Continuing with thinking about how an Internet Twitter would work, I am going to look at what I do with Twitter and what happens

1. Post tweets - tweet goes to everyone who is following me, shows up on a tab of a Twitter user if I mention their Twitter handle in the tweet, appears in my account's public tweetstream

2. Retweet tweets - same as if I posted the tweet (see 1.)

3. Direct message - send a message to a Twitter user (like a text), hoping that I will hear back from that person

4. Search - can search for a search term (hash tag) in other tweets

5. Follow - get a list of tweets for someone I am following, the list appears in my reading tweetstream

6. Like - indicate that you "like" a particular tweet

How can I do this stuff if I don't want to use Twitter?

1. Post - use a weblog, followers have to subscribe to my RSS feed

2. Retweet - use a weblog, copy text from tweet or source into my weblog post, my followers have to subscribe to my RSS feed

3. Direct message - use IM app

4. Search - use a search engine for what I am interested in, not sure if people can search Twitter without using Twitter's search

5. Follow - Can use TweetsToRss to get a list of Twitter tweets that I can following using RSS reader, can follow people posting from weblogs using RSS reader

6. Like - Not sure how to "like" a tweet without using Twitter. Can post comments to weblog posts, Webmention would be another way to leave comments if the other site supports Webmention

This is just a start, will be posting more on this subject soon.