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Twitter is a way to post status messages to your friends and also receive them from your friends.

I just got on Twitter and although I only have one friend (my lovely lady), I’m really enjoying it and I think my friends would too.

Here’s why I like it:

Usability

With function over form, the main submit form to update your status is one textarea and one submit button. No rich text editing or any of that, just type your message and tweet your friends with it. No barriers to entry or distractions.

Web usability guru Jacob Nielson describes one aspect of a good user interface as an interface that isn’t there, meaning that it’s nice when you don’t need to use a specialized interface to use a service. Instead you can use interfaces that you are already familiar with and that you already use on a daily base. Although it’s nothing new, I think this is one of the most enticing things about Twitter. You can connect your phone number with your Twitter account and use SMS or a mobile browser to update your Twitter status. And then you can receive your friends’ tweets.

You can also connect your instant messaging account to your Twitter account and send and receive tweets right from your instant messaging client. The user ‘twitter’ shows up as a friend and will send you IMs when your friends update and you can update just by sending the ‘twitter’ user an IM.

Simplicity

It does what it does and nothing more. And if you want something more you can build applications using Twitter’s open API (i.e. check out Twittervision 3d).

Connectivity

For the most part, we all have friends and family living and working all over. One major reason that people use social networks like FaceBook and MySpace is to stay in touch with these people. The thing is, I think that Twitter provides something much more basic and satisfying in communicating with friends and family over long distances than traditional social networks do.

When you live (or work) with people, you share the little details of your day with each other. It’s easy to do that because you see them a lot. Or you are actually doing little things with them, like grabbing coffee, having dinner or listening to music.

When you are physically distant from someone, you rely on infrequent blog entries, social network messages, uploaded photos, phone calls or emails. I know that I have trouble touching base with a distant friend when ‘it has been awhile’, and I think a big part of that is because, although you’ve seen the photos and read the blog entries, you don’t really have a feel for how that person is doing on the day to day, and what they’re up to on an average day.

Twitter does get a lot of flack from non-believers that think that it’s a waste of time to get all little updates from people. But I think that these little updates are very much what makes us human and helps us connect to each other. Actually, the idea for Twitter came about after considering how much people enjoy reading away messages (you know you’re one of them!). There’s something special about a simple, real-time status message.

You can find me on Twitter here.