On Saturday morning, the Today programme on Radio 4 ran a slot about Twitter (it's about 20 minutes in to this segment - or there is a shorter MP3 here) and I was cast as a sceptical voice (i.e. the good things I said about Twitter were not used) to balance out the cheerleading for this flagship micro-blogging service.

Incidentally, I recorded the interview in my daughter's bedroom using the in-built mic of my Macbook Air and then emailed an MP3 to the show, which was quite good fun and very kind of the beeb. She had just had her first tooth out and was less than delighted by the prospect of going to the studio :-(

So, a Twitter sceptic in Headshift? Perish the thought! Actually, I like Twitter a lot, and I even have a Twitter account, with 44 followers at the time of writing, but have not yet sent my first tweet. So embarrassed are some of my colleagues about this apparently luddite state of affairs, they set up a fake Lee Bryant and threatened to tweet on my behalf.

The BBC's technology editor, Rory Cellan-Jones, who ran the story, is a more active Twitterer, but even he wonders if Twitter will cross over into mainstream usage in the way that Facebook and other social networks seem to be achieving:

Mind you, the only people I'm really finding there at the moment are what you might call the hardcore technology crowd. I've just glanced through the list of fifty Twitterers I'm following right now, and they're almost exclusively other technology journalists, bloggers, entrepreneurs, BBC colleagues and other vaguely techie types.

Twitter is certainly a news phenomenon right now. Hugh McLeod, the famous cartoonist and Web 2.0 evangelist committed twittercide, and then enjoyed a resurrection shortly afterwards. Andrew Baron, with 1,500 followers, tried to auction his account on eBay before he too had second thoughts. Elsewhere, a US student demonstrating in Egypt used Twitter to notify his friends that he had been arrested, which meant they could act quickly to free him.

So, why do I think a degree of scepticism is in order? First of all, as one of the commenters on Rory's article demonstrates, some people believe the world can be neatly divided into people who love Twitter and people who "don't get it". For me, this is part of the problem. It is a classic case of early-adopting geeks building their own cultural barriers to entry for those who come after, and feeling comfortable in their own bubble until, as was the case with Facebook and a host of previous sites, they move away when mainstream users start to threaten their pre-eminence. In my job, which is to transform enterprise IT using social computing, we are far more interested in getting second-wave adopters involved, rather than creating a ego-amplifier for early adopting geeks (like us). Put simply, if the price of entry to the new world of social computing is the time and attention cost of twitter, then I think we may have a problem.

There are many things I think are great about Twitter and Jaiku and the general field of micro-blogging / presence sharing / status updates, and I think they have a myriad of very valuable use cases within businesses or intimately connected networks. Ultimately, I think this is a feature, not a product, and we will see it baked into other tools and systems. I am slightly more ambivalent towards the personal broadcast model, only due to time pressures and the law of diminishing returns as more people join the service and spam begins to rear its ugly head. The level of sharing, conversation and network-based assistance that takes place on Twitter is wonderful, but I am more of an asynchronous RSS reader person, which is where, for example, I read my Facebook friends' status updates.

But what made me metaphorically roll my eyes on the Today programme was the "news" that Gordon Brown (the UK Prime Minister) and his team are twittering as a way of keeping the UK updated on his activities. Whilst there is nothing particularly wrong with this, and I suppose it adds an interesting informal channel for Twitter users, I think this is the wrong way around. I would strongly prefer Downing Street to be following our tweets rather than the other way around, and given the many real needs for openness and shared data from government, I personally feel that such a simulacrum of openness is actually a bit of a distraction.

I also cringe slightly when I think about the dominance of the so-called A-listers in Twitter. In many cases, these are people whose job it is just to tweet, or blog, or speak ... usually about twitter, blogging or events, rather than some other business or activity. I just wonder whether this is useful on a wider scale, since few people have the luxury of being so actively self-referential, and also because we are in danger of extrapolating from edge cases. I get the argument about the future being here but not evenly distributed, but I don't think Robert Scoble's twittering (lovely though he is in person) is an indicator of what the rest of us will be doing later. Also, I have a nagging feeling that this is teaching us (and our kids) to normalise a level of interruption and always-on behaviour that is just not healthy. Sorry if that sounds old-fashioned ;-)

However, it is worth remembering that you can use Twitter in a number of different ways that reflect your own comfort with frequency of update, number of "friends", level of intimacy and privacy, etc. Also, tools like Twhirl make it easier to stay in touch using Twitter without your mobile phone bursting into flames. None of the above is an argument against Twitter per se, just a healthily sceptical perspective. As we have seen with the other social networks and social tools, I think it will become more useful as it becomes used in more intimate, small-scale networks rather than a single, open public realm.

I look forward to the day when all my tools, desktop and mobile, provide a unified view of my presence sharing, status updates and micro-blogging, ideally geared towards more intimate, connected networks with a common purpose. In the enterprise, within teams and projects, this could be very useful indeed, and I expect to see it in more and more systems and applications.

Ross Mayfield just wrote a great post about the increasing overhead of keeping up with emails, twitter and other streams of data, in which he talks about the importance of clearly defined communications protocols that set out how and when you will respond to different types of message - such as, for example, Tantek Çelik's wiki page. Like me, Ross also favours batch processing, rather than real-time response in many situations:

These modalities, such a blogs and Twitter, and not to mention more specialized forms such as social bookmarking, feed sharing, Flickr or obnoxious Facebook apps -- all trend towards batch processing. They can almost all flow into an RSS newsreader for a power user. And conversations flow across them and often threads and comments are hard to follow. But that's okay because of informality and discovering what you missed while in the flow is far easier.

Ross's company, Socialtext, has just released what seems like a great upgrade to their enterprise wiki platform that has begun to incorporate people and status updates. This is certainly a sign of things to come.

So, whilst I may not be a cheerleader for Twitter, I am sure glad it exists and expect to see 'twittering' and its successors used a great deal in different contexts and networks as time goes by. Twitter is helping teach us a lot about presence sharing, micro-blogging and ambient intimacy, but there are also many people like me for whom the time cost feels too high to justify deep-diving into the Twitterverse. Facebook (or IM) status updates and messages provide a low-frequency alternative for some people; others might want to try more emotive status services, such as moonri.se (created by fellow Headshifter Amit Khotari).

I am not a Twitter expert, so smackdowns or corrections are welcome, but especially ideas for future uses of Twitter in a business context. Who knows ... after writing this post, I might just be tempted to go for my inaugural tweet :-)