On Twitter

Stolen from a Gtalk conversation with Teresa Wu

Twitter is the ultimate extension to human communication.

The gist of most human communication is small talk, and small talk usually just consists of variations of answers to "what we have been doing". Twitter is a platform for users to continually update their account with answers to that question, in the form of answering "what we are doing". Aggregating that conversation fluff into a common location as a blog of multiple small entries essentially takes the essence of small talk on the individual basis and broadcasts it to all the user's friends. As such, users are able to communicate with all their friends at the same time because they're taking the template of normal everyday conversation and letting everyone see it in one place.

Ultimately, this allows users to communicate with a broader range of peers and engage in more interesting conversations.