I mainly joined Twitter so I could follow the likes of John Resig and Neal Gafter as well as some other interesting techie people and I am already mildly annoyed with the service.

I expected that Twitter would offer me a client similar to Live Messenger or Google Talk. Instead, I had to find a third-party client. Furthermore the one everyone uses is only available on Mac and has ads unless you pay $15. If anyone knows of a good windows standalone client, please let me know.

Additionally, I have been trying Twitter for all of 2 hours now, and I’ve realized this whole micro-blogging thing really irks me. I am following people I consider to be really smart not because I care what they ate for dinner, or what videos they are currently watching. I am following them because I want to know more about what they are working on and thinking in terms of technology.

That being said, if and when I start following my actual real life friends, I will be interested in what they are doing currently. Maybe Twitter should take that into account? Have different classifications of tweets, ones for personal friends and ones for the public? Or maybe Twitter just isn’t for me. Perhaps I should just stick with traditional blogs and instant messenging clients.

Also, there are huge privacy concerns with an app like this. Although there is an option to have only certain people see your updates, the whole spirit of Twitter is to be a public micro-blogging system. I don’t even want to get into how careful you have to be with what you post there. Sometimes public messenging can get you in trouble. Something many people have found out the hard way with facebook. Also something Charlie Villanueva recently found out.

From a technology standpoint, Twitter is an alright service I guess, although for me it really lacks the wow factor. It seems to me that its a pretty direct translation of IPmulticast leveraging SMS and pretty much nothing else.

Twitter seems like a pretty linear service, unless I’m missing something. I’m guessing that it’s success is due to the fact that they really targetted mobile phones, but in reality it just seems to be a gimped version of RSS. I don’t even think they were the first to offer micro-blogging. Additionally, there are alternative open source models which have pretty much the same functionality for micro-blogging, like Google Jaiku and facebook’s new (and annoying) what’s on your mind? feature.

What does Twitter really offer me? It’s not a full feature web app like facebook or myspace, its not an internet overlord like Google… Their one advantage is SMS. They don’t even have downloadable clients from what I can tell. They rely on user made clients.

It’s cool that they already have a bunch of people using it (I almost added Shaq to my watch list). But will it really have the staying power once the initial novelty of the app wares off? Their functionality isn’t that hard to reproduce and improve upon…

Unless Twitter leverages the SMS platform in some other unique way or they expand or add some other functionality, I will be surprised if it is anything other than a flavour of the month micro-blogging tool (for me anyway). Which is fine by me, there are enough programs I check every day anyway. But I suspect with its rush of popularity, we will hopefully be seeing something more interesting coming from the Twitter people sometime soon. Until that time comes, let me know of some interesting people you think I should be following.