But the recent celebrity rush on top of the media nods has given twitter the kind of credibility that can suck in the unwilling. So we get these official accounts for celebrities and politicians keeping us up to date by way of a savvy intern.

Like U.S. Senator John Thune, Republican, South Dakota, whose account gave us the following blip earlier tonight:

Introduced bill to require admin to pay down debt using $ repaid by TARP recipients. Hope to prevent Pres from creating rolling slush fund.

I look at this and think: who wrote this? Was it the Senator himself or the savvy intern who convinced him of twitter’s credibility.

I’m going with the latter. I saw those twitpics last week. Noobs in suits don’t twitpic the first day they’re on twitter. Interns do. And you just let your ghostwriter define you in terms of that intangible event you hope to prevent when you’d have defined yourself in terms of what you actually do.

My point is this: do it yourself. Be genuine. You might be able to find a ghostwriter who understands or even shares your political views, but you’re going to struggle finding someone who shares your character.

As luck would have it, twitter has a million examples of genuine participants, beginning with Shaq and ending with the guy twittering with no regard to whether or not you know his full name.

So, apologies to all for the offstage lecture. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it’s announced that Mr. Thune will be attending the next twitter meetup. Maybe we’ll get new evidence. Maybe I’ll argue that ghostwriters have initials that can be typed in for the fake stuff.

We’ll see.

Being new to twitter, Deane is still concerned with how best to use the service. When he looks back at each tweet, he’d like to be able to say, “yep, that’s a complete, cogent thought. It’s a mini blog post.” Here’s a great example of one such tweet:

Male lion + female tiger = a liger. They’re much larger than either parent. Female lion + male tiger = a tigon. They’re much smaller.

This is definitely a mini blog post. And an interesting one at that. I had no idea there were enough of these in the world to establish an expectation for size.

But Twitter doesn’t ask for anything more than an answer to the question: What are you doing?

So, in this regard, learning about the non-magical characteristics of ligers and tigons really doesn’t give any clues as to what Deane is up to. Granted, Deane is tweeting as @gadgetopia, which also happens to be the name of his blog. And If I had to guess what Gadgetopia was up to at any given time, I’d say mini blog posts.

But I tweet as myself, and sometimes I’m just not very concerned with cogency. As in the tweet he points to as an example of an inside joke:

Has anyone seen @brianoberkirch’s dongle?

For what it’s worth, this just happened to be what I was thinking at the time. Actually, the full tweet was intended to go like this:

Has anyone seen @brianoberkirch’s dongle? Also, why does this remind me of the song Detachable Penis?

But I accidentally posted half the tweet when I bounced to Google to confirm the name of the band.

Back to the point. I use twitter to (1) post what I’m doing, (2) post what I’m thinking, (3) ask a question, or (4) respond to something somebody else is (4a) doing, (4b) thinking, or (4c) asking. My twitter account really doesn’t represent anything more profound.

So, even though I’m probably not always thoughtful enough to hold back an inside joke, this just happened to be what I was thinking at the time.

I hope this helps, Deane. Be sure to let me know in the comments if you found this:
(a) extremely helpful
(b) kind of helpful
(c) not really that helpful

Now that being social means plotting your location, the issue of oversharing is top of mind again.

It’s not the idea of fellow geeks knowing where I’m at any given time that makes me uncomfortable. I have no problem with brightkite, and I love the idea of you knowing when I’m in ur town so long as I’ve authorized you.

But I check in to public timelines as well. And in those cases, anyone can see where I’m at. As a single person, the concern wouldn’t even occur to me. But family changes this, and lately I’m wondering how much to reveal. (Like whether I’m out of town.)

To put a finer point on it, I’m wondering how much to reveal on Twitter since it’s the one communication app I use that doesn’t allow privacy differentiation within a stream.

I understand Twitter has immediate issues to deal with, but privacy should be high on the list of concerns. Right now it’s not being handled with any amount of sophistication.

I don’t mean to complain about Twitter. The issue is more mine than theirs. And, fwiw, I love the service.

There’s a simple solution, though. Allow members to post private tweets by preceding them with a p. e.g., p You wake up in Vegas.

Those private tweets would only be seen by the people you trust most. I know that everyone follows and follows back to widely varying degrees, but, for anyone using the service, the segment of friends you trust most would be reciprocal followers (i.e., those you follow who also follow you back.)

I have about 150 friends in this category. And even though I don’t really know them all well, I’d trust them to know that I’m out of town or where I’m staying or, maybe, what my family is up to.

I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.

Like today, I’m getting ready to deploy a mobile version of a content network and it strikes me that what we really need is a twitter version for all blogs. Basically, it would go like this…

Since userAgent doesn’t actually tell you if the user uses Twitter, we’d simply prompt visitors with a simple question. Use the Twitter? And if they did, they’d just Click here.

At that point, posts would collapse into 140 character bits. Opinions would be condensed for clarity (eg, teh suck or ftw).

An example post would go like this:

zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

And, then, comments would go like this:

@aaronmentele lulz. springsteen is rolling over in his grave. srsly

retweeting @aaronmentele: zomg, @microsoft tries to be cool… http://is.gd/6DP

@aaronmentele – yeah, fail. u missed the best part tho: http://is.gd/AJ

If you’ve been using the Twitter for any amount of time, maybe you’ve already thought of this. For everyone else, I explained this all in an earlier tweet.

If there ever was any real widget momentum underway, it crashed when facebook kicked open the Platform. (Feel free to hit me in the comments for using facebook and open in the same sentence.)

I didn’t like the use of the platform label when Zuckerberg first declared it. But 10,000+ facebook apps make the use difficult to dispute.

I’m not typing on the virtues of facebook here. Personally, I think the thing sucks – all ur bits r belong to facebook. But we definitely feel the significance of the facebook platform a hell of a lot more than any supposed widgetization of the web. (This coming from a work request point of view.)

Enough talk of the borg. The idea that we’re declaring working models is far more significant. Let’s example in on Twitter again. Popular opinion holds it as a working model. So, rather than build a standalone app to track iou’s, why not grab on to the API and drop a new publishing rule into the existing ecology?

I like platforms. Experimentation gets easier. It’s not the new way of doing things, it’s another way. The web is gaining sophistication.

But 10 months later or so Richard is naming them best little web co of ‘07. He even specifically calls them out as one of the few disruptive technologies of the year.

So what changed? Well, the idea caught on, it evolved, and it scaled.

We get so many inquiries from entrepreneurs looking to launch disruptive ideas that I get excited any time a prospect says they aren’t sure what to expect at launch, or, better yet, that they aren’t even worried about the initial reception.

Disruption almost never occurs at launch, and forecasting it is impossible. (Odds improve w/ Steve Jobs on staff.)

But don’t let that stop you. Consider launching light. Think beyond launch. Let your idea evolve. Help it scale. Work toward disruption.

If you see Twitter as a mechanism to post and display brief messages, set up light profiles with followed / follower relationships, and offer a straightforward API, then, yeah, we can probably build it for you. But giving that app purpose to even a fraction of Twitter’s participants would be something else entirely. Even if your purpose is all the money.

To be fair, it’s pretty easy to miss Twitter’s good parts. If you throw a tweet over the wall now and then and have sms notifications turned on for twits like me, it’s going to seem like one big cluster. But get inside it for a while, and you begin to see what makes it grow. It’s not a single purpose. It’s the open platform that spawns all kinds of purpose.

There’s absolutely no way the dev crew planned for it to go this way. So, if you’re looking to emulate, you’re going to need a lot more than a similar spec.

If you’re still not buying that Twitter shows any redeeming quality, switch the example to craigslist. Again, we could certainly deploy an app with similar functionality and even improve the user interface, but that alone would never capture a similar following.

Need another example? How about MySpace? Virb makes MySpace look like it was built by a monkey armed with Paint and a trial version of HotMetal Pro. But where do the people go? To the cluster.

Another? Digg. Pligg won’t be knocking them over any time soon.

So what makes one site lock on so effectively, and the next die? Your guess is as good as mine.

But if you look at the entire [Web 2.0] category, I think you’d see that the popular apps are those that follow / respond to their community vs those that try to lead it. Maybe some ambiguity of purpose is good.

One thing’s for sure, that guy’s never going to pay us to build him his Twitter clone.