Here’s a little link love for my current Twitter list:

BlogBloke
Brad Kellett
Corey Akula
Chris Carfi
Gabe Rivera
James Kendrick
Martin Gordon
Mathew Ingram
Miles Evenson
Randy Morin
Ric Hayman
Richard Querin
Rick Mahn
Steve Gillmor
Stowe Boyd
Susan Getgood
Warner Crocker

People I’d like to add
(If I knew their Twitter ID)

Chip Camden
Dave Wallace
Dwight Silverman
Earl Moore
Ethan Johnson
Frank Gruber
Fraser Kelton
Karl Martino
Mike Miller
Nick Carr
Seth Finkelstein
Steve Newson
Tom Morris
Tom Reynolds
Zoli Erdos

Removed per my Pink Floyd Policy:***

Dave Winer
Fred Wilson
Hugh Macleod
Robert Scoble
Steve Rubel

*** I still subscribe to all of these blogs and, with the exception of Scoble’s self-Trumanization, I enjoy them.  As I discussed the other day, I want my Twitter experience to be different from the larger blogosphere- I don’t want anyone talking to me unless I have the ability to talk back to them.

One negative thing I have noticed about Twitter is that my Twitter page is filling up with conversations I can’t participate in because I follow people who don’t follow me.  Sort of like the blogosphere all over again.

My new policy: I’m going to remove people from my list who don’t reciprocate.

We already engage in one-way conversations in the blogosphere.  I want my Twitter experience to be better than that.

I have moved from thinking that Twitter is merely cool to thinking that it’s very cool, and that there may be more real world uses for it than I originally thought.  There will be challenges, for sure.  But the potential to create a new communication medium is huge.

There are a ton of people using Twitter, and more sign up every day.  I know from our early ACCBoards.Com days how hard it is to keep up with a ton of new traffic.  We started out as a little message board for ACC sports fans.  Suddenly, we were on the local news, then we got mentioned on ESPN, then players and high profile recruits began to post messages.  Traffic went off the charts and our servers crashed.  And crashed.  You hope the traffic explosion will happen, and you think you’ve planned for it.  But when traffic starts growing geometrically, you end up throwing your assumptions out the door and just try to hang on.

Managing the traffic load will be a problem for Twitter, but not the biggest challenge.

The biggest challenge for Twitter will be figuring what it wants to become.  With traffic comes the opportunity to make good decisions, and the opportunity to make bad ones.  And a lot of people will come out of the woodwork to help you make bad ones.

Will Twitter be happy being a popular and useful communication tool?  Or will it try to recreate itself as some sort of business tool in the hopes of attracting some business dollars?  I hope the former, but history tells us there will be pressure to try to become the latter.

If I owned Twitter, I’d stay the popular and useful communication tool course until I slayed the competition – much like Google did with search.  The first rule of interactive online communities is you have to own the space.  Once you own the space, you can worry about rule number two.  TechCrunch is the blogosphere’s best example of the application of the first rule.

Along the way, I’d periodically add new and complimentary features to keep Twitter on the minds of the technorati and on the pages of Technorati.  Private Twitter groups, for sure.  Perhaps topical groups.  I’d add a photo feature, maybe by teaming up with up and comer Zooomer.

Mostly, I would concentrate on doing a few things very well and avoid the dilutive urge to add new features for the sake of adding new features.

Twitter users will face challenges too.  The biggest one will be deciding how to use Twitter.  As a mini-blog, as a shared IM substitute, as a message board.  Or as some combination of the three.  With traffic and popularity will come the disrupters.  The spammers.  The foul, cruel and bad-tempered rodents.  Tim O’Reilly to tell us how to deal with them.  How will we deal with those problems? 

The only captcha for that sort of thing is a healthy combination of common sense and self governance.  If someone treats their Twitter account as a billboard for spam or self promotion, users will have to decide whether to stand by and watch or vote with their follow list.  Ideally, one’s follow list will eventually equate to one’s eBay number.  But for this to work, we have to make Twitter a different place than the blogosphere at large.

If Twitter becomes nothing more than a pocket sized version of the blogosphere, everyone loses.

Just because I think Jott is more useful in the real world doesn’t mean I don’t think Twitter is cool.

I am enjoying using it.

If you are a friend of mine, in the blogosphere or in the real world, here’s my Twitter page.  Add me as a friend and I’ll do the same.

Steve Rubel has a post setting forth 3 reasons why Twitter will be sold soon.  I’ve been watching Twitter for a while.  I just signed up (see the box in the right column).  It’s a cool little application, but here are 3 reasons why I respectfully disagree with Steve.

1) Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds- no doubt about it.  It is the app de jour for the blogging crowd, which as I have said a million times before is sort of like being the favorite book of the Yeti crowd.  You hear a lot about Yeti if you happen to be in Nepal, but Yeti is a non-factor for most of the people in the world.  I also wonder how many of the current Twitter groupies will stay the course over the coming weeks and months as the new app de jours come and go.  If I were going to bet on someone getting bought, it would be Jott.  Now there is an application that I find really useful.  People in the real world will find Jott useful.

2) My reason number 2 is also Steve’s reason number 2: Twitter doesn’t monetize its audience.  It shares that inconvenient truth with about 99% of the rest of Web 2.0.  As soon as Google buys Twitter and starts trying to cram more ads down our throat (or collect more of our personal data), a lot of users will bolt.  Stated another way, the “I dig it” threshold is much lower for a garage project like Twitter is now than it is for yet another Google attempt to increase ads and decrease privacy.  Some one should go back and look at last years’ darlings and see how many of them have monetized their traffic.  And how many of them are out of business.

3) While Twitter is probably cheap, there is a reason for that.  If there were an obvious way to monetize its buzz, it wouldn’t be.  Even the Web 2.0 market is somewhat efficient.  It’s the big, seemingly insane buys (YouTube, MySpace, etc.) that end up prolonging the cycle and generating cash, or at least the potential for cash.  I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about that, but it’s true.  These great little apps like Twitter have a hard time finding a place in the VC arena where everyone is trying to hit home runs.  Like Tony La Russa said, you can win a lot of games with doubles and singles, but most of the money gurus have forgotten this.

I like Twitter.  I’ll probably use it for a while.  But it’s not something I like enough to pay for or to suffer through ads for.

So unless some Mighty Casey with a lot of money to spend decides to take another stout swing, I think Twitter will have to settle for being cool.