Point of view is everything
Thursday, May 17, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Les Orchard: "Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you've amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it's good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people." 
That's exactly right. And he goes on to explain that's why when reviewers look at Twitter, or other networking systems (like blogs) they see them as mundane. But it's like listening to random phone conversations, you'd think the same thing. But suppose you were listening to a conversation among people you know?
Twitter isn't private, so it's not exactly like eavesdropping, but it is personal. These days on the Internet we're experimenting with various mixtures of private and public, subscriptions and ephemeral connections. Almost no one watches the main Twitter page, yet that's probably where most of the reviewers go.
