I was recently quoted in a Mashable article on the culture of Twitter.

As Twitter becomes mainstream, not only in the US, but also in several other countries, its changing from a community frequented by early adopters to an utility used by the masses.

As Twitter becomes more of an utility, it ceases to have one community and one culture. Each one of us curate our own community on Twitter, by following friends, strangers, celebrities, news feeds or hashtags.

Specifically, each hashtag is its own community, with its own culture. For instance, #wheniwaslittle and #scrm have distinctly different cultures, withdistinctly different participants and norms or participation.

Of course, Twitter’s 140 character limit creates a norm of frequent short, witty, haiku-like updates that cuts across these different communities and cultures.

On the question of whether Twitter promote cross-cultural communication, I think Twitter, like other social web platforms, creates the “possibility” of cross-cultural communication. Perhaps, Twitter enables discovery more than most platforms because of its open architecture, powerful search, and trending topics.

However, human beings have a strong tendency to prefer the familiar, so we pay attention to people with a shared context and treat the rich Twitter public stream as background noise. So, in practice, Twitter’s ability to promote cross-cultural communication is limited by our own willingness to engage in it.

I also asked my followers: What is #twitterculture? Responses mentioned cafe, chat room, CB radio, humor, narcissism, sound bytes, grown-up. The #twitterculture hashtag even threatened to break into trending topics at one point.

So, what do you think is the culture of Twitter? Do share your insights in the comments below, or on Twitter using the hashtag #twitterculture.