ambient

I’ve been playing with Twitter quite a bit this week and have been impressed. Never mind that it’s currently where all of the cool kids are hanging out, it’s interesting to me for the following reasons:

• It is a parser. An @ tag identifies people and now, thanks to hashtags, # identifies nouns. This allows systems to aggregate and potentially create a true del.icio.us-killer (by flipping it inside out) and a super-simple semantic notation system that could scale very easily.
• It works really well as group chat. There are features here that could work in a lot of different settings. Look for an open source Twitter clone in the near future, something that does for micro-blogging (is there a better term) what WordPress did for blogs.
• The potential integration with Boompaste is huge. Very excited about this.
• It’s a social network in the truest sense of the phrase. Like, I’ve actually met and interacted with real people.
• The API - I now no longer know immediately if I’m interacting with a human or a bot and that’s cool.