What does Twitter change?

The tremendous success of first the Internet and later the web, is mainly due to their main design principle: build a basic, unsophisticated, yet flexible infrastructure and let the applications on the edges put the intelligence (the so called end to end principle).

More over, the Internet/Web infrastructure is based on open standards, like TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML prevents provider lock-ins and lowering the entrance barriers to newcomers.

Such infrastructure allows an open-ended innovation, supporting application architectures and utilization patterns no one had considered when it was designed. For example, who could ever dreamed about Ajax back in the early 90' ?

Twitter follows the same principle and has therefore the same potential of the technologies it is build upon. It offers a basic infrastructure for a publish subscribe communication of short text messages, offering an open API that allows others to develop sophisticated applications like searching, aggregation (Tweetdeck) and trend analysis (hashtags.org, Twist, TweetStats).

One obvious difference is that Twitter is neither an open infrastructure nor is based on open standards -- However, neither is Google Maps and that has not prevented it to become a "de facto" standard. More over, there are other technologies like the venerable IRC and more recently XMPP that have similar capabilities for instant communication and are based on open standards, but haven't had the same impact than the web. Why should then Twitter be different?

What makes Twitter so powerful and gives its tremendous potential is how it is actually used. Users, post anything they found relevant, interesting, funny. They post about themselves, friends, hobbies, work. They expose preferences and dislikes. In other words, Twitter opens people's thoughts and feelings and make them available to others instantaneously, creating a continuous conversation on which you can enter and leave. Participate. Watch.

This is the closest we will ever be to telepathy. And that surely will change the way we communicate.