Twitter looks to be settling in for the long haul

This is a great quote from this NYT article:

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

Around a year ago Twitter really started heating up for a solid year of hype and headlines, a make-or-break condition for most emerging technology. And now that it’s 2010? Twitter still looks strong. Still no actual business model to speak of, and no real money aside from venture funds, but the service itself is rolling along very nicely and has found niches all over the cultural and political map.

Here’s another informative excerpt from the link:

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.