I am not yet on Twitter; well, I’m technically on it, but I’m not actually posting to it, just using my account to browse around. But the Times had a how-to guide today that gives me more of a sense of why people like it.  Like Tumblr (but more so) it integrates with a great set of apps, so you can post and read from anywhere (including via SMS, because of the 140-character restriction).

What I do find remarkable about is how much of Twitter’s appeal seems to be about searching for tags, so you can see what the giant hive-mind is saying at a particular point in time. This is obviously a big selling point of a lot of Web apps (e.g., Technorati, Google Trends) but in most other cases, the fishbowl feature is just a fringe benefit to some first-order activity — i.e., people search on Google to answer specific questions, but then add it all up and we all get to see the broad currents of the searches via Google Trends.

To my knowledge, Twitter is the first (popular) application where this meta element is perceived to be a reason why people are posting in the first place. To read the Times, at least, (see also here and here) the main reason to join Twitter (instead of just sticking with Facebook, which in terms of pure friend-to-friend communication does everything Twitter does and more) is that you’re throwing your observations on a pile and then you get to watch the pile.

I’m obviously very interested in the question of how you can get people to do things collectively, and how their knowledge of the collective nature of enterprises affects their participation in them, so if Twitter really is succeeding along those lines, it could be a really cool thing. I’m skeptical, though, and I guess my prediction is that Twitter will flicker out as Facebook rolls out tools to essentially duplicate what it does.