In this post, I am going to talk about one of the areas that I think appeal to Twitter users - Twitter as a conversational tool, and how that works.

When someone posts a tweet, and it appears in your tweetstream, there is a link to reply to the tweet. If the original tweeter is online, they can easily and quickly respond, and a conversation can start. To me, that ability to have a conversation is one of the key benefits of Twitter. The back-and-forth is something more like a IM chat than exchange of postings. To support that, Twitter is using their servers to support the back and forth such that the lag can be quite short. This would not be the case for a blog and comment exchange. Also, the replies can be viewed almost immediately after sending (I am speaking about the web version of Twitter). In a weblog post/comment, you would need to keep refreshing to see if there was any response.

So, another aspect of the Internet Twitter would be - how to provide that interaction? In Dave Winer's post, he mentioned that someone had recommended XMPP as a protocol for  this Internet twitter. Another possible technical solution might be based on RSS Cloud, which is supported by several of Dave Winer's tools. 

More to come...