Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

There was a thoughtspurt the other day among several components of my distributed non-me thoughtspace – Fred and Warren Ellis commenting on a Techcrunch post, the Real Paul Jones commenting on Fred’s post and offering his own thoughts – and all of it together, and substantial other peer pressure, convinced me to join Twitter. And start thinking about it.

What I think is this – Fred frames Twitter as a social network service, and I think that’s right, with a particular emphasis on the service: it’s a plugin of sorts for digital identity. But where Fred says, “By locating the network around the profile, we were really locating it around “communication”. In Twitter, the “profile” is our communication, an always-on, interactive wall.” I’m not sure I agree entirely. I think Twitter is, if not exactly a digital ramora, then at least mostly dependent on the silt of our previously-established digital identities. We don’t need to restate our cultural preferences etc. again on Twitter because that’s asked-and-answered and, for most Twitter users (at least at this point) fairly easily accessible in one form or another – via Facebook, a primary blog, etc. But that identity – or an aspect of it – is, as Fred says, continuously reaffirmed via “an always-on, interactive wall.” Twitter is thus an expressive identity affordance in a way that isn’t possible on other channels of communication – SNS too static, IM limited person-to-person, blog limited to a particular set of expectations of the medium/audience demand, etc.

Twitter is definitely a medium-big deal at this point (though I do stick to my story that it only really burst on the scene because the WiFi kept crapping out on the third floor at SXSW Interactive ’07), but still mostly confined to an early-adopter multi-channel communicator population, which (in certain places) online makes it seem like a bigger deal than it is generally. So will it scale – will mobile phones be advertising their integrated Twitter clients in 18 (or 12 [or 9 {or 6}]) months? Maybe. But I don’t think that it’s necessary for the continued viability of Twitter – it could get along just fine as the kind of between-modes expressive affordance for high-use multi-channel communicators that it currently is. And I think that along the same lines, the coming death of Facebook is overstated – more cognitive energy might be directed to Twitter or other channels, but a functional, established, static SNS repository for that particular aspect of digital identity seems a viable long-term gambit. Especially if, as Twitter seems to suggest, new forms of SNS are increasingly not replacements for profile-based services but supplements.