by Fred Stutzman
April 11, 2007
OK, disclosure first: the title of this piece is a little bit of an overreach. However, like all things Twitter, it is meant to make a point succinctly and optimally in 140 characters or less. If you've been following the social blogosphere recently, you've been hearing a lot about Twitter.com. Developed last summer by folks from the Obvious Corporation (some of the folks that brought you applications such as Blogger.com and Odeo), Twitter has been labeled anything from a microblogging application to a continuous presence notifier to a viral, social instant messaging client. Whatever Twitter is, it has certainly caught the attention of a wide swath of people and it appears to be well on its way to establishing itself as the first breakout Web 2.0 application of 2007.
Exploring Twitter
Rather than choosing a particular label for Twitter, I figured I'd start by providing an overview of the service. The most useful metaphor I've found for describing Twitter is to liken it to a web-based IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client. We've all chatted online before--reserved our handle, entered a chatroom, and started messaging away. Well, there are two problems with chat in that form. First, the chatroom is (usually) filled with strangers, and second, you must be logged into the chatroom to have access to messages.
Twitter is essentially a net-based chatroom filled with your friends. The basic idea is you log in to the service, add friends, and start sending them simple little messages. These messages are limited to 140 characters or less, so you have to make do with a sentence or two. You can elect to send and receive messages any number of ways--through Twitter's website, through your mobile phone (via SMS), through your IM client, through RSS, or through a number of third-party tools that have emerged to help people access and interact with the Twittersphere.
You might be asking, why limit messages to 140 characters? In fact, this isn't an arbitrary limit. As Twitter dispatches messages via SMS, keeping the messages under 140 characters means they can be contained in a single text message. This important "tweak" in the service also means messages must be kept succinct and to the point--something we're not exactly used to on the Web, where tremendous volumes of text can be transferred instantaneously.
The fact that Twitter interacts with SMS means that it can be used to enable individual movable feasts. As a Twitter user at 2007's South by Southwest Interactive conference, I received frequent Twitter messages from friends throughout the evenings, updating me as to their location, whom they were hanging out with, and where the best parties were located. So what is Twitter? Is it a microblogging application or instant messenger or social presence notifier? In fact, I think it's all of these things, wrapped up in a friendly, easy-to-use ball.
Twitter: Have It Your Way
While we can certainly come up with a lot of Web 2.0 jargon to describe how Twitter is used, perhaps most interesting is the fact we can all use it in our own, individual ways. After all, Twitter isn't a whole lot more than little bits of text messages that you can pass to your friends. As such, what we do with these messages is pretty much up to our own design and hacking. However, in watching Twitter for the past few months, I've seen a few key uses emerge.
The most common use I've seen is the social update. Social updates operate quite similarly to away messages in an IM client--an individual sends a message off to let people know where they are going or what they are up to. A quick message like "Off to the movies" or "At the bar" will let your group of friends know what you are up to quickly and easily.
Another common use is the microblog. There isn't a whole lot of distinction between the social update and the microblog, but we can think of the microblog as something similar to a constant mind-dump. And because Twitter limits messages to 140 characters, people often post many microblogs a day--little things like "Have you seen this article?" or even semi-public venting "I can't believe how much work I have to do!"
In essence, Twitter lets us tap into the collective information stream of our friends and contacts. We can easily follow what our friends are doing or thinking, and contribute our feedback in a semi-public conversation. Even more interesting is that we can leave or pick up this conversation at any time--even if you don't have Twitter on your mobile phone, you simply need to log into Twitter to see the last few hours of activity of your friends. There's something very fascinating and scary about being able to tap in and out of your friend's consciousness stream with nothing more than the click of a mouse.
RSS Culture and Interruption Science
Twitter is a natural follow-on to what I call RSS culture. RSS culture is just a handy way to describe how many of us engage the Web these days. We opt in to messages, we share our ideas in public via blogs or social networks, and the internet is essentially a fully semantic read/write interconnected web of our thoughts. In his 2005 book Ambient Findability, Peter Morville describes the Web's ebb and flow: "In this wonderful world of everyware (sic), we will enjoy an unprecedented ability to pull people, places, products, and ideas into our attention."
In the book, Morville describes an ambient web--one that is constantly with us. Like many others, I find other people to be the killer app of the Web. With applications like Twitter, we are always connected, never more than the push of a button away. When we enable Twitter on our mobile devices, that button push is no longer required--we are able to constantly be with our friends at all times. Indeed, there's something very interesting here.
A number of bloggers have explored the motivations for using Twitter, perhaps none more eloquently than Kathy Sierra. In a must-read post entitled "Is Twitter Too Good?" Sierra takes a contrarian look at Twitter. She concludes:
Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking it's having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking ... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.
To Sierra's first point, I believe that we are being conditioned by this intermittent reward--and this is an artifact of RSS culture. Like many people I know, I have a few hundred RSS feeds in my newsreader. At any one time, I can hit Refresh and be served up at least a few new stories. This is the intermittent reward that Twitter provides--as long as we have enough friends in the service, we can almost always find a friend doing or liveblogging something or other. While Sierra downplays the value of this feeling of connectedness, I tend to believe that services like Twitter, ones that provide an enmeshing of the virtual and the real, ones that ostensibly enable human interaction, are the future. The connectedness we feel is very real, as long as we care about the people whose messages we're opting in to.
And to Sierra's point about multi-tasking, she's absolutely right. Twitter has a great bit in common with instant-messaging applications. Researcher Mary Czerwinski has published a number of articles in which her team explores the effect of interruptions--particularly those of instant messages--on our ability to do tasks. Of course, she finds that these interruptions degrade our performance--see her paper "Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance" (CHI, 2000), or if you're looking for lighter fare, check out the eminently interesting New York Times Magazine article entitled ""Meet the Life Hackers."
In fact, a recent study at King's College, London found that emailing and text messaging (two interruption-driven tasks) may lower your IQ by ten points over the course of a day. Assuming that you never turn Twitter off, its IQ-destroying potential is absolutely terrifying. But do we care? No, because Twitter is so darn fun.
Hyper-Twitterers and the Growing Twitter Army
And what fun Twitter is. In these hyper-interactive, YouTube-enabled times, it is remarkable that an enjoyable, meaningful web service can be created out of something as simple as 140-character text segments. Like all good web services, however, Twitter thrives on its ecosystem--the army of users and programmers and designers that are coming up with ways to make the Twitter experience more fulfilling. Here are a few of my favorite Twitter-based applications.
Twitterholic: This application lists the top 100 users of Twitter (or hyper-twitterers, as I call them), ranked by their number of "followers." Followers are simply people who have opted to get Twitter messages from a user. At current, the top Twitterer, legendary internet personality Leo Laporte, has over 3,200 followers, while runner-up hyper-twittering blogger Robert Scoble has over 1,800 followers.
Twittervision: This Twitter/Google Maps mashup displays Twitter messages in real time, via Google Maps. You'll see a Twitterer post a message in the UK, and then watch as the map zooms over to a US or Australian-based Twitter. It is sort of mesmerizing.
TwitterBuzz: A real-time list of the most popular links being sent around in Twitter. An interesting little zeitgeist showing the top links currently being discussed in the Twittersphere.
RSS2Twitter: With RSS2Twitter, you can easily set up any RSS feed to be delivered to your Twitter account. This means that RSS updates can easily be delivered to your mobile phone via Twitter--which is useful if you want to keep track of something.
Twitterfeed.com: Like RSS2Twitter, but Twitterfeed makes it very simple for you to post your blog entries to Twitter.
Twitteriffic: Twitteriffic is an OS-X-based Twitter manager. It sits on your desktop and allows easy publishing of your tweets, as well as easy tracking of your friends' Twitter messages.
Of course, these are just some of the many applications created by the Twitter army. A full list of applications can be found at the Twitter Fan Wiki. If you're just getting started with Twitter, here are a couple of links that will help you get up and running quickly.
- Webware.com: "Newbie's Guide to Twitter," by Rafe Needleman
- "Twitter Lingo: The Official Commands." A must-read for those using Twitter.
- O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog: "Twittering Your Home," by Gordon Meyer
Conclusion
Call it a microblog, a social presence tool, or whatever else you'd like--it does appear that Twitter is here to stay. As a tool with many flexible uses, it is likely that we'll see individuals integrating Twitter with all sorts of interesting applications in the future. It is this simplicity and flexibility that makes Twitter a winner--in 140 characters or less.
great service!
Bst Rgds,
Michael B.