What really makes this concept different from other communication methods, is it allows celebrities, public figures, even companies, to connect directly with their users. With a regular website or blog, in many cases posts and information is distributed one direction (from the person or company, to us, the audience). We can’t really respond, and start up the conversation. Additionally, in many cases, the audience feels further disconnected, as many if not most celebrities and public figures, have their public website and blog content screened by PR. In some cases, it may not even be written by the figure at all.

However, with 140 character messages, that the celebrity or public figure can send from their phone or computer.. it’s coming directly from them. And it’s interesting to see what these people are thinking or doing. For example, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, Comedian Rainn Wilson, US President Barack Obama, and Actress Felicia Day are just a few of the public figures I keep track of on Twitter.

In the political scene, Twitter is creating a bit of a stirr. Politicians in both the US and Canada can connect directly to the public to get their message out. No news media, PR reps, or anything in between. Down south, Tweet Congress is a website dedicated to locating your local congress men and women on Twitter. Many of them talk about bills they’re working on, or events they are attending. In Canada, Mayor Robertson, NDP Leader Jack Layton, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper use Twitter to let people know their personal thoughts on recent policies and events.

This can be both a good and a bad thing for these politicians. During the recent address by President Obama to a joint session of the US Congress, Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) made a comment about the seating arrangements. Some people criticized him for being rude and sending these messages during the speech, but the one thing you can say is that it brings you closer to the people who are representing you in government. In the case of celebrities and other public figures, you quickly find out that these are normal people, who have random thoughts that they want to share with the world too.

It’s also interesting to watch trending on Twitter and see what people around the world are actively talking about, in real time. Sites like Summize (which was bought by Twitter itself a while back), and Twitscoop all you to search and see visual trends about what people are talking about. A regular person with a quick hand, a cell phone, and Twitter, was able to snap a picture of the February 25, 2009 crash of a Turkish Airlines plane at the Amsterdam airport. This picture was all over the internet, before CNN and other major news networks were able to break the story. Even this morning, I just learned that there was an unfortunate shooting in Maryville, IL at a church.

Twitter is even changing the ways that companies interact with their customers. Companies like Dell Computers, Zappos Shoes, Virgin America Airlines, and Comcast use Twitter to not only monitor what people are saying and thinking about their company and products, but use Twitter to interact directly with those clients and improve their customer service experience. We do this too at Peer1 and ServerBeach.

Twitter is just one service out there. The interactivity of social networks (everything from Twitter, to Facebook, MySpace, and the myriad of others) is allowing the faster, more direct, and wider dispersal of information than we have ever seen before. The concept isn’t revolutionary, per-ce.. but it’s changing once again how we get and give that information.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. And of course, you can follow me on Twitter here.

Over the couple years that I was involved with the project, lots of things ended up changing. Danga (LiveJournal’s parent company) got bought up by SixApart in January of 2005. 6A was a much larger company, and initially we were all quite happy that more development time and money might be provided to the project. However, this was not the case, and LiveJournal was sold once again to Russian-based SUP (pronounced “soup”).

Now don’t get me wrong — the time with SixApart wasn’t really all that bad. A lot of improvements were made to the service. However there were also some controversial changes (e.g. introduction of site ads). I can’t go into any detail (due to the NDA’s I have with Danga/SixApart), but there were things happening in the background that were out of control of the people who managed LiveJournal day-to-day (e.g. changing company circumstances, directives from upper management, etc..). In any case, the site continued to change under the direction of SUP, most recently with the removal of the Basic/Free account level (leaving only the paid or ad-supported account levels), and now proposed restoration.

Now I didn’t leave because of these reasons. I left because I no longer had interest in devoting time to the project. Now this is partially due to changes in my own life, but I think that deep down part of me was feeling a bit alienated. I lost my passion for what I was doing and had no motivation as a volunteer to keep helping.

The ideals of the original site are all but gone.

The site has the same name, but deep down at it’s core, it’s not the same site. It’s like waking up and realizing that your spouse of some years is a completely different person. Okay, well not quite as dramatic, and less worry about STDs, but you get the picture. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking a swipe at SixApart or SUP — there are some very smart people who have and/or still do work for them. I’ve never operated that large a company and am not qualified in the slightest to comment on their operations, beyond being a user who wonders if his journal, as he knows it, is going to be there tomorrow.

Now this is where an intrepid group of people comes in. A group of people — some former staff, some previous volunteers, all just regular LJ users — dared to really dream of where a site LiveJournal could be if it was completely driven by the community and had less overhead of a corporation. And so, Dreamwidth was born.

Now this is no small undertaking from both a technical and social standpoint. This group not only has to work on getting their new fork of the open source LiveJournal-codebase up to modern spec, but they are also looking to start a hosted community around this software, with more open and transparent community-based management. They are however making great leaps and strides.

It really gives me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside that a community can grow so passionate about what really is their online “home” that they can pull something like this off. And I have every bit of faith that they will. Good on you, Dreamwidth team.

And we’ll see.. maybe I might try and see how far my PHP knowledge translates over to Perl…