More attention required, please

Last month, I wrote about Continuous Partial Attention, which had been identified by Harvard Business Review as a Breakthrough Idea for 2007. This concept has since been thrust further into the mainstream thanks to Twitter, a service that allows users to share brief comments (140 characters or less) with friends and strangers via the web, their phone, or instant messaging. Some pundits have suggested it was the dominant undercurrrent at the recent SXSW conference.
Given that there are hundreds of people blogging about this and orders of magnitude more twittering responses, I'll keep this post concise. Here are three thoughts on Twitter (in Twitter-friendly sub-140 character format of course):

• Does anyone else find it ironic that Twitter has fantastic growth in the US even though most people agree the US lags Europe in SMS usage?


• Given the huge mobile charges that Twitter users incur, does anyone NOT think a mobile provider will ultimately acquire Twitter?


• Is Twitter's growth a symptom of continuous partial attention or is it creating an epidemic?

As an antidote to these quick-fire thoughts, here's an entertaining visual about where Twitter fits in the history of blogging (thanks to Pete Cashmore at Mashable):

1. Alan Taylor

   1. 1 - I am under the impression that a large majority of the cell-phone plans in the US actually charge users to *recieve* SMS messages, which has seriously hindered the popularity of them as a form of communication. Twitter would therefore seemingly be better suited to use in Europe you would imagine, where we not only recieve for free, but get generous 'allowences' for sending too with many contracts. How this has lead to the large growth of Twitter in the US is indeed strange.
   2. 2 - Twitter is definatly in a position where it is seemingly hard for them to make money. The curious thing here is that the company who made it - Obvious - is currently looking for a buyer of it's other web-company Odeo. I am unsure how the service could be monotised without having an arangement with a tel-co. Either they get a kick-back when users send and recieve SMS 'tweets', or they would have to position the service as a content delivery platform that is of interest to the fabled 18-34 demographic.
   3. 3 - Interesting question. Has now been Twittered in search of a response.