I've been meaning to write another post sharing and reflecting on how I use Twitter, yet this keeps changing, as the service itself evolves at an incredible pace. Certainly Twitter is experiencing exponential growth as the users of the service expand beyond the usual early adopter crowd to a larger and more diverse general population.

However the other influence on this ever changing ecosystem are the emergence of all sorts of applications and services that allow for much greater optimization and customization. It is now way easier to tune into various customized signals amidst the noise.

For a while I was describing Twitter to people as "cloud chat" in that it was similar to a chat room, but without the walls, so potentially anyone could see what you were saying. A colleague of mine Jason Dojc in a recent tweet used a similar description: "Twitter let's you instant message the public."

Yet this only speaks to one side of both the appeal and power derived from this emerging platform. Marshall McLuhan often mocked people by saying the medium is the message, but really what he meant was to pay attention to the form rather than content.

So when the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, referred to Twitter as a poor man's email system, really he was fooled by the content of Twitter rather than the medium. As a medium, Twitter is more a search engine than a chat room, and it's not the incessant tweeting that people should be focusing on, but rather the constellation of applications that are giving shape to this growing cloud.

It occurred to me therefore that what Twitter is starting to become is a dynamic and real time open source search engine.

While a lot of computer purists only think of open source software, journalists quickly realize that via twitter when you search you don't find information, you find a source of information, multiple sources in fact, all of them out in the open.

It's this social dynamic that makes twitter a phenomena and adds to the excitement and peer pressure that fuels its continued growth. Yet I cannot stress enough that it's the medium (search), and not necessarily the content (chatting with friends) that really sets it apart.

This is evident when using Twitter's search site, hashtags, or search panels in the TweetDeck application. While on the one hand I follow my friends, I also maintain real-time searches on subjects that interest me and the clients I work for.

Along these lines my thinking has been influenced by Michael Lewkowitz, someone I follow on Twitter who has spent a lot of time meditating on the nature of this new medium and the concept of a social venture commons. What I enjoy about his approach is that it unites both the culture and the technology to understand what potential can be derived from pushing the medium even further. He recently shared an article from bitcurrent.com called Twitter's not a site but a protocol which depicts even greater potential growth for this service.

The problem however, with regard to growing pains, will be whether Twitter is able to resolve one of the fundamental problems with social media, which is the perpetual high school culture. While that is a subject I intend to expand upon another day, I would like to briefly address how it relates to Twitter.

We all leave or graduate from high school for a reason. While much good comes from that phase of our lives, it also holds a lot of bad things, which many of us deliberately leave behind. Cliques, popularity contests, snobs, stereotypes, peer pressure, and illegitimate authorities are an unfortunately mainstay of social media culture at the moment, and Twitter may face the same problems as Facebook if unable transcend this internet adolescence.

Hierarchy for example is a real problem in social media, not because it's there, but rather because it is often invisible and unaccountable. There's a whole world of metrics that are accessible only to owners, publishers, and advertisers who can identify the degrees of influence that we all have.

For example, ever notice that the grid of people you follow on your Twitter profile has a logic to it's order? There is a twitter hierarchy, determined by who follows you, and who follows them. It's a relative hierarchy, as influence naturally is, and many sites try to emulate this invisible ranking with their own Twitter grades and rankings.

Personally I will only follow people on twitter who are willing to reciprocate and follow me back in return. When people add me I almost always add them in return, unless they are so obviously a spammer (of which there seems to be quite a few lately).

Similarly when I start following a person, if they don't start following me back within an arbitrarily short time frame, I will subsequently unfollow them.

The worst thing you can do on Twitter is follow no one. This to me is like wearing a sign on your head that either says you're super arrogant, or super ignorant. There's really no excuse to not reciprocate on Twitter. The tools exist to allow you to follow as many as you like and still adjust the signal to your liking.

I also dislike people who are followed by hundreds if not thousands yet only follow a handful or a couple of dozen in return. My friend Rachel who runs Venison Arts sums it up nicely:

"How do people tolerate these vanity Twitterers? You know the ones. The ones who only follow people who can augment their fame or career."

All it shows is that you don't understand how to use the system. This type of transparent elitism comes off to others as obnoxious. In a later tweet Rachel is once again spot on:

"There's something so snobbish, so deeply petty about the quasi-known who cherry pick those they follow, like clique fashion accessories."

Often those in the centre of this culture cannot see how those on the periphery or those new to the party will see things.

For example, the slogan at the top of the Twitter web interface that asks "What are you doing?" is entirely misleading. Perhaps it should say something along the lines of "What do you have to say that is of interest to your friends and the web at large?".

How do we bring reflection and consideration to social media? At my most optimistic points I see Twitter as helping us get to that discussion, to continue that process.

I do however wish there was a type of "exit interview" where in order to unfollow someone you have to enter why it is you want to unfollow them. I honestly wish the people I have unfollowed knew why I did it. At this point there's no polite way for me to tell them, so I just unfollow. When people unfollow me I'd love to know why.

Listening to Laurie Anderson muse about Superman, while also reflecting on the radio columns I did this morning that speculated on the future of our relationship with artificial intelligence, I return to viewing Twitter as an open source search engine.

Twitter is the medium, and we are the content. I am your white rabbit and you can follow me down the hole and through the looking glass as we search for meaning in this emerging society.