Raymond expresses a very valid point with regards to Twitter in his comment: "it is so dependant on the timestamp" and tweets that have disappeared off of the front page due to time are deemed less relevant.
The internet, and now especially with social media, is transient; always moving, flowing and morphing leaving us with a constant battle with continuous partial attention - on Twitter we live in the moment and are easily distracted, moving on to the next thread maybe before we have adequately explored the possibilities of the current one.
Twitter is a place to get the conversation going and spawn ideas but due to its format cannot be the place to see them through (the 140 character limit sees to that). Conversations, therefore, have to be taken offline in some way. How?
Each individual tweet has its own "status" link which opens just that single tweet (click the link that says how long ago the tweet was) thus making it easy to refer back to any point in the conversation at any time.
So, why not just quote someone's tweet back at them?
Twitter is more the facilitator of communication rather than the end channel so it is probably better to take deeper discussion and analysis away from this environment in order to effectively extend a particular conversation. As such, there is no restriction on going back to ideas expressed hours or even days ago - if the idea is worth exploring time is irrelevant.
Raymond is correct that too few good discussions on Twitter are not seen through to their logical conclusion due to the inherent restrictions with the format so we need to be making the effort to take these threads and use them elsewhere.
What are your opinions?
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