What Twitter Looks Like To Me These Days

A typical Sunday, reading the NY Times online, scanning Twitter, drinking coffee, and listening to TV On The Radio.

I glanced at my @replies, and realized how much my twittering has changed recently.

Twitter / Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Every reply here was a retweet of something I had flowed along to others, either things that I had seen in Twitter that were interesting enough to send along, or things I had uncovered online and brought into my Twitter stream. A few months ago my @replies would have been almost 100% chat with a small number of relatively close real-world friends, with an occasional link.

Maybe its the number of followers (heading toward 6000!!), but I think its a shift in the fabric of the Twittosphere. More and more twitterers have come to use Twitter as an increasingly central stream of information, sentiment, and context for whatever is happening in their many worlds.

The smooshing together of long-distance, big-chunk blogging with the fast-twitch sprint of Twitter is a revelation and a revolution: the best example today of how open social discourse is happening on the Web.