Well–last night I stumbled onto the last third of a chat taking place via Twitter. This is a relatively new phenomenon. Tweetgrid, a third-party service that makes Twitterchatting much easier, is only a couple months old.

I must say I still don’t fully understand the advantage of chatting through Twitter using hashtags. I posted 8 updates in under an hour and would have posted many more, but I felt terrible about spamming the rest of my friendslist. (Anyone invented filters for Twitter? That’s a plugin I’d install ASAP.) Some of the participants in the chat were firing off a new tweet every 15 seconds or so…and the chat lasted 3+ hours.

There has to be a better way. Can’t we all just go back to IRC? I would argue that the learning curve isn’t that much steeper, and it would prevent perfectly intelligent people from using SMS-speak. (Perfectly intelligent people forced to use SMS-speak is a tragedy.)

But with that out of the way, will I participate in #journchat again next week? (Every Monday, 7-10pm CST, bringing journalists and PR people together to, you know, save media.) It depends. If I’m around, I’ll probably join in for a few minutes, but the sheer volume of tweets last night made my head spin, even using Tweetgrid (highly recommended, btw). And again, the worry that I was alienating people who didn’t care about journalism trumped my ideological impulse to think that my public replies were drawing new people into the conversation.

What do you think? Is chatting on twitter like this a good use of the tool?