Ask YC: Why should I care about Twitter?

And therein lies the brilliance of Twitter. If someone is a navel-gazer or otherwise uninteresting, you don't follow them anymore, end of problem. You have influence over the signal to noise ratio and you consume it on whatever schedule works for you.

It's where the net's pulse is at the moment.

Who knows where the pulse will be in a few months time. Everything changes so quickly.

i share your distaste for social networking. i hardly check my facebook, just once every couple of weeks. there are just too many people blasting you some game or stuff like that. boring.

but w/twitter... it was different. after you get past certain barriers, it becomes a conversation.

some people use the sms function to blast all their friends "wanna meet for lunch". hey, if you only need to send once, right and pay once?

there are business leaders on twitter and some really smart people. think of twitter as a party that goes on 24/7. you get interesting conversation.

sometimes, some people come in and shouts out that they're on ustream, and hey a couple of people slip out to go to that room. while everyone else keeps the conversation going.

sometimes, you get the really breaking news. other times, you get good links to interesting stuff.

there are times, you just listen in on a conversation between two twitters and you learn stuff.

how do you keep up? you don't. you don't need to keep up. you can miss stuff and that's ok. i use growl on the mac to give me a heads up when someone twitters. that way, i don't have to actually be directly engaged. just think of it as background conversation in the office. And of course you can really turn it off.

just my two cents.

Twitter reflects the overrall california lifestyle and the shallowness of conections made in here. Comming from the east coast, I can tell there is a huge difference on friends I have in SF, and friends I have in Boston. I know more people, and have more "friends" in california, but for some reason they tend to be more of the "good times" types, while in Boston I had less friends, but more people I could rely on and stronger connections.

So, with twitter, you just broadcast something to a bunch of your "friends", while in the east coast you would just normally text few of your friends directly.

And, there is a good reason they call it "California RSVP". Some people call it shallow, some call it "laid-back", it depends on your point of view, but I have gotten used to it.

Honestly, it is not an indictment, just an observation. I actually like having many friends, getting invited to many things, but I also don't like when many people RSVP to things, and they just don't show up. I actually can directly quanitfy and compare this at soccer games. In boston about 80% of yes-es would actually show up at games. In SF about 60%.

I guess, you could also argue that in the east coast, people are less friendly, so you have fewer friends and people have to keep them closer and dearly, or that in SF there is a lot of stuff to do, and people can get easily ditracted.

BTW. I am european, so don't want to transform this in a west coast vs. east coast thing.

When it comes to twitter, I am not sure how much the general crowd would be interested in it. Taking example something like blogs: it has instant appeal in a lot of people, because basically it is an online diary.

A lot of people have diaries, and bringing them online was something natural.

But twitter? I am not sure it solves a need to the general masses, except for the hyperconnected ones.