I was about to write a nice opening for my next "User spotlight" column which will focus on the Twitter community. I knew exactly how I'm gonna write about the simple, naive and not too sophisticated interface for this cool and beloved community, that mainly just want to know what its friends or other people are doing.

My perception has started to change just from the beginning, when I found a cool Twitteret user that I wanted to interview, and was amazed by the fact that I've got no option, what so ever, to contact her. No option for a comment or message sending. Also, the "about" section is very very limited and you can hardly learn anything about the people you meet in the site. Not exactly a good start for making new friends in a community, so I thought...

Luckily enough, Lynn Wallenstein (a co-founder of Powered By Geek company) had a link for her website, where I've managed to find an email address to contact her.

While reading Lynn's answers, I finally understood that for many users (though not all of them), Twitter functions more like a cool gadget for your Google Talk and less as an inner online social community "I like the Twitter web interface, but I primarily use it through gtalk/jabber as I want the updates pushed to me" says Wallenstein.

When I asked Wallenstein to name 3 things that make Twitter a good community she said "I don't think Twitter is a community. A community implies that ALL the people on Twitter are all always talking to each other. Twitter has many little communities that overlap. I happen to be involved in the more geek/web designer circle in that those are my friends, we seem to all be talking to each other. I am sure there are many similar circles for other areas/regions. Twitter is a tool that facilitates a community..."

When looking at the wikipedia definition you see that Twitter is "an Internet service that allows users to post one-line summaries of their current state, and to view the current state of other users. It fulfills a niche somewhere between blogs and customisable status texts or display names in instant messaging applications." So why not build a community in the web? I mean, wasn't that was the whole "web 2.0" idea?

"I wouldn't use Twitter 1/1000 of the time I do if I had to check a web page. The IM integration is defintly my favorite Twitter feature" And what about other communities, are you a member in any of the other social networks? "I am a member of like every social network in the world, but Twitter, if you want to call it a social network, is the one I most frequent. I am always on Twitter... 24/7. With it pushing to my IM client I just work and read the messages as they come in. For me it is like working in an office with a bunch of people and someone yells out "hey check out X""

So I understand that your real friends (in life) are part of the Twitter community as well. "Yes, many of my real life friends are on twitter as well as many people I am going to meet at meetups and conferences are as well." If you could, what would you change about Twitter? "Better API Plus I would love to see new features like XFN integration as well as some sort of friend recommendation (8 of your friends have this person as a friend, you should add them, etc) as it is sometimes hard to track what conversations are going on if you are missing people. I also think an improved direct message, such as @screenname would go directly to them" Best line you ever read on Twitter? "redjac: Just saw a guy on the street beat a rat to death."

Your favorite Twitter user? Changes depending on the conversation, but I think thus far my most "interesting" twitter friend is Christian Heilmann, partially because he posts so much, partially because his posts are usually in my field of interest and mostly because he is funny.

Now, I got to ask - Is it really that interesting to know what other people are doing at any given time? Definitely. It not only provides me a method of venting about whatever I am doing, but I pick up interesting bits of information from my friends. I have found a lot of cool things from twitter recommendations. And last one - What would you do if you had 8 hands? "One for the remote, three of typing, one to hold my coffee, one to thumb wrestle and two backup emergency hands incase of paper cuts." To summarize my Twitter little research I would say that users, especially the ones who use a lot of profiles in many of the social networks out there, won't spend much time in a community when you need to get and update your web page every time. I guess when it comes to profusion, communities must find a way to facilitate us, the users, and make it easier to keep us updated all the time with our online communities friends.