As Twitter picks up steam, Twitter will have to convince mainstream audiences of the purpose and utility of Twitter. Skeptics of Twitter often ask, “Why would I want to know what other people are doing, and why would I want to tell other people what I’m doing?” The typical response from Twitter users is to “Just try it,” or “The first rule of Twitter is to just tweet.” This is somewhat of an unfair reason to try to convince someone, since I myself was reluctant to sign up for Twitter for over a year. Ultimately, I tried the service with an open mind (”just tweet”), and have discovered Twitter to be a useful tool.

To attempt to achieve some level of reasoning for the usefulness of Twitter, we can refer to a lucid article from the New York Times Magazine last September, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” in which Clive Thompson explains the appeal of microblogging tools like Twitter and Facebook status updates as enabling an “ambient awareness” of our circles of friendship.

In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

One of the criticisms of the idea of ambient awareness is that you don’t want to know what someone is doing, all the time. I agree. We should all maintain a certain level of privacy in our lives, else we’d go insane. To me, the value of Twitter comes not from the constant awareness of what people are doing, but from what they are thinking about certain issues. This goes back to the discussion earlier about the purpose of social networks. I see Twitter as enabling an ambient awareness among thousands of minds.

Therefore, I think Twitter is misleading when it asks, “What are you doing?” If you answer this question too literally, you will not be maximizing the value you get from Twitter. No one wants to know that you’re going to sleep at 3 AM, except for maybe your mother, who wants you to be healthy. Of course, there will be cases when you will tweet what you are doing, but these cases will still be useful because they facilitate discussion. For example, I could tweet that I am at the Red Mango at St. Mark’s, and that I think it is superior to the Pinkberry that is literally across the street. Pinkberry loyalists would cross the street and force-feed me Pinkberry. Okay, maybe it’s not that dramatic, but you get the point that a tweet motivates action and discussion. I think Facebook phrases the question better by asking, “What’s on your mind?”

Microblogging platforms break down traditional verticals of social circles and thought circles, and social networking and microblogging enable connections with those in your outer circles of relationships. We will still maintain our connections with our close circle of friends at the same level. We see them every day, and in most cases Twitter will not change that. What Twitter enables is communication and discussion among people who might never meet otherwise.