it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.

Stowe Boyd’s remarks were triggered by an earlier report that Twitter staff are mostly following their close colleagues and hence not in touch with the broader developer and user communities:

Stowe Boyd:

“The comment that Biz and other staffers follow a relatively small number of people — and not the leading external developers working on Twitter applications — because they don’t want to miss things seems completely backwards. Isn’t it obvious that you will miss what these other folks are saying if you don’t follow them? Unless the presumption is that someone will direct important things to your attention, explicitly, with an @ or d. Like email.

My take is that Ev and the Twitter staff are not using Twitter the way that I do, and the way that many other dedicated users do. I will call their style of use the Right Hand Path: its a tool to communicate with a small collection of co-workers, real-world and business contacts. The Left Hand Path, on the other hand, experiences Twitter as a large, sprawling, and multidimensional social system, predicated on the open, asymmetric follower model and shaping a culture growing within it.

If they weren’t so central to the future of Twitter-as-a-tool I would say the Twitter guys (and The Right Hand Pathlings as a whole) don’t get Twitter.

Of course, the cultural relativism of our time will lean to agree with Ev, that there are a million different ways to use Twitter, and none of them is right. I agree in the small — meaning that no one should be compelled to use Twitter in a way that doesn’t make sense to them — but I disagree profoundly in the large, simply because I perceive that certain ways of using Twitter provide benefits that are difficult or maybe even impossible to gain elsewhere. This is partly due to functionality, but increasingly it is due to the community that has developed on the Twitter bedrock, and the culture emerging there.

And therein lies the root of a serious question, one significantly more problematic than the question of product direction that Marshall raises, although his concern overlaps with mine: as Twitter has become the bedrock underlying a growing and dynamic neighborhood of the web, how will it be governed?

From one point of view, Twitter is an application owned and operated by Ev and his colleagues, and our use of the app is controlled by the terms of the service agreement we all checked ‘OK’ to. From this point of view, they are free to do whatever they want, and we have the freedom to take a hike if we don’t like it. Or gripe, or write a petition. But otherwise we have little recourse if in fact Twitter Inc. decides to screw up replies (the #fixreplies mess has *not* been resolved yet, by the way), or makes other changes to functionality that degrades our experience.

It may seem that we have no grounds for any sort of complaint. After all, it can be argued that we aren’t paying anything, just freeloading on their largess, and they have borne all the costs.

On the other hand, their astronomical valuations — what they are using to pull in hefty amounts of paid-in capital from investors — is directly related to our participation. Without us using Twitter, by the millions, Twitter would just be a bunch of software cogs in a cardboard box. It is our animation that makes Twitter worth a billion dollars, not just the cleverness of the developers and the openess of their APIs.

To a great extent, Twitter is ours, like the air we breathe.

So, how will Twitter be governed? As a tool owned by a company that is owned by the inventors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalienable rights?

The entertainment business tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are artifacts produced by our culture, which we share with the artists, and the controls that the entertainment business thought they had — copyright and DRM — have failed with the digital and web revolution.

So, here we have the same revolution, come home again. Twitter’s world — its conventions, meaning and use — is our artifact: we have built it, 140 characters at a time, just as the Twitter developers have been building the platform underneath our feet. But it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.”