Twitter is bringing back the good old days

In the olden days of the internet, it was kind of socially acceptable to email someone just because you saw their posting somewhere and had something to say. There weren't that many people on the internet, so the fact that you were both on the internet was very nearly a suitable pretense for initiating contact. As Miss Manners puts it, the (virtual) roof was an introduction.

Then, of course, the internet got bigger and that became unworkable. Now you have to sort of establish a relationship in some online community before you can start talking to someone one-on-one.

But I think Twitter is bringing back this "roof is an introduction" idea. You can totally tweet at someone just on the basis that they're on Twitter. The low-commitment aspects of Twitter, the very things people say makes it rude - the fact that it's only 140 characters, the fact that Twitter etiquette makes following and replying purely optional - are what makes this possible. If everyone emailed everyone on a whim with no basis for introduction, we'd quickly be overwhelmed. But 140-character messages that it's acceptable to ignore make it once again manageable.

For example, Wil Wheaton recently tweeted a question at the Twitter spam team. I was interested in this question too, so I replied asking him to retweet their answer if they send him one. That's totally allowed and not particularly presumptuous. Wil didn't reply to me, which is also totally allowed and not the least bit rude. Wil Wheaton also happens to be my first adolescent celebrity crush. But because we're working within a 140 character limit, because there's no requirement to introduce oneself (i.e. no "Um, hi, sorry to bother you, but I loved you in Star Trek and I read your blog all the time...") there was no room for fangirl awkwardness. It's simply sharing information with another internet user, like back in 1994.