This is absolutely the BEST summary of why Twitter works that I’ve read. Of course, it’s by Howard Rheingold, the guy who brought us “Smart Mobs” and who introduced me to the online world when I read his book “The Virtual Community” back in 1993.

We were fortunate enough to have Howard as a very early guest on <a href="http://http://noillusionspodcast.com/2005/03/18/on-the-pod-with-howard-rheingold/">G'Day World, way back in March 2005.

Here are just a couple of Howard’s reasons why Twitter works, but read the full article for the rest of the story.

clipped from www.smartmobs.com

Variety — political or technical argument, gossip, technical info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, repartee, scholarly references

Reciprocity — people give and ask freely for information they need (this doesn’t necessarily scale or last forever, but right now it’s possible to tune your list — and to contribute to it — to include a high degree of reciprocation)

A channel to multiple publics — I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds — and each of the 1300 people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks. I used to just paint. Now I document my painting at each stage of the process, upload pix to flickr or flicks to blip.tv, then drop a tinyurl into Twitter. Who needs a gallery or a distributor?

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