Dodgeball could be slightly more useful if the FOAF feature actually worked. But your point about it being dependent on having local friends, where Twitter does not, is a great one.

So yeah, Twitter is a lot like not-quite-instant messaging. I think that’s what I enjoy most about it.

A rather sizeable clique of people here in Minneapolis have been essentially using Dodgeball to Twitter and it annoys the shit out of people who are trying to use Dodgeball for the “intended” Dodgeball purpose. They argue that if Dodgeball actually allows you to send messages in whatever format you want, why shouldn’t you? To which I say that’s true, but y’all all might as well just sign up for Twitter instead and that way it’s easier for the rest of your friends outside of your clique to manage how they receive your messages. But now they’re just being stubborn, so for the moment I’ve blocked all their Dodgeball messages. And they’ve killed the joy for Twin Cities folks who might have been interested in it. We’re not big enough to drown out that noise.

For me, if I’m going to check in on Dodgeball, I’ll probably Twitter it, too. The only difference right now is that I have different (though somewhat overlapping) groups of friends on each, and it was a bit of a chore getting some of my less-internet-inclined friends to get dodgeball accounts. Even though I think they’d enjoy Twitter more, they don’t want to sign up for another thing.

I think there’s the plenty of potential for other services to incorporate Twitter as a feature (much like the facebook status thing, which I’ve heard about but haven’t witnessed since I don’t facebook). Don’t know if the Twitter folks want to go that route.

Last night was a perfect example. A person in class in SF needing distraction. Friends in LA and Minneapolis send Chris Rock and Boob jokes to pass the time.

That’s the brilliance of twitter.

It’s also a great archival tool. If I want to know what was going on at any point over the last month (I started using twitter President’s Day Weekend), I can run through my archives and see what my friends and I were up to.

It’s a help tool. It’s a great way to ask questions.

It’s next level communication. It moves my online friends into my offline world. We make more “real” connections this way because we are “present” in each other’s lives via twitter.

It also allows me to stay more closely connected to my offline/local friends who are also using the service. I feel bad for those that aren’t because they are missing out on the continuous dialogue.

It’s become the back channel for our every day lives. A kind of comic thought bubble.

But that’s just how I use it. People use it in so many different ways.

I’m such a twitter evangelist.

Twitter is whatever you make of it. I hate to conceive of it as microblogging. Not only is a cheesy buzzword, but I also don’t think it’s entirely reflective of how people use Twitter.

It’s more like time-shifted (as opposed to instant) messaging or chat mixed with the ability to spy on random folks. It’s a platform that isn’t bound to or by an IM client. I wish I could come up with the perfect metaphor. But I really believe that its flexibility will be an asset once folks figure out how else they can use it.