(2020-05-07) Matuschak Twitter Is A Water Cooler

Andy Matuschak: Twitter is a water cooler

Conversations can arise there with no apparent cause, and they can naturally continue over days or weeks as participants naturally return to their “water cooler,” or as more new people stumble into the conversation.

A related notion: Twitter is a “third place.

Connecting prose and its surrounding Twitter conversation

Twitter’s ephemeral nature makes it hard to keep track of a complex conversation, relative to traditional forum presentations.

It may be possible to get the best of both worlds in web publishing: to use Twitter as the ongoing water cooler to keep conversations going, but to present those conversations in-context and as a coherent, legible set of threads instead of a pointillistic maelstrom.