Attention Conversation Notice: not required, you either saw “Twitter” and ran or you’ll read on…

“Is Twitter down?” “Is Twitter up?” “Twitter ate my homework..” Enough already!

The news this week is that Twitter was not designed as messaging platform. For those who came in late, it was originally just a microblogging service. Purely “Tell us what you’re doing in 140 character or less”. From the web, from your phone, share what you’re doing. Killer idea; and as originally architectured, it did that just fine.

But that’s not how the people used it for long. They didn’t just read what others were doing, they wanted to talk back. And the defacto standard @ replies were born.

The best and worst thing Twitter did was listen to their users, and formalise this, hacking something up and making it part of the API.

And with that little change Twitter went from being a microblogging service to being a messaging system. And they are still working through the implications of that change. Because it is hard enough to run a stable microblogging service, with an ever increasing userbase. It is another thing when the growing network are cross-linking to each other. This places an additional strain on the system’s servers.

Add to that all the services that are being built on top of it, of which my favourites are still Zannel and Seesmic. After all, if we can’t add A/V to our tweets, we can at least piggyback them on top of it. And let’s not forget Twitterfeed, which we are using for our Digital Assistants, pumping out automated tweets.

Now there is a change coming that will help things a little, enabling users to reply to specific tweets. This will reduce the server load, since the system currently has to do a look-up to find the user being replied-to’s latest tweet.

When they have fixed their current set of scalability woes I’m sure al3x will sit down to finish this. This will not only make threaded Twitter viewers like Quotably better, it will let everyone have more control over their replies, especially when hitting up little status-update-whores like myself.

And how do I know this? Because I thought about it, jumped on the Twitter Dev GoogleGroups, spent an hour or so pouring through the API documentation, and figured out how the API could be easily extended to support it and then just asked them. And al3x said yes, this was coming soon. So awesome! I mean, do you think anyone at Microsoft, back when they kind of mattered, was ever so accessible or transparent?!

And this is something I don’t think the Twitter team get enough credit for. Sure, they are not perfect, but they are doing this all very much in the open. There is not much of curtain they’re hiding behind, and trust me, as a Software Developer for going on 12 years now, trust me, you never want to look behind the curtain to see how the Future is built. But that is just what they are doing; being as open and honest as they have time to be, just as we are with our tweets.

They are a shining example of small teams of smart people are working together to build the future for us. As has been pointed out, do not go looking to Google buying Twitter as being a solution.

So, yeah, it would be great if following twitter_status actually meant something. It would be fantastic if just before Twitter feel into a heap, that with it’s last breath it would sent a DeathNotice tweet, so we wouldn’t all sit there loading Is Twitter Down. But hey, they have put up Twitter Status so we can at least see what is going on. And those new Over Capacity screens are something, I guess.

But let’s also be honest here; is Twitter being down for a while really the end of the world? Firstly, for a lot of us it is both Ambient Intimacy and a Weapon of Mass Distraction. How long each day are you spending mentally crafting a witty reply? Maybe Twitter’s down-time is really the Universe telling you to get back to work on that Project you’re procrastinating from.

Because, whilst by using and playing with Twitter we are all helping to beta-test the best communications technology since email, we still have email; we still have fall-back communications technologies. Most of us are at tweeting people we already have on IM, email and, hell, even good old-fashioned mobile phones. So it is not like we are suddenly cut off from our contacts.

OK, so Twitter is a victim of it’s own success. We are all having too much fun in this never-ending, world-spanning chat-fest. Such that when it is down, we miss it; hence the constant outcry when it is not there.

And why? I think this sums up the best where we are heading:

The power and reach of our minds is expanding out through our devices and the exocortical software agents we now have managing so many of our subroutines. We are cyber even without the implants and wetware. The individual is wiring into groups, like cells aggregating into functional bodies, towards greater communicative and iterative power.

Exactly!

On that note, let us keeping looking forward. The strength of Twitter’s open API is that so many clients have been built to use it. Clients that will in the future automatically handle the use of the specific @-reply tweets I mentioned earlier. Many of which currently have already a re-tweet button.

The re-tweet is the new defacto-standard in Twitter. And I suspect we will see this absorbed back into the Twitter API at some near point in the future. Because the power of the re-tweet is incredible. It is what allows news to flow across overlapping social networks, around the world, in minutes.

As Mark Pesce laid out in his Friends, Enemies and My Army speech, if you wanted news about the recent earthquake in China, and it’s ongoing implications, you just had to follow Dedric Lam. He was re-tweeting information from around China, as they collaboratively pieced together where the Earthquake occurred, purely from checking which of their contacts had gone off-line. This is Twitter as Global Frequency, people-as-agents in the field reporting in to, or being tracked by a central node. Tap into that flow and you had instant reportage, all while the Media were still scrambling to get their agents up and out into the field.

And this brings to light another emergent phenomenon of Twitter, the rise of key nodal points; hyper-connected individuals that become a clearing house for all information of a certain nature.

Now, bear in my mind, I am not talking about friend-whores like Scoblezier, but people genuinely connecting and forming deep networks. I think in the future more of these new players, akin to the power-bloggers of ye olde early naughties, will emerge. I will certainly be on the look out for them. Please do share those you have already found in the Comments!

So enough rambling, just keep the Faith! We Twitterati are living life in perpetual-beta for a reason. Even if the end result ends up just being the next Facebook.

Bonus Content: for reading this far, or being smart enough to skip to the end, here’s two cool new Twitter tools:

• Summize – a powerful Twitter search tool
• TwitArc – “Arcs are drawn on the left connecting people that are repeated and on the right for common repeated terms.”