I have been playing with Twitter for about a week now and I really like it. It’s very easy to use, is dead simple to describe, and is strangely addictive. The only problem I have found with the service is that I have no way of finding out who else I know on the service. I saw that they have the Plaxo address book importer widget but that didn’t solve my core problem of figuring out who I know who might be on the service. I am all for helping people build out new services, but it would be nice to be able to get some immediate value from the service by finding folks who are already on it. Having some way to discover people aside from browsing the public timelines would be helpful – school affiliation, geographic home, or some other way. That being said, it’s kinda fun to just post updates and they have made the bar sufficiently low that frequent posting is easy and quick.
I have also been playing with Dodgeball as well (disclosure: it’s a Google product) and it seems to have more features but is actually much harder to use at this point. It also appears to be much more popular in New York than where I live, so maybe that says something about user preferences. Dodgeball appears to have more people based on the look and feel of the website, but it’s hard to know whether that is in fact the case.