PSYCHOBABBLE: Immediate satisfaction is an instinctive trait of all animals. The “now” is always better than the “later”, because anything with half a brain wants to “know”. In psychology, it’s called the id, which is the part of the mind that looks to satisfy the basic instincts. Humans, having the most developed brain of all the animals, have learnt to suppress that instinct better. But underneath it all, we are all impatient. It was the reason telephones, and then SMS messages became popular. Our need to “tell others” as soon as we can, is something that any innovative device or service can take full advantage of.⌘

When Twitter came along, it was understandable that the lure of a spontaneous conversation was far more tempting than one in a remote part of the web. It’s all about engagement. People are far more engaged on Twitter than they are here. I say something, and the replies come in less than 2-3 minutes later (given time for everybody else’s client to refresh). But that’s not all. The ability to share a thought as soon as I can think it, and speak it out without frills, is very attractive to someone like me. And that is one of the bigger reasons why this place had become such a ghost town.⌘

When you say and share everything that comes to mind immediately, not much original material is left to write about. You’ve already tweeted the gist. The unadulterated version of the thought. Turning one word to ten just so that it’s an interesting read is not fun. Sure, not everything can be said in ≤ 140 characters — and those are the things that I write about here — but most things can. It’s faster, easier, and hence immediately satisfying to tweet it. Things like sharing links, or what I thought about the newest Google killer on the block are just better on Twitter. That was the main reason for the death of my link-list. I realised I shared links faster and better on Twitter than I did here, and that they reached more people because interaction is so much higher with tweets. I wrote a little script to bookmark links from my Twitter timeline to Delicious to overcome the little problem with Twitter Search that prevents me from finding links from others (or even me, for that matter) beyond 7 days. And this is kinda the point.⌘

Twitter’s dynamic nature lets us use it in whatever way we want. More so for us programmers since we can build stuff around it to do our bidding. So, while Twitter won’t kill anything, it will replace a lot of things in our lives because many of us do things on the web in a light way. Whether it be reading feeds, general browsing, or checking our mail. Twitter can be re-routed to do all those things for us, because majority of the users are low-volume users of the web. Direct messages can replace e-mail, reading feeds can be brought down to links shared by people in your timeline and so on so forth. There are very few mainstream Internet paradigms that cannot be replaced by creative use of Twitter.⌘

I still don’t know how good or bad our dependency on one service is — especially one that is prone to be so unreliable. But I do know that change is a good thing. It allows to think and not get used to one paradigm. Lesser room for a bad model to stick around for a long time. To re-iterate, I don’t think Twitter is going to kill existing paradigms. But it is very well going to make sure we re-think them and try to fix the things that are broken.⌘