Does Twitter need a categorizing system?

Last week there was one of those "for what the hell should I use Twitter?" discussions going on a mailinglist. One guy proposed that Twitter is due to its broad scope of messages and topics not interesting enough for him. So does Twitter need a categorizing system?

I instantly answered this question from my point of view on Twitter with “No, please never do that!”. My background in messaging and chat systems is IRC. There you have so called channels (something like a discussion room) you can join and which normally deals with some more or less specific topic. So I know systems categorizing messages on different topics. And thats why I like Twitter: I can read stuff from people from very different cutural or business background. I’m a complete dumb ass in photography but I follow professional photographer doing architectural shootings. I like his photos. I’m also following one of the sneaker girls although I’m not very much into sneakers (OK, into shoes, but not esp. sneakers . I’m just interested in in many kinds of stuff and I don’t want the system limiting me in embracing all those interesting topics.

Some time ago I read David Wineberger’s brilliant book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder or the german translation Das Ende der Schublade: Die Macht der neuen digitalen Unordnung. Now I see a practical example for his thesis that future systems will allow you to grab, gather and sort things just as you like them avoiding prebuilt categories.

Sometimes the categorizing system is overstrained (how many categories and subcategories does “the world” need?), in other cases “looking into a category” just isn’t what the users want to do. On the other hand: having a category system you can estanlish and fill by yourself is something very different and might be useful for people thinking in such categories.