Mr. Tweet, Twitter & The Usual Suspects

I got my report from Mr. Tweet today. If tweeting, Twitter and and the whole concept of social networking with an extensible API is foreign: the short version is its a way to drop 140-character messages into a virtual world where people who “follow” you see them almost immediately and others can search and find.

I knew about Twitter just from the background noise of the net, but when Tim Elliott of Winecast sent me an invitation, I accepted, even though I couldn’t see any benefit to it. Twitter just seemed silly. But I also knew Elliott was a smart and talented early adopter. If he liked it, I was probably missing something.

Over the last few weeks, Twitter has demonstrated itself as the next step in this evolution of connectivity, and I am now seeing the new apps that fill in the blanks, like Twitter Grader and Mr. Tweet: virtual appliances that ferret out folks on your wavelength and make it easy to include them in your own staccato-statement world.

And another truth was starting to reveal itself. The more these appliances make suggestions on people to follow, the more often I know who they are, and the more they’re “the usual suspects”–people I know (in a ! IRL way) from my last waystations along the early adopter highway.

Like the #1 suggestion on my first Mr. Tweet report: Robert Scoble. I am already following Dave Winer. Can the prompt to add Adam Curry be far off?

Next will come the wholesale monetization of Twitter, which was deftly avoided by them waving off Facebook’s offer of cash and pseudo-cash, but sooner or later, they’ll take the bait and tweets will suddenly sport more product placement than America’s Biggest Loser.

And that will be my cue to move on down the road, where I’m sure to find all the usual suspects on my next stop along this information superhighway that gets smarter at every turn.