The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible 1st impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your followers, and you think, why does the world need this, exactly? It'snot as if we were all sitting around 4 years ago scratching our heads and saying, if only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.
I, too, was skeptical at 1st. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom'9os when he was launching Blogger.com. back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books.With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation...