If you don’t like the post either write a polite comment about why you didn’t like it. A comment saying this sucks and taking a cheap techcrunch shot (would you do this on Om’s site or ReadWriteWeb?) just shows you to be a raving twitter fanboy sir.

I like twitter, but I wouldn’t say I’m a raving fanboy. I just don’t think there’s a reason one service cannot borrow features from another – Pownce certainly did. It’s especially true if you take the features and improve them – that’s how innovation happens sometimes.

Allen and Mark are sitting on Ubahn 3. Allen and Mark are laughing and discussing the iPhone. Till gets on at Frankenhofer stop. Till sees friends Allen and Mark laughing up a storm. Till walks over, says Hi, and asks "why are you guys laughing so much." It is at that point that Allen explains (RE: THREADED) why they are laughing.

You see Till, in that scenario, the discussion does need to be threaded when you join -  even if it's just for a moment.

The cats were cute the first 20,000 times.

For one, I follow twitter mostly via SMS, sometimes via their great mobile site, and when I’m home via Twitterrific.

And one thing in common in all three of the modes by which I usually use Twitter – threading would break the simplicity of these models.

A few other points. I don’t (usually) want to follow all the people my friends are following – for one, many of them are people I have not other connection with, for another perhaps they twitter in a style I don’t want to follow actively (i.e. I know missrogue personally, but don’t follow her twitters).

However, there is an interesting twist to Twitter’s mode of doing things – it does give you some hints about other people who might be interesting – and if you like, you can take a look at their twitterstream and decide (and the fact that @username’s are now links on the twitter site helps with this).

Threads have their place – but they have MAJOR problems as well.

For one, they introduce severe cognitive effort – i.e. if you are writing something you have to first have decided where to insert it (some tools like gmail try to automate this – sometimes with success, but I have also had very different conversations show up as one thread in gmail because they shared the same subject line).

Even more annoyingly, if you are not part of an initial conversation but entering it later, you have to dip in and out of many threads – each “dip” (usually via a click to open up a thread – often via opening up a new page) takes real time and effort – and for me, at least, it usually results in my leaving that discussion board entirely.

For me, the everything at a glance style of Twitter – with the only organizing order being time – allows me to get a gestalt impression very quickly. Either of one person’s twitter streams or of a collection of people (my friends, a friend’s friends etc).

And for me, this is a joy and pleasure of Twitter – simple tools – open for others to build upon and leverage – but unencumbered of additional layers of complexity (such as threads).

Shannon

Interesting perspective on threading – I guess I come from the message board era so that's why I look to it. I find it much easier to follow what is going on.

IMO Twitter is not so much about discussions anyway. I think Twitter’s success with people comes from the simplicity. I mean, it’s really so simple – a single text field.

In regard to the @-syntax, it was introduced after people had used it so much on the site.

Last but not least – what’s with the hating on lolcats around here? It’s not like anyone forces you to watch the picture. Which – just by the way – is extremly funny. ;-)

I’m actually surprised that Twitter doesn’t just add the features that Jaiku and Pownce have exploited.

One thing that Twitter has going for it is that just about everybody uses it…if they add the features, I’m sure a good majority will stay put.

The reason it became so viral is because everyone wanted to know what their friends/family/co-workers were up to. I don’t think threaded conversations were ever part of the original plan.

Consider Pownce to be “Twitter v.1.5+” They introduced threaded group discussions, links, file-sharing, and events to the mini-blog chatter.

Cheers,
BG

At the end of my article where I note that if Twitter adds the same functionality that it will be a Pownce-Clone, it was a joke. I was trying to get people to think that Kevin Rose made Pownce and it seems every startup is a Digg clone. I guess my sarcasm didn't work.

I also didn't note that Pownce was great, just saying that for this function they handle it better in my opinion. The lack of threading makes using twitter.com difficult for me. That's coming from someone who uses messageboards heavily since '94 and bbs' before that.

I hope that you will stick around and maybe other posts that I author you might find more valuable. Thanks for the feedback.

On Twitter, you can ask as well.

IMO, pownce will fail with all the premium content. Makes me not want to register.