Time magazine’s Steven Johnson recently wrote an interesting op/ed piece about how he thinks Twitter will change the way we live. I agree. In fact, I believe Twitter – or, at the least, SMS Group Messaging – will be the next iteration of email. Combine Twitter with Google’s new “Wave” (in beta testing) and I think we see the future of real-time, threaded conversations.

Here are some of Steven’s observations and predictions:

“as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.”

“Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.”

I personally believe that what Twitter has done is create an in-road for leveraging Text Messaging (SMS) in a new way. Regardless of Twitter’s success or demise, what they created will continue. Twitter is the new email.