Jeff Pulver: "twitter: The Ham Radio of Today... twitter is my gateway to the world... when I am online in the morning a simple 'Good Morning' is a great way to both start a conversation and make your presence known... It is the platform I go to when I am in a mood to communicate with others... twitter represents what I can best describe as 'real-enough time' communications"

Jeff's a smart dude, a real visionary, and he's been involved in many successful things.

Let me state the obvious: Ham & CB made a good number of people happy but had limited appeal & purpose and was a fad.

Loneliness is real for almost everyone at various times in life, and any means to cure it is worthy. IRC & AOL chat & Ham & CB & Twitter & all means for converation-starting -- they serve a real need.

But it's shocking that this piece was written without even a nod to the absurdity & risk of our March Toward Total Screenlife. Real-time communication is free & easy, so why have "real-enough time communication"? When you want to say 'good morning' or are in a mood to communicate with others, why not arrange your life so it's F2F (eg. a workplace, people you live with, a breakfast club, ?)?  Are the people within X miles not good enough? As I quoted the other day, "The physical world is very high bandwidth." I'm sure there are good answers to my questions -- and Twitter serves a good purpose in our diverse, advanced, flatworld, busy lives -- but at least ask the question: Are we headed toward total screen take-over? Might the inconvenience and awkwardness and realness of F2F be worth choosing?

Jeff's a conference-organizer, so he gets this, but I'd like to better understand the pull, the draw, the seduction of this part of screenlife.