My friend Florian Seroussi, guest blogging on Pat Phelan’s blog, asks, “Is Twitter gone mad?”. Florian, no slacker on Twitter, takes on the reigning “Twitter Kings of Follow” (my term, not Florian’s) — Robert Scoble, Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, and Barrack Obama*.

Florian makes a stunningly important observation: There are people who use Twitter in “Broadcasting Mode” and people who use it in “Conversational Mode.” He prefers the latter. So do I.

Whether we are disturbed by the latest Twitter trends — the Twitter spam argument, the tendency toward elitism, the followers/following dynamic, the eBay sale of a Twitter account — depends on how we use Twitter, and whether we see it as a broadcasting medium or a conversational medium.

It’s ironic that many of Twitter’s most (statistically) popular users (see above), are people who first made their name preaching the value of conversation, but upon reaching the limits of what can be achieved conversationally, have fallen back to broadcasting, an old media paradigm.

And while it’s easy to say that something is unethical, against the rules, or contrary to the “purpose” of Twitter, what is the purpose of Twitter, really? A big part of its appeal is that despite its simple interface (or perhaps because of it) you can make Twitter into whatever you want. Twitter possesses a unique metaphor, and we’ve only begun to see all of the  ways it can be used and abused. Twitter can be:

• A microblog: A place where you express the same things you would on a blog, 140 characters at a time, no images, no videos
• A managed “smart feed,” or annotated link blog: Links to interesting blog posts, news, images and videos, with comments, managed by trusted people who know their particular industry
• Global IM: A way to “chat” with millions of people
• A social network
• A conversational medium, that is a hybrid of one or more of the above
• A tool with which companies can listen to and respond to consumer experience and preference
• A tool to reach millions of people inexpensively with marketing and advertising messages

There are probably many more ways to describe Twitter, but I offer these to illustrate that your perception of what is right and wrong on Twitter depends on what you think it is. Is it a social network? Then you will probably agree there is spam on Twitter and that it is a problem. Are you there to converse with a select group of friends? Then you will think that having 10,000 followers makes no sense; but it does if you’re using Twitter for purely commercial purposes.

What we’re seeing is the beginning of the death of Twitter as the cool place to hang out. It happens to every social network (call it what you will) when the number of participants reaches a certain level, and the network becomes attractive as an advertising medium. Twitter has reached this milestone. The bloom came off of Facebook when the Beacon fiasco occurred, and Twitter, as a place for conversation, is starting to unravel at the edges.

* Obama at least returns the favor whereas the last time I checked, Hillary Clinton does not. John McCain does not appear to have an official presence on Twitter. Another topic for another post.

Tags: Florian Seroussi, Pat Phelan, Robert Scoble, Jason Calcanis, Guy Kawasaki, Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Twitter