I took some behind-the-scenes heat from progressive friends for tying the Twitter Dome Scandal -- the fight over House rules on web tools -- to the broader and decades long effort by conservatives to paint liberals as anti-free speech cowards. There's a risk, I argued, in jumping on the John Culberson bandwagon, because it only goes to further the meme that congressional Democrats lust after one nation under the Fairness Doctrine, where speech is regulated and unpleasant talk banned. But Republican Policy chair Thad McCotter makes that point far better than I can.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Twitter is just a silly web app. And man, is it down an awful lot! But, I tell ya, it's going to have to try harder than that to drive me away. I just found out from my network that the line at the Apple store on 5th Ave is 200 people deep and the wait at the Soho store five hours long The first tweet was a result to a question I posed; the second was just the right bit of info bubbling up at the right time. Both are bits of news that potentially saves me hours of my life -- if I wasn't such a fool that I'm probably going to go try anyway.

Yeah, I'm going. I'll probably Twitter my progress, if it's not doing its Fail Whale thing... (Photo thx workinpana)

UPDATE: The second tweet concerned the wait at the Apple store in the meatpacking district, not Soho. My bad.

So, in brief, a Republican congressman from Texas by the name of John Culberson is up in arms about a letter on how members of the House of Representatives use the Internet, and I took to the Huffington Post to push back a bit on the conventional wisdom that Democrats in Congress are intent upon cracking down on Twitter, Qik, YouTube, so on and so forth. I'm posting it in full below, and then I'm off to do something, anything, that has nothing to do whatsoever with Twitter:

The Politics of the Twitter Dome Scandal

Those of us obsessed with both politics and technology have a juicy new piece of red meat to sink our teeth into this week. Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas, is leading the charge against a three-week old letter (in pdf) written by Democratic Congressman Mike Capuano of Massachusetts, in which Capuano proposed how members of the House of Representatives be guided in their use of online video. Also in the fight: House Minority Leader John Boehner, who has sounded this alarm over what Capuano, the head of the House Commission on Mailing Standards, has proposed: "I'm writing to alert you to an attack on free speech that is making its way through Congress."

I found that statement from Boehner on Culberson's blog, in a blog post titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" -- which should give you a quick sense of some of the political contours of this debate, but more on that in a minute. Rep. Culberson is probably best known to anyone who doesn't live in the Houston area as the Twittering Congressman. Culberson is an active tweeter, posting to his micro-blogging account his first-hand reporting from the steps of the Capitol and his congressional office. He's also an early adopter of Qik technology, which allows streaming video right from a cell phone. It really is rather amazing to have an elected official offering such unmediated access to what happens in the halls of government.

Culberson responded to the Capuano letter by decrying it as an attempt by anti-free speech Democrats to change House rules to nip his Twittering and Qiking in the bud. Them Dems are trying to shut me up, growled Culberson.

But there's a small problem with Culberson's analysis of the situation. I've read the letter on the proposed rules standing up and sitting down. I read it with my glasses on and my glasses off. Ever which way the conclusion is the same: what the Massachusetts' congressman is proposing (though granted, in the gobbledygook that they teach congressional staffers to write in) is a loosening of existing rules. No where does it suggest prohibiting Twitter. No where does it ban Qik. No where does it, as Culberson is claiming, require that disclaimers be posted every time a congressperson wants to type out a thought on the Interweb. What Culberson is raising a hue and cry about is simply not within the four corners of that document.

Now this being DC (and me being an only semi-reconstructed political hack), I can't help but recall who exactly wrote the rules we're debating in the first place? Let's see. Teddy Kennedy was the first member of Congress to have a website, and that was in 1994 -- the year of the Republican Revolution. Republicans controlled the House for the next decade, covering just about all of the time Congress was coming to terms with the Internet.

A wide swath of political geeks have answered Culberson's call. The Sunlight Foundation, a transparency-minded group that has done amazing work innovating in the open government space, quickly got his back. The Congressman first sounded the alarm two days ago, and Sunlight's Let Congress Tweet campaign is already ramped up and getting a good amount of attention. I can't count the number of times my friends, associates, and allies on Twitter have retweeted the movement's call to action.

But let's for a minute hop back to the blog post that Culberson put up to share Boehner's statement, the one titled "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech."

If that title looks familiar, it might be because "Democrats Seek to Quell Free Speech" is pretty much how Republicans in Congress have described the things that Democrats do for decades now. When the topic at hand is campaign finance, the Republican line is that reformers are anti-free speech. When it comes to the critically important topic of diversity of voices in the American media, which I've written about for HuffPo in the past, the Republican tactic is to (1) raise the ghost of the Fairness Doctrine and then (2) sound the bell over how Democrats are up to their old speech-shackling tricks again. A similar and familiar trope is branding liberals as language police. 'Dems hate free speech' is one of the most well-worn phrases in the Republican repertoire.

Congress is a slow-moving body that lags a few years behind the greater U.S. But they're catching up. Back when I left the Hill in 2005, getting a member to post on Daily Kos required a day's worth of meetings. Now, in Nancy Pelosi, we have a speaker with a blog that regularly integrates YouTube videos, all manned by a team of online specialists. She's been interviewed by Big Think. She's working with the Digg-ish Ask the Speaker to put together the crowd-sourced questions that she'll be asked at next weeks Netroots Nation (nee Yearly Kos). All perhaps an indication that House Democratic leadership isn't cowering in a corner somewhere in fear of our digital future?

Still, "slow-moving" is the nature of the beast. Congress isn't a start-up. It's meant to mostly keep the status-quo going, with slow and methodical adjustments that keep the country moving in the right direction. Everyone agrees that when it comes to the Internet, the House has work to do. And that's what Capuano and others have been attempting to do, in Congress's own plodding way.

I had some thoughts about Twitter's appeal yesterday that are entirely rough but that still might be worth sharing. The gist is this: what Twitter reminds me of is nothing so much as the constant stream of chatter that my high school friends and I kept up during the course of a day -- either in person, via note, over the telephone, or through word of mouth from friend to friend to friend. My high school friends (and by that I mean not only my close circle of six or some "best friends" but our extended network that included other close circles of friends) were extremely clever, bright, and funny, which conspired to make that period extraordinarily enjoyable. And through that constant contact, I felt alive, connected, loved, and tied in to something bigger than myself.

Now, back at that age of 17 or 18 it seemed to me that one of the sad things about getting older was that people of a certain age didn't seem to keep up those sorts of close associations. I looked to me that once you got married or otherwise partnered up you most likely lost that sort of free-wheeling friendships that made my life so rich. Become a thirty-something, and it was you, your spouse, a kid or two, and that one single friend that came over for dinner on occasion. I know there are probably troves of sociological research on how our social connections shift over different life stages, but, anecdotally, I'm not sure I was that far off.

Let me get to the point: it seems to me that some of the appeal of Twitter is that it can bring you back (or, if that wasn't your experience, introduce to you for a first time) to a time of constant chatter with a circle of friends and friends of friends in a way that's hugely fun, reaffirming, and relaxing. There's something kid like about gossiping and sharing and living life as a member of a social group or groups, rather than as a single atom bumping its way through the universe. In that way, Twitter reminds me a lot of high school: constant contact that makes me feel part of something bigger than myself and is a whole lot of fun too.

I'm not all that surprised that the New York Times has decided that the hatred of my home neighborhood of Park Slope has reached the level of "trend" deserving of a Sunday style-section story. After all, New York City seems to be locked in a battle over its soul, and Park Slope is the most high-profile habitat of the sort of self-obsessed urban dweller that every New Yorker loves to demean and is terrified of becoming. And seriously, the number of strollers on Slope sidewalks on any given weekend can indeed be downright maddening. What I do find surprising is that in that piece the Times used "Twittering" as a capitalized adjective with no explanation:

By the same token, when we talk about "people who hate Park Slope," we are talking in large part about a certain stratum of the chattering, Twittering class. "This whole thing sounds like white people being annoyed by and jealous of other white people, which I find kind of funny," said James Bernard, a union organizer and a member of the local Community Board 6.

I can't imagine that Twitter has reached the level of shared cultural trope. How many people do you think read that and thought "what the huh?"

Whether Twitter someday takes its place in the stable of modern ways we interact with one another or eventually fades away like some old ruins, as far as I can tell it is a nearly completely novel model for communicating. "How exactly?" is a fine question. As I've begun collecting string on Twitter and spending an unhealthy amount of time Twittering and reading tweets myself, I've hit upon a few initial questions that are a starting point for thinking about how, at least, some small segment of the population is chatting today. Here are my top five four:

1) On Twitter, Who is the Audience? And Is It Different from the People You're Talking To?
This is the big one in my mind right now. A defining part of the Twitter experience is that you don't really know who your audience is. With blogging, for example, you might only have the vaguest sense of who's reading what you write, unless they chose to comment. But when it comes to Twitter, it's much more complicated than that. There are the people you follow and who follow you, the people who follow you and to whom you can publicly @ reply or privately direct message (and whose responses you can choose to see or not), the people reading the public timeline, and the people who might read your tweets through a badge on your blog. There are a handful of different kinds of audiences, some of which you're having a dialogue with and some of which are just watching you. Twitter fosters so many different kinds of interaction that even Evan Williams, one of the minds behind Twitter, is at pains to lay them out.

2) How Does Twitter Scale?
Even messages just 140 characters long can become an avalanche of information as your list of "followed" Twitters grows. Does Twitter need to grow beyond small networks of contacts to eventually support all the servers it runs on? In order for that to happen, there might need to be a way to sort your friends in different categories, groups, or tiers. If that happens, does it fundamentally change the Twitter model, for better or for worse?

3) What Sort of Relationships are We Building?
It's easy to joke about the shallowness of interpersonal relationships that are maintained by 140 character snippets, but I know more about some of my Twitter friends than I do with a lot of people I only know offline or who otherwise aren't on Twitter. I did a quick back of the envelope analysis of who I'm following. Of the 70 or so people, I categorized 25 under "Know a Lot," 20 under "Know a Little," and about 15 as "Fans Of." (The rest are organizations, publications, companies, etc.) What does it mean that I'm devoting equal levels of attention to people I consider friends as I am to people who don't know me from Eve?

4) What Kind of Information are We Sharing? And Who's Good at Sharing It?
One of the most interesting aspects to keep an eye on is how the way in which Twitterers fill that little text box is evolving. The original stated question that Twitter was supposed to answer was "What are you doing?" I find that the people I follow are using that question as only the loosest guiding principle, developing ideas about what's appropriate behavior as we go along and using those 140 characters to share ideas, pass along links, respond in real time to news events, and more. The open-ended questions I find particularly fascinating (but don't know how to begin to answer) is are there types of people better at sharing the info that Twitter is good at distributing?

Okay, so those are the five four most pressing questions I have about Twitter as a communications model. What are yours?

(Note: This post was edited after it came to my attention that I had only listed, in fact, four questions. One got dropped along the way. Oops.)

Back when the first rounds of web applications took off in the late '90s and early '00s, I was either in grad school or working in the non-profit/political world. I wasn't following the details of how early online tools like Blogger grew in popularity, so I'm unsure if the tremendous number of third-party tools and applications that are developing around Twitter is normal. But almost every day these days I seem to come across a new way that developers are extending the micropublishing service, either refining the core product or pushing it to do new things. I don't know if that has happened to the same extent with other apps in the past, but it is a demonstration of how at Twitter has some quite long coattails.

Twitter provides an API that opens up their app to some level of granularity. For example, after some initial tweaking, outside developers now have access to direct messaging (accessed by prepending "d [username]" to a tweet). That move created all sorts of ways for inviting Twitter users to engage with people who want to provide them with information or other services. The openness of the Twitter API have been a giant "welcome" banner for anyone wanting to make use of their platform. And made use of it, folks have -- Twitter's Biz Stone has said that the Twitter API gets at least *10 times* the traffic of Twitter.com.

Maybe the key is that Twitter is so simple: just 140 text characters zapped to a centralized server and relayed to whomever users want to receive them. They don't bring so much to the party that no one else thinks they need to bring a thing. The innovation that has been built out of it has been neat -- and instructive -- to watch.

Input Tools. When it comes to the fairly straightforward task of managing input into Twitter, any number of third-party gizmos have popped up. Desktop-based tools like Twitterrific, Twhirl, and Snitter are all engineered to the same end -- conveying your short post to the Twitter service. Where these applications are different is the options that users have to customize the fine details on how they post. Each has a unique look, layout, and feel.

Output Managers. More interesting than input tools are those that help managing Twitter's sometimes overwhelming output. TweetScan, for example, allows you to search Twitter streams and set up something similar to Google Alerts, where you get an email notification when your keywords are mentioned. Quotably sprouted up to correct what seems to be a flaw in Twitter -- responses to posts routinely get lost in the stream of messages, by organizing conversations in threads like how blogging tools like Scoop were built to accomplish. As Twitter doesn't (yet) provide users with traffic stats on their posts, Tweetburner boosts the usefulness of the service by creating custom URLs that can be embedded in tweets and then tracked. And then there's something like TweetPeek, which bundles together feeds to make the service more group friendly.

Extensions. A bevy of third-party tools exist to not just help better manage Twitter, but to grow it into something more than it is right out of the box. Twitsig, for example, takes your Tweet stream and converts it into images that can be used as signature files in forums and email. Foamee is both a protocol for indicating that you owe someone a beer or coffee and a tool for tracking who owes who drinks. But most intriguing to me is something like Qwitter, a program developed by Tobacco Free Florida. Tweet the number of cigarettes you've had in a day to the Qwitter Twitter account, and the service will keep a progress chart of how often you're lighting up. Or you can tweet in a note on your quitting campaign -- "realized tonight that it's hard to not smoke while grilling" -- and Qwitter will compile your thoughts into a journal for future reference. As a public advocacy and policy use of Twitter, that's a useful model to watch.

The powers-that-be at Twitter made the decision to create a robust API, a choice that is providing the oxygen for a thousand flowers to bloom in software development land. And it's not only plug-ins that are being developed; some of these new tools are standing in a partnership relationship to Twitter. The potential is there for many more symbiotic apps to be created, standing separate but dependent -- kinda like the many bail bondsmen who set up shop outside jails. Now the question is whether there is a business model that supports keeping the party going...

There's a real trend these days towards tying some of the advantages of the modern "web," such as it is, to actual physical spots on the planet. You heard it here first. (Hey, it was news to me when I thought of it this morning.) I started digging yesterday for something that would connect Twitter, currently my worst online addiction, to place. Twitter creates such a cloud of really touching information about people you know and want to know. But as things stand, there's no easy way to connect that data to my geographical location on the planet. That a good friend of mine is having coffee somewhere on 7th Avenue here in Park Slope is mixed in with the news that an acquaintance in Nairobi is contemplating the new power-sharing arrangement there.

I haven't managed to dig up any sort of app or tool that really ties Twitter to geography in a way that makes all that information useful to me as I go about my day. But I expect something like that is on more than one developer's drawing board, and will see it very soon.

But even in the absence of a useful geo-Twitter app, we do see on the horizon an embracing of geography as useful and meaningful. Outside.in is an online aggregator that pulls blogs in blog posts that have some sort of location information embedded or tagged. And then there's Fire Eagle. This new tool from Yahoo is still in the invite-only stage, but what it does is to collect an update on my location status from me either via the web, SMS, or third-party applications (in much the same ways that Twitter can be pinged.) Outside.in is launching a new feature called On My Radar that uses Fire Eagle to create a stream of information connected, they say, down to the very block you're standing on at the moment. And both Outside.in and Yahoo are partners in the new OpenSocial Foundation that launched yesterday, laying a foundation for a lot more of these place-tied web projects.

Of course, while I was never much into Dodgeball, that was an early attempt to tie digital info to geography. I'm not sure why it never took off. But this next round of tools is probably more welcomed today with people more accustomed -- because of Twitter, Facebook status lines, and the like -- to informing the web what they're up to on a regular basis. (Photo thx practicalowl.)

UPDATE: Ah, just stumbled upon Fireball: Twitter + Fire Eagle = Fireball. Exactly. Off to play with it...

UPDATE DOS: Carlo Scannella writes to say that Outside.in's Steven Johnson was talking up Twitter integration at a session at Parsons last week...

In March 2007, a Twitter engineer told an interviewer that he was having difficulty getting [Ruby on] Rails to handle his company's massive spike in traffic. [Rails creator David] Hansson responded by sending a heated email to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, and chastising the company on his blog for playing the "blame game" instead of solving its scaling problems itself.