as for the John Smith thing, if they WANTED to, and it would be difficult:
Check the post IP… If the IP and Names match up, then also put the other email and webaddress with it.. so unless 2 john smiths post from the same computer… you should be fine. But that is taking my example too far

My only point is that although this is a new direction twitterers are taking, twitter has already taken strides to make conversations easier… but developing a whole new (or even making major edits to the) backend (which would be required because this would be changing some basic rules twitter lives by) is time consuming and changes the main path twitter was going down.

:) Maybe you should make a twitter clone for communication.

But you do have a good point about the dofollow thing. I really don’t get that much spam around here, and hardly anything ever gets past the combined powers of the CAPTCHA, Akismet and Bad Behavior. So I might actually remove the nofollow from comment links to give the commenters some Google juice.

As for the Twitter thing - I agree. It was not designed for this purpose. But, it is being used this way so why not adapt it?

Also, I believe blogs are perfectly fine communication platforms - this is why I use email notifications and various other plugins to facilitate discussion and make it easier to read and follow.

Just informing people I did in fact reply.

That would be like me saying that my post counts are off in your database because sometimes I use http://www.geeksparadox.com and other times i use http://www.travismccrea.com just as sometimes I use teamcoltra@geeksparadox.com instead of teamcoltra@gmail.com and it really just depends on what computer i am on and what the auto fill is… however the system SHOULD recognize that it is all by Travis McCrea.

OOOR Why I don’t get a dofollow on my link?
I mean I post here a lot (maybe less then others, but i have been a solid reader for over a year) any blog commenter should get a dofollow link. I do that on http://www.highschoolers4huck.com to encourage posting. Along with a link to their latest post in their blog.

This sounds harsh, and I mean it with a light heart. I guess my main point is: I don’t think twitter was designed to have threaded conversations just like wordpress isn’t designed to give the commenter of your blog (inherently) a part of your pagerank, or give them much coverage at all because its supposed to be about the blogger.

> attack loosing
     Attack with what?
> spellcheck
     Loosing is immune to spellcheck
> replace loosing
     Replace with what?
> losing
     You replace loosing with losing.
     Your post is no longer loose.
     You gain +100 Exp.
     You gained a level!
     You are now level 3 blogger.
     Your writing skill increases by +1.
> go north
     You can't go North from here

There!

-1 to Writing skill.