Tom, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Hope I am doing Babble justice!

Not sure how common this is, but I have 2 twitter ID’s where my private one functions as a chat room between a small group of friends. It is a little awkward to navigate between my two “rooms” but it was jumping between these two IDs that got me thinking about the persistent conversation aspect of Twitter.

I think the most significant difference between Babble and Twitter is what you call the boundedness of the groups: Babble is a traditional online community in that if you are in my group, everybody else in my group is also in yours, and vice versa… this gives rise to powerful social effects that arise from mutual awareness. (That’s not saying it’s good or bad — the fact that my Twitter followers don’t entirely overlap yours also gives rise to powerful social effects such as propagation of communications across group boundaries).

The cultural norms are not so different, at least in that in Babble people, as in Twitter, people produced lots of social talk and brief upates. In Babble, the default “room” was called the Commons, and it functioned sort of like Twitter — other rooms were devoted to focused work topics, and still others rooms — a genre that developed in a number of Babbles and was called either “offices” or “personal places” functioned a little like blogs.

I’d certainly love to see some social visualization capacity for Twitter…