The beauty of twitter isn't that you send messages without specifying recipients. Any billboard does this. HTML webpages, blogs with RSS feeds, etc do this. Tw

The beauty of twitter isn't that you send messages without specifying recipients. Any billboard does this. HTML webpages, blogs with RSS feeds, etc do this. Twitter allows you to: 1. Communicate on equal footing. You're living on someone else's blog, or their social news site, or their subreddit, or their messageboard, or in their chat room. There's no need to shout anyone down with negative karma, because everyone controls their own feed. 2. Control your world. If you stop following someone, they basically cease to exist. On the other hand, they can follow you if they want, with no harm to you. This allows celebrities to share directly in a way they never have before. 3. Stay engaged with minimal time. Tweets are limited to 140 characters for everyone. Writing a blog post requires a commitment and willpower. A tweet is extremely easy. Despite all of this, Twitter itself is very awkward to use, and making sense of the un-threaded mass is very difficult. It's reaching mass adoption because it can be all things to all people (microblog, chat, rss feed, friend updates, broadcast announcements, etc). There are better ways out there to facilitate good discussions. Google is trying to tackle the office collaboration problem with Wave, and I think there's huge progress to be made in the space of online discussions, separate from the current plethora of news reaction sites (coughhackernewscough) that we have now. The inevitable rise of self-posts on news sites (it's usually resisted or frowned on at first) shows the existence of this need.