Missing the Bear: BI: Why you should stop using Twitter.com

Business Intelligence ran this article today: Why you should bail on Twitter.com and use an alternate service. The article 'helpfully' offers you six platforms using the Twitter API that in the authors opinion are better than the dotcom interface.

To clarify, the article isn't saying 'stop using Twitter', it's saying the Twitter.com interfaces is poorly designed and has poor functionality, therefore you should be using a platform to better curate the information that the data created by Twitter offers you.

I would like to assert that Twitter shouldn't try to mimic the numbers of apps that perform different information organisation related functions (channeling, curating, sorting, community forming) and therefore the author of that article is "missing the bear" on the purpose of Twitter.

In more academic lanuage if you like: Twitter's API is the (opportunity) space that makes place making possible, where place is specific to each community or individual self-selecting groupings.

We know (Shirky, Jenkins-- heck just bounce over to my PhD blog) that digital social organisation is fluid and the continued life of digital social organisation depends upon its ability to form, disipate, and re-form depending upon the needs of its public (formerly, users).  Apps arise around organising the public around a social object.

So, so, so many apps now rely on the data that Twitter provides, around which they hope to fulfill a market gap. Twitter's job isn't organisation because organisation is different for every member of the public that contributes to the twitosphere. Twitter has provided opportunity very well but placemaking is someone else's job. Twitter's job, is space-making.

Twitter has managed to localise public contributions in a space; driving place makers or apps providers out of business by trying to dominate the market doesn't make any sense. They two providers are in symbiosis. It would be extraordinarily difficult to duplicate that localisation.

But what's more: you wouldn't want to. If Everybody is on Twitter. Being on Twitter allows you the flexibility to learn and connect according to your current needs, but also your future needs. This is fluidity again.

Why can't we just see Twitter as localisation-- a space in which to occupy such that the opportunity to seek out (explore, interact, connect) our own place in it?

Let's juxatopose Twitter to Facebook: Facebook where the apps are built in, Twitter where they are external. Doc Searls complains of the login with Facebook to external websites and communities that then re-localises those connections without very much organisation or say about how it gets used.

Is there a difference here? Am I imagining it?

But it seems to me that Twitter should remain as a space in which we can find our own place, rather than bringing place to us as Facebook has done? Let Twitter be a basic framework.

Is this getting thin?

And admittedly, I know very little about revenue models but do understand the need for them (am a 'journalist' after all), but I would hate to see Twitter get out of control. Sometimes simplicity is best.

 This also isn't to say that at some point some other space might become more appealing or that we may migrate away from Twitter or it might stop being useful for as yet un-invented technology. But in the short-run Twitter is best confining its activities to space making and not place-making.