Nancy Friedman has written an excellent post about the severe disconnect between Twitter’s party line and the actual uses people have found for it. Part of the frustration is the growing fascination the main stream media has for Twitter, in spite of its utter inability to comprehend “the tweet” on the most basic level (c.f. blogs, podcasts, “debating the issues”). And on the subject of Twitter’s supposedly simple opening query, “What are you doing:”

[…] it didn’t take long for the Twitter community to discover a much broader and vastly more interesting range of possibilities: sharing links and tips, spreading news, telling jokes, publicizing events, replying to or forwarding (“retweeting”) other people’s tweets. Twitter has even been used to locate missing children and raise money for charity.

Nancy was one of the first people I followed regularly on Twitter, and I have to say her commitment to the medium is pretty impressive (4,651 updates at the time of this post). But her insights as a user really come into focus when she relates them to her experience creating brand identities:

Usually when a brand gets so much of its vocabulary wrong the business either fails or undergoes a dramatic overhaul. Yet Twitter has succeeded. Why? Because Twitter is much more than the Twitter.com web site. In fact, there is almost no reason to ever use the Twitter web site.

I was bowled over by this last point, mostly because it’s occurred to me repeatedly over the past few months that I hadn’t actually been to Twitter.com in ages because it is a hassle. Sometimes the navigation menu has three options, sometimes eight, and I never know what information clicking on any one of them will present.

As far as I can determine, Twitter fills in the gap between a minimal web presence (say, an email address) and more full-blown endeavors like Faceboook or MySpace, or a blog. Even if you engage in these other mediums (or especially if you do) it’s nice to have a low-impact outlet. And what you get in return is a steady stream of bite-sized ideas that you can tailor to fit your particular needs.

And in those few moments when I do find myself responding to the ostensible “What are you doing?” it’s almost a violation of decorum, like when someone asks how you’re doing and you actually tell them, in detail, to their horror.