Ayende recently posted his feelings about how Twitter can be misused from time to time.

You cannot have a meaningful discussion in Twitter or IM, the conventions and limitations of the platform. Email is a better medium to expression complex concepts, but voice or video are far better methods of communication.

I'm inclined to agree, though some people will indeed be able to have discussion with some meaning, its hard to have a discussion about a complicated set of ideas.

I'm fine with a discussion between two people going forever and a day on Twitter. I'm not having a go at anybody who does. As Chuck says: let the tweets flow. It's just that the discussion is bound to be fairly light and easy.

I do think there are a few circumstances where Twitter's weaknesses as a communication medium/archive are exposed.

Firstly, if things are busy in your twitterhood, spanning tweets may have the opposite effect that your looking for; if other people tweet in between your tweets, it will dilute your message.

Secondly when you need to use around 5+ consecutive tweets to get your point across, it becomes clear that you simply need more characters per message. Spanning across multiple tweets to get an idea across is fighting against the tool.

Should Twitter increase the char count? I feel the higher the char count goes, the less Twitter looks like a microblog engine and the more it looks like usenet anarchy. I happen to like SMS updates too so I feel it would break out of the SMS boundary.

Lastly, for conversations that occurred while I wasn't obsessively staring at Witty, its kludgy to find the beginning of the discussion and then skip other peoples tweets that occurred in between. To be fair, that's not the fault of Twitter, and hashtags certainly make it easier to listen in to particular topics (much like IRC Channels) but most clients behave the same way.

These few problems alone make Twitter a deal breaker *for me* when it comes to heady topics. Emails, blogs, and wiki's are ways in which I like to escalate such things. But if you like to contemplate quantum computing in 140 char chunks, more power to you.

Incidentally, this was around 2200 characters or if you prefer, 16 consecutive tweets.

Jeremy Miller's post on software teams berates the use of strict enforcement mechanisms of development processes, in favor of a more nurturing environment of self awareness and coaching. He writes:

Quality gates are a very common tool in software development processes to enforce quality by making the people on the project demonstrate some sort of compliance to a standard or process before the project is allowed to proceed.  I'm not sure that I'd say that quality gates are necessarily a bad thing at all, but by themselves, quality gates are absolutely worthless in promoting software quality.

I wholeheartedly agree. Personally, I like to see the odd quality gate, simply so that people are periodically reminded that quality is an issue. However the overuse of gates will simply lead to process apathy.  One of the reasons why I feel such checks are usually pointless, is because they check for the symptoms of good behaviour, rather than rewarding actual good behaviour itself. Besides, we all know that where there are systems of forced quality assurance, there are people who will deliberately pay lip service to prove to themselves that they can beat the system.

Teamwork is about trust and communication, and no amount of Office Nazi-like behaviour is going to produce more of either qualities. Participating in a team must be about nurturing these qualities. By imposing hoops to jump through, you prove you don't trust your fellow team members. By dictating progress rather than collaborating on it, you are denying your team the ability to communicate effectively with you. 

If you don't trust your team members, or you aren't interested in their opinions, why are you working with them?

Inspired by this recent post about types of programmers, I found myself asking this question:

If you could have databases of information uploaded to your brain, which three would you pick?

I think I'd like to have Google Maps, MSDN and Wikipedia.