I have read the reports you linked to and a host of articles and whitepapers that try to analyze the Twitter challenge. I think it’s like everything else that emerges in the world of marketing. It’s just one more tool that, if used appropriately and with dedication, can make a dent in maintaining customer communication.

Twitter won’t be as appropriate for some verticals — folks in the communication trades, news business, magazine and trade press folks… we’re all used to communication so we’re more likely to gravitate. But I am seeing an interesting trend — there are a lot of requests for information appearing in my Twitter stream — and that is another important point — Twitter will only be as good for you as your Twitter stream. It’s about who you follow as much as who follows you.

I am a news junkie so I follow news outlets and grab a lot of information that never makes it to my local news and might only make the crawl or flipper on a news channel.

I like Twitter.

Pat = @PatMcGrew at Twitter — I hope your readers will come follow me! Oh, and you!

The statistics of how many users produce how many of the tweets could probably be replicated in any study of the communication ecology of almost any community of interest. It’s easiest to visualize the physical community. A couple of people like to talk. Most people like to listen.

The paradox is that I don’t think twitter is best seen as a media. It might be more productive to see it as the natural evolution of the agora -the original marketplace in the west. Agora lead to cities lead to civilization.

A computer assisted agora follows the same principles. But it’s subject to a time shift and the elimination of space as a constraints.