One of the best parts about Twitter is the amount of activity on it compared to say Pownce. While obviously that depends on how many people you are following, as I wrote about a month ago, I had roughly the same amount I was following me on both (recently, Twitter has gone way up though) and yet Twitter always seemed to be bristling with activity while Pownce was a ghost town.

Today Twitter seemed to have even more activity than usual, no doubt thanks to Jeremiah Owyang’s post that seemed to kick start what is now being known as ‘Twitter Tuesday‘. Currently at the top of Techmeme, a number of big players in the tech world have now written on the phenomenon.

While everyone has had interesting things to say about the service, the most interesting one I thought was Paul Kedrosky who notes more or less that Twitter is in the eye of the beholder. I think that is absolutely true. I’ve been a big fan of Twitter from early on and a few months ago I labeled it “massively-multiplayer IM” – and while I still think that holds true, I realize now that it may not look like that at all to someone else depending on your vantage point.

As Paul says, Twitter is a little bit email, a bit IM, a bit social-networking – all that and less! But it’s the less that I think is actually important. Twitter works so well and is exploding because it is so simple. If there was no 140-character limit in message, it would get bogged down in self-righteous sludge and spam. Instead, now even following 200 and some people (and that is nothing compared to some like Owyang who follows over 2,000!), the conversations on the page feel brisk – and it’s very interesting to watch them permeate from one topic to another as someone brings something up.

I am a bit worried if Twitter hits true pop-culture appeal, because it will get harder keep up with – even today I had to go back a few pages when I’d come back to my computer at various point throughout the day, and again I’m only following 200 and some people – imagine if I were following 2,000 or 20,000! Granted it’s up to you who you want to follow, but with more and more people joining up, there are going to be more and more I want to follow.

A few things would absolutely help with such an influx: the ability to group users and of course search functionality. I have no doubt the folks behind Twitter have thought about and are working on these things, but please hurry, a few more ‘Twitter Tuesdays’ like this and I’ll be buried in tweets!

And of course I have yet to even mention the power of Twitter as a means to get ahold of a ton of people quickly (such as in an emergency) or to break news both big and small.

Another thing to think about is potential new features such as video. I’m really not sure I’d want to see Twitter add video – it may only muddle things up. Seesmic, does a nice job being the “Twitter for video” and even interacts well with Twitter by alerting your followers automatically when you post a new Seesmic video. The co-existence of the two in harmony would I think be of better value to me then one adding the functions of the other. To follow Michael Scott’s adage from The Office (as told by Dwight Schrute), K-I-S-S: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Until next ‘Twitter Tuesday’…

(…you can follow me on Twitter)

[UPDATE]: Scott Karp has a post about why he had to stop using Twitter. A good read, basically seems like an extension of the feelings many have about the digital lifestyle overtaking our actual lives. He notes that Twitter has “turned distraction into an artform” – which is hard to argue with.