That's kind of the point of tweets, "leaving a bigger trail" in the minds of people who read them than IRC messages (that can be said and then vanish away in th

That's kind of the point of tweets, "leaving a bigger trail" in the minds of people who read them than IRC messages (that can be said and then vanish away in the sea of chatter or get swallowed by the low signal/noise ration never even getting to be read). By actually having to subscribe to someone be notified of the tweets you increase your signal to noise ratio and you tend to actually read most of the messages and most importantly to share them in a different way than just throwing them away to drown in the sea of noise of a chatroom. Now, to have this bigger "social/communications/memes trail" you also have a bigger digital trail that can be used to find and target people, but you need to pay a price for anything. To me IRC has always been an instant-messaging and conferencing tool and I never understood how people could have communities in that chaos or even use it for things like technical discussions and project management. That's what mail groups were for back in the day (and still are, thank god!).