An Old-School Way of Thinking About Twitter

I recently read an article on the Langwitches blog comparing Twitter to a large dinner party. I think this analogy is perfect. Just like at a huge dinner party, with so many people talking at the same time, about so many different things, you can't possibly keep up with every conversation at once. In fact, you'd seem like a psychopath if you tried to! "One person at a time! Stop talking about what you had for breakfast - that's not relevant to me! I'm back from the kitchen - everyone stop talking and tell me what I missed!" Instead, we dive in and out of conversations, participating in one while we keep an ear open for a chance to jump into another. When we get up to do something else, we don't leave a sound recorder to listen to everything that happened while we were gone. If it's really important to us, someone will tell us later (or in Twitter's case, mention you specifically in the tweet). So when it comes to Twitter, I think we all need to stop acting like psychopaths and just enjoy the party. :-)