I’ll admit, when I first heard about Twitter from my friend Steve, it looked like a lot of self-indulgent, distracting noise. Then a few things happened.

• I’ve been absorbing and learning alot about Social Media and communities, and doing a lot of thinking about the topic.
• I went to SXSW Interactive this year.
• I had a conversation with Steve (RippleOn) again at Stew Friedman’s lecture.
• Then, I had a conversation with Chris Justice (MegaJustice) from SparkSight about Twitter, who kindly took the time to show me a few things while we were in the middle of another conversation. (Chris and I multi-task)

And now?

I “get” Twitter, and it’s place in our communications, or at least I’m beginning to. My comparison when I was explaining Twitter to West, my business partner (and husband) is that Twitter is to instant messaging what email was to the phone.

When you want to talk to someone on the phone, you both have to be available at the same time (unless you’re leaving voice mails for each other.) You can have a short or long conversation. You do usually tend to talk for at least a few minutes, you do usually exchange at least a few sentences. On the phone, you’re also usually talking to only one person, although of course there’s conference calls. Those people still need to be available at the same time (if you’re not recording for later playback.)

Email takes that conversation to a different plane. You can still have a “conversation” with someone, only you do it on your own time. I send you an email in the morning, you send me one back a few hours later, I reply again in the afternoon, you reply in the evening, and we consider this a conversation. With email, you can copy as many people as you like, and those people can generally reply to your email.

On email, I can stay in touch with far more people in an efficient, effective way than I ever could if I had to call them.

Instant messaging for the most part also requires both people be available at the same time. Yes, you can leave chats for each other when they’re not there. And usually, you’re just chatting with one person at a time, although of course, you can have a chat room, or you can have three way chats, and you can have multiple chat windows up at the same time.

With Twitter, you can put out one message, and it “twitters” everyone who’s following you. And they choose whether they’re being instantly notified or not, but most of the time, they choose to go to twitter.com to see the information. So again, it’s on their time, and you’re touching many more people than you would normally touch at one time with chat.

Of course, there’s all kinds of permutations around this, but this is a general summary of what Twitter is for those of you who are just baffled.

Oh, and my Twitter name? cjromb. I know; it’s not very original. But I want my friends to be able to find me, so I can put pithy comments in for their enjoyment and amusement.

YOUR TURN: What’s your Twitter name? I’d love to follow you, too.