It’s a large scale, device agnostic, messaging routing system, stupid…

I’ll be the first to admit that some times I just don’t “get” it. As part of an ongoing quest to understand lifestream tools and what they are about, I was investigating Twitter and wondering why the need to “broadcast” the trivialities of my life was actually important, when I read the following on their blog.

Meanwhile, the current issue of the MIT Technology Review explains, “Twitter is a system that quickly matches new messages coming in from members with the followers who have signed up to receive them, then retransmits them using each follower’s preferred channel.”Yes, we’re building a large-scale, device agnostic, message routing system that’s the technical core of Twitter and it has many applications. However, we’re making it fun and social too. It’s the fun part that technology columnists occasionally get cranky about.http://twitter.com/blog/2007/04/new-york-times-on-911.html

This I get. It’s a lesson I find myself revisiting often and is increasingly relevant in the burgeoning web2.0 world, if you can get past the “pimp-my-website” mentality of many sites which focus on the general user community, there is real power under the hood.There’s something in that for both the evangalists and the cranky columnists — Web 2.0 has to also speak the language of Business 1.0 just as much as Business 1.0 needs to understand it’s not just about the wild natives broadcasting the trivilaities of their life, there could be something important that we are missing in the dazzle and glare.