I gave a talk recently about blogging (twittering, etc) and how we create online identities for ourselves. The slidecast is above. I wanted to explore some ideas, the main ones being: It is about identity, not technology X; Your identity will be constituted from several different tools/services; Your configuration and emphasis of those tools is part of what makes the identity (as well as what you put in them); An online identity is becoming default for academics now; All this is driven by really easy and diverse ways of sharing; There are numerous benefits to you as an academic. I concluded with two propositions, which you might like to disagree with: 1. Soon, your online identity will be your academic identity, 2. There is an online identity of some form out there for everyone.
While an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren't having conversations. According to this argument, Twitter is no more a conversational platform than Wikipedia is.
While Twitter has been less than forthcoming on how they plan to monetize their service, there is no shortage of ideas from third parties on ways to get paid for spending time with Twitter.