Twitter has ripped through our community like a wave, capturing the time wasting cycles and a few more than that from quite a few people. The problem is, its totally the wrong tool for us. Twitter is meant to be a tool to tell your friends and followers "what you're doing" so they can meet up with you. It isn't meant as a chat room at all. Most messages should be one line saying "I'm here, doing this."
Twitter has become -- for many in the Domino Blogger community -- a kind of limited chat room. Why? Because there is a need for a social space like that. We want to be having side conversations while we're working, sitting through boring meetings, watching television, or whatever else. We enjoy that. We get to know each other better, and we keep in touch with those we know fairly well.
The truth is, Twitter is absolutely terrible if used as this tool. The latency is ridiculous, the stability is poor, and the functionality is extremely limited.
On top of that, using Twitter this way is swamping Twitter. The tool itself can't survive the use of it as a chat room on a large scale. The architecture is wrong for it.
So why do we use it?
We use it because its a free, wide open, many-to-many unplanned chatter tool with a very low barrier to entry. There are other tools like that though, which are better suited to what we want.
So what should be done? That's fairly straightforward. We should establish a Domino Bloggers community chat channel on IRC, or public chat room on Skype, or something similar.
There are tools designed for community chats. The most long standing of these is IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Other tools like the Skype public chat I'm using for the Olympic Side Chat work too. I picked the Skype one because most of our community is comfortable with Skype and wouldn't need to figure out IRC. Skype also gives you consistent credentials, where IRC really doesn't. If you log out, someone can log in and take your name. There are other tools out there, including some great tools for Linux but overall, so far Skype seems to be the most ubiquitous.
The latest versions of Skype offer something very similar. You can create a public chat room and even advertise it if you want. You don't have to establish credentials with the others to join, either. You can easily just "jump in" and "jump out" when you want. It does have the idea of admins and access rights that can be open or closed, but open is fine for most of us.
What's your thought? How many people do you think would consider the idea of no longer using TWITTER as a chat room, but instead using it to say "I'm in the Domino Coffee Room" -- which is what Twitter was meant for? Is Skype a good choice?
