Here is a good example of how an alternative User Interface can change the context of which an application is being used.
Twitter initially started as a micro blogging service. In fact this is what their official description says:
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”
But then nice little applications such as TwitterFox or Twhirl have turned twitter into a global chat program, or shall I say a “Cloud Communication” tool where users passively or actively broadcast short snips of information to other clouds of users. These clouds overlap tightly and therefore create an organic gossip network of people where news and information is distributed in a fluid and organic fashion.
TwitterFox and Twhirl are nothing but different User Interfaces on the same back-end that the standard Twitter is utilizing, however the new style of user interaction, has caused twitter to evolve form a micro-blogging service to a completely new species.
[tags]twitter, twitterdox, twhirl, socialmedia, chat network, organic[/tags]