The communicative potential of Twitter

I'm currently investigating, by means of current theories of communication, how to locate Twitter between other forms of social and mass communication. There're some specifics which evolve Twitter (or in general Microblogging, for that matter) into an interesting and unusual new breed of interpersonal and mass communication at once. Microblogging hasn't reached a tipping point yet. It's still mostly an early adopters technology, but fairly recent Nielsen Media numbers (1) suggest that it's growing rapidly. I'd guess that the ongoing releases of new twitter-based software tools (i.e. Twitterrank) in line with the steep growth of the community will soon burst in an online phenomenon not unlike blogging, but bigger. Since I plan to build on these thoughts, I decided to present parts of my argumentation here, in order to force myself to critically and elaborately write all these things down which just exist in my head right now. Thus in my next post, I'll try to explain why I think that microblogging has more potential than blogging.

(1) Nielsen Media Alert: Fastest Growing Social Networks for September 2008.