Ah Twitter, the Web 2.0 darling du jour.  I’ve been using Twitter a bunch.  Beyond the @[friend] responding to something, I prefer to use it to let people know generally what I’m up to.  Like if I’m at my desk or not.  There seems to be a bit of backlash going on.  If you read as many feeds as Jim and I do, you’ll see a lot of comments like “I don’t get it” or “too darn annoying”.  Here are some recent bits on Twitter:

Twitter’s expanding popularity has frustrated some users. “I’m a little annoyed by some of these newbies,” said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco who complains that many users seem to be focusing on quantity over quality in their updates. She blames the influx of new users on Mr. Scoble, a Twitter user who began writing frequently about the service on his blog earlier this year. She removed him from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. “He Twittered about Twitter,” she said.
Source: Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration - WSJ.com

Here’s our take: Twitter is going to be overused, overload people, who will then get turned off. There is just simply too much noise and not enough valuable “signal” to be worthwhile. I run into a case of TMI - too much information — in that I don’t really need to know that you’re heading to the bathroom, etc.

Intrigued? I certainly am. I still take the current Twitter-mania with a huge grain of salt, mostly because in its current state Twitter is going appeal only to a small subset of people who enjoy publicly sharing what they are doing. But watch out — I think that like IM, blogging, and social networking, services like Twitter will evolve with new features and functionality to actually become useful communication and information tools.–Charlene Li

Ah, but maybe I just don’t get it. So tell me, do you subscribe to Twitter? Do you post updates? Do you think anyone cares? –Dave Taylor

I don’t know if Des’ podcast falls under this category, I still haven’t had a chance to listen to it (my Friday was insane), but Des let me know he talked about yours truly, so that says something.  Maybe he was hard up for content or something.

Regardless, Twitter is in an early stage of usefulness.  Lots of experimenting.  Is it like Moblogging, is it a corporate communications system, could it be an emergency broadcast system?  Myself I stopped getting updates on Gtalk.  It was just driving me nuts!  I just got on an unlimited data plan for my Blackberry, but if Twitter took over Gtalk, then Gtalk as a way to get a hold of me was significantly reduced.  I’ve been trying several of the alternatives and my fav du jour is Twadget for Vista.  For some reason I couldn’t get it to work yesterday (I think too long without a reboot), this morning it’s letting me know what’s up in my sphere of friends.

Do I think there is going to be a Twitter crash?  Totally.  Not in a bad way though.  Folks might stop shorter updates and go for longer ones.  I also see there being more ways to publish to your blog.  Maybe a special flag like “d” for direct to send only to your blog (”b” is the obvious choice isn’t it), I think the possibilities are limitless and it’s only a matter of time below Twitter 2.0 comes around.