Twitter is the social networking tool du jour. It would be tempting to view it as just another time waster - and it is - but there are some interesting things about the platform that I think make it very fun and useful, especially in comparison to say Facebook.

Firstly, compare having a friend in Facebook or similar site to having a follower on Twitter. Twitter following is a much lower cost, lower commitment point of entry. You typically don't need to ask someone's permission to follow. And the bio information on Twitter is so limited that you usually aren't exposing any data you don't care about. Friends on Facebook really are your friends, whereas I have no idea who most of my Twitter followers are. This openness is a big advantage of Twitter because it helps me build a network, not just have yet another place to catch up with people I already know.

Second, Twitter's focus on a simple idea, 140 character text messages, means it's more of what you want, less of what you don't want. If I get tagged in one more "25 Little Green Patches I Should Live In" Facebook app I'm going to punch somebody in the mouth. No worries about that garbage on Twitter.

Third, Twitter's API is about making the experience better for users. Facebook's API seems to be about making it better for developers. The best thing going about Twitter is the multitude of UI clients enabled by the API, TweetDeck, for example. Twitter is happy to publish out their feed to let people decide how they want to consume it. A good UI experience is half the battle. I still think there's work to be done in Twitter land, but it is miles better than most social networking sites. It's like a throwback to Usenet. If I want to read my newsgroups in slrn, I can. It's the same for Twitter.

Fourth, the power of the Re-Tweet. The social norm of re-tweeting interesting tweets allows cool stuff to propagate rapidly beyond the network of the person who originated it. I think it also encourages people to post better stuff so that their ego can be stroked by the pleasure of having others re-tweet it. I am finding more cool web pages off Twitter than from any other source. When's the last time you found something interesting and unexpected from Facebook? It's pretty darn rare. Google needs to hurry up and add a "Tweet This" link to their default FeedFlare toolbox in Feedburner. (There is a third party add-in for this).

Fifth, you can get a mix of business and pleasure. The Chicago Tribune (@ChicagoTribune) recently made a big Twitter push, including switching their masthead to Twitter handles for a day. I followed a couple of their columnists and now I don't just get notifications of their blog posts, I'm getting to know more about them too. This might be good and bad, but I think it is a way that what someone might think of as a faceless corporation can get out and humanize themselves to their customers. (NB: Treating Twitter as just another RSS proxy or as a "write only" medium defeats the purpose of the tool).

Sixth, Twitter lets you tap into the power of the online gestalt in near real time. As screens of tweets go by or you watch the tag cloud from TwitScoop, you can see what's hot out there. I learned about some breaking news that way. Never had that happen on Facebook.

Add it up and it is easy to see why Twitter is taking off and Facebook is getting scared into things like a bogus redesign in an attempt to make their site more Twitter-like.

"Few things make me so quick to anger as ow.ly links." - @ourmaninchicago

You've seen them. Those Tweets with URL shortened links from Hootsuite (ow.ly), Stumble Upon (su.pr), and Friend Feed (ff.im).  If you've clicked one before then, like me, you recognize that they are a manifestion of purest web Evil.  Why?  They frame the site you are posting and put an obnoxious toolbar for their product at the top.  Reasons to despise this are:

1. It's a security risk (part 1) since you can't see the real URL of the site.  The only thing that shows up in the URL bar is ow.ly/xxYYzz or whatever.  While all URL shorteners have risks, this is particularly bad since you don't know if the actual site underneath is genuine.  Sure, it might look like the New York Times, but what if is really a scammer who prompts you to log in and captures the username/password combo that you happen to use for everything?  Not good.

2. It's a security risk (part 2) since they can track your surfing.  Unless you somehow type in a new URL or hit a bookmark or something, clicking links only reloads the child frame, so the URL bar stays in place.  This not only perpetuates the risk above, it also theoretically lets Hootsuite track your every click.  Not Good.

3. It turns you into a flack for their product.  Conveniently, if you post something using this, you are now helping to advertise and promote the product to other people.

4. It promotes further viral spreading of these obnoxious links.  The toolbar contains icons to let the consumer directly re-tweet it - using ow.ly, et. all. of course.

Presumably most people aren't consciously using these products as URL shorteners.  Rather, they are using the tools as social bookmarking and one of the many fine "benefits" that comes along with the product is this evil framing link wrapper.  Be careful Tweeple!

A couple more URL shortening services to avoid: Digg and tr.im

As for Digg, I actually think it's a great place to find cool stuff, but not for sharing with others via Digg links.  These hijack the original link and, even worse than the above, send you to a landing page, not the original site.  Dat's not nice.

tr.im has a cute name, but the service is flaky and already announced they were going out of business once.  So unless you don't want your friends to see this:

avoid tr.im.

Save yourself grief.  If you want to shorten links, just use bit.ly or tinyurl.com.  No guarantee they won't turn obnoxious or go out of business either, but the others are already there.