> Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

This is grandiose sounding rubbish.

The moment when I experienced real-time global conversation was when I compiled an IRC client on a Unix box in maybe 1992 or 1993, joined some channel, and it turned out the person chatting with me there was in Australia.

In between that and Twitter (as well as before), there were instant messengers and public chatrooms and what have you. Services like AOL and CompuServe.