I know I'm a little late to the game with this review, but I still run across a whole bunch of people have never tried Twitter.  Now that I've been using it for something like a month now, I thought I'd jot down my thoughts about it.  I still have some mixed feelings about it, but I really like what it's doing to our concept of peer-to-peer messaging.

• It is not chat and it is not IM.  It is a conversation with a broad surface area.  It feels a lot like hanging out with a large group of people.  When Cisco crew was at Cisco Live and everyone was tweeting it was great--I can now make fun of Bergelson for wearing a French cuffed shirt and no tie.  Before, I would have had no way of knowing about his blatant disdain for fashion :)
• The concept of sending a message out without having a particular recipient in mind is fantastic.  This is a killer way to communicate amongst a team.  If Twitter doesn't enter the enterprise market immediately they are stupid.
• I don't like hearing what people are doing.  I don't really care about that.  I like hearing what people are THINKING.
• I really like the way the combo Web/SMS/Fat client interface has made people realize that there really is no distinction between types of messaging except for the delivery channel.  Can you say unified communication?  For some reason this fundamental principle is not recognized by many people.
• For me at least, the fat client is extremely important.  It can't be a realtime conversation if I have to break my workflow and visit a Web page.  A nice clean, unobtrusive interface is essential.  This is the first application in a long time that I really feel needs a fat client.
• The 140 character limit.  I like the idea, but it's too stinkin' short.  I think I need like 200.  Please, allow me at least one grammatically correct sentence and a link.  Geez.
• The architecture.  Is a DISASTER.  And you know what?  They could easily fix it, but they'd lose control.  They could easily allow services to republish their feed and reduce server load instantly, but they'd give up control of the messages which is the meat of the service.  This will be overcome once an open source version of Twitter becomes popular.  If you don't think there will be go look at how many ways there are to build Digg now.  If they don't sit down and play nice Twitter will get run over by the community.

So yeah, in general though I need to eat crow here and say that I was wrong.  The concept of an open-ended conversation hasn't been done before, and I didn't realize that's what Twitter was.  If you're like me and you considered Twitter a crippled blogging platform you should really give it a try.  I have illusions about using it long-term, but it's worthwhile to see the different type of conversations people are having on it.  And I still believe that its potential in the enterprise space is enormous.

If you're interested in following my Twitter feed it's at http://www.twitter.com/jasonkolb.

And thanks again to Trent Adams for telling me that I should give Twitter another look.  I would have missed something important if I hadn't.