As I mentioned the other day, I recently joined Twitter. I've been poking around its nooks and crannies ever since. Here are some observations, presented in Twitter-sized chunks:
Playing with Twitter reminds me of blogging circa 2000. Back then, all weblogs were personal in nature and most people used them to communicate with their friends and family. If I wanted to know what my friends were up to back then, I read their blogs. Now I follow Twitter (and Flickr and Vox).
The reaction to Twitter mirrors the initial reaction to weblogs...the same tired "this is going to ruin the web" and "who cares what you ate for dinner" arguments.
Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that's when you know how you've got a winner: when people use it like mad but can't fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.
For people with little time, Twitter functions like an extremely stripped-down version of MySpace. Instead of customized pages, animated badges, custom music, top 8 friends, and all that crap, Twitter is just-the-facts-ma'am: where are my friends and what are they up to?
Twitter's like Flickr without the images.
When one thing (i.e. Twitter) is easier than something else (i.e. blogging) and offers almost the same benefits, people will use it.
Twitter brings back the "type words in one box and press submit" thing that made Blogger so popular back in the day. Compare with current blogging systems. To publish a post in MT, I've got to fiddle with 7-9 different text boxes and options. See immediately above.
Let's not forget Dodgeball here, which was used extensively at SXSW in 2006. (In other words, all the Twittering at SXSW 2007 was not unprecedented. Chill.) It's more focused on location and SMS though...by allowing updates in more ways and being more flexible about the type of message allowed, Twitter is attractive to a wider group of people.
If your friends are not on Twitter, I can't imagine it would be that interesting.
Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. I know, let's not turn absolutely everything on the web into a popularity contest!! We already know Scoble is a big blowhard and has weak ties to lots of people...let's move on, shall we?
I wonder what the average number of followers per person is? The folks with 5 zillion followers get all the attention, but as with blogging, those posting updates for their 20 friends form the bulk of the activity.
Lists of friends and followers are presented alphabetically. Does Anil attract more friends, on average, than Veen because he always shows up near the top of the listings?
I can see why Obvious dropped Odeo for Twitter. With podcasts, you've got all that data locked up in binary format (no easy cut-and-paste) and it takes you 20 listening minutes before you can react to it (by commenting, by linking, etc.). With blogs, the reaction time to a post is 1-2 minutes, with Flickr it's 5 seconds, and Twitter is 2-3 seconds. The barrier to entry for reacting to and remixing podcasts is just so much higher.
Twitter is the first thing on the web that I've been excited about in ages. Like years. The last thing was probably Flickr. (Talk about burying the lede.) It's just so damn simple but useful. Again, reminds me of weblogs in that way.
If you're on a Mac and using Twitter, download Twitterific, a little app that sits on your desktop and displays updates from your friends. My only complaint: it doesn't completely show updates, forcing you to the web to read the last 2-3 words of a longish message. Come on...it's only 140 characters, show them all!
Twittermap displays recent Twitter messages on Google Maps. All you do is send Twitter a message with your location -- like so...the "L:10003" is the important part -- and Twittermap will pick it up.
Even more mesmerizing is Twittervision...a world tour of recent Twitter messages. Just sit back and watch the updates come in one at a time, displayed on a world map. (This is in beta and Twitter's having some downtime issues right now, so the data may be less than fresh when you go.)
Twitter seems to work equally well for busy people and not-busy people. It allows folks with little time to keep up with what their friends are up to without having to email and IM with them all day. Those with a lot of time on their hands can spend a lot of time finding new people to follow, having back-and-forths with friends all day, and updating their status 40 times a day. Too many web apps fail because they only appeal to those with abundant free time.
I'm fascinated to see where Obvious takes this app once they get their scaling issues under control.
The default display of recent messages plus your own messages is genius. Makes it feel more like a conversation. The "with friends" display is great too...perfect for discovering other people to follow.
"Friends" still isn't the right word.
Most of my friends are still stuck back in Facebook, and several are starting to get into Virb.
I think I'll enjoy it more once I can talk some of my pals into trying it out - and when the site is consistently faster.
Also, twitter.com is still far too slow.
Is there space for it? While other tools *could* do the same thing, none of them are built for it. Viva la Twitter, I say.
I don't have much time, but I've got to update my Twitter, blog, and/or Flickr page!!
Being cool is boring. Or as Stefan Sagmeister puts it, "trying to look good limits my life".
The Twitterific window is resizable!
So it is. I was pulling it taller and not wider. Still though, it would be better if you could just make the message area a little taller or something. Not that it's working at all right now...Twitter is just too damn slow during the day to be usable.
But you would have been enjoying the 'first thing you've been excited about in ages' for much longer (I was actually being sarcastic. It was cooler NOT joining, amirite? amirite?
And yes, twitter is almost dead during the day time. Pity.
Good observations, especially the parallels to blogging's early days.
I've written two pieces about Twitter on my blog, and the general upshot of both of them is that Twitter will evolve into something more mature with real usefulness/utility to people. Right now, it seems to be novelty, a very cool proof-of-concept and not much more. Twittervision, et al, are the shizzle in their own right, but novelty atop novelty.
Twitter reminds me of Blogger in that, while you love it, it's like an abusive spouse that you always make excuses for, in spite of it letting you down over and over and over.
I've been Twittering for awhile and find that while fast and easy are great, it quickly loses its shine when the darn thing is so overloaded and pokey that you can't log in, or your updates get eaten.
So yah, let's hope they fix those scaling issues, but I'm not holding my breath.
"Average" Twitter User:
Followers: 17.5553
Friends: 15.1793
Updates: 104.3608
Favorites: 2.2171
Date: 3/19/07 Sample: 5828 active users
Source: Twitterholic.com
@LC, my favorite twitterer is SantaClaus. I'm pretty sure he's the real deal!
I like the idea of fictitious folk, though.
Damn, I should have done UO in twitter.
Those reactions may be tired, but they were certainly on target. It is worth noting that the "who cares" argument was spot on: as you said yourself, " Back then, all weblogs were personal in nature and most people used them to communicate with their friends and family." And now, most weblogs are not that personal, and have evolved to communicate to a broader audience. They moved away from the "what you ate for dinner" milieu of their own volition because... wait for it... people didn't care about what other people ate for dinner. If blogs had remained what they were seven years ago, they certainly would not have taken the world by storm in such a lasting fashion.
Perhaps Twitter won't go belly up right away, but I am certain that something else shiny and new will come along to divert websters' attention soon enough. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself!
Ahh, the power of viral marketing.
Yes, or chocolate without the flavor.
I'm sure it could be co-opted into something different than it is (which is inane ramblings of vapid the vapid and self-absorbed when I've looked). But there are other tools that are already other things. Or that can be similarly co-opted. Or created.
Twitter does not appear to have been designed to be a serious tool, and it does not appear, with few exceptions, to be used as such. If you doubt it, go to the home page right now. Just to be sure, I've looked nearly a dozen times - it's always without substance.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be critical. Or I didn't mean to be. But, really, Twitter just makes me sad.
Agreed. I had the same reaction when I used Twitterific. I stopped because no one I know uses Twitter (quite useless, really).
Man, Kottke, do some research. ;)
In a year or so, they all have joined.
Or hates it.
Just as with IM and SMS. Hehe..
:)
well ... i just signed up and i don't know yet ... i don't feel like disturbing all my friends again with a new social web2.0 tool/portal/thing/whatever-it-is.
but at least I DO exist in Twitter, i'm re404 :)
I also made a dodgeball reference, but again, that was after watching someone get sick of the annual SXSW dodgeball spam.
"If you don't understand the value of just "hanging out" with your digital friends via Twitter...then that, quite frankly, is your loss."
Indeed. Much in the same way that it is our loss that we don't "get" pork rinds, professional wrestling, Dancing With The Stars, or the National Inquirer.
There are plenty of people who will tell you that you don't 'get' anything if you don't enjoy it - and I guess in a way they would be right. I never got Milli Vanilli, or Right Said Fred - but millions of other people did. That doesn't mean they made good music.
Whether or not you enjoy what Twitter has to offer is subjective, and you are entitled to your opinion. Whether it is substantial, and whether the functionality you describe are trite and banal really are not subjective.
Unless your lunch poisons you, or becomes animated and runs away (and, debatably, unless you are a professional food critic) - to think that publishing what you have for lunch is worthwhile speaks poorly of our culture.
In the last few days, I've seen a few twitter boxes pop up on websites I frequent, and most of them say something like this (after about 90 seconds of lodaing):
"Making dinner. POSTED 13 HOURS AGO."
So... yeah, it's great. Glad you wrote that. Glad we know "what you're doing, where you are, right now".
This is the fate of all Twitter accounts- people get all up in its face the first few days, then get bored with constantly updating their online lives, and abandon it. We'll be seeing a lot of "Watching Seinfeld! POSTED 3 MONTHS AGO" in about... three months and two days.
Have you never read Samuel Peyps?
http://herrylaw.blogspot.com/2005/08/favourite-writings.html
Maybe though means like Twitter getting closer to 'the translation of life into language' all the time...
Early Livejournal clients greatly resemble Twitter as well. I recall using the Linux client back in early 2000 when I first signed up and it was simple a small text box to type in and send something off. Most early posts also followed the line of Twitter with people logging the intense minutiae of their lives and what they were doing at the moment. I recall the founder having a number of posts along the lines of "I'm going somewhere." and "I'm back home now."
More interestingly is that, yes, it only makes sense if you have friends that use it. This is the great problem of all social software. It's not useful unless your friends use it, but how do you convince your friends to use this cool new social software that isn't useful unless their friends use it.
Frankly I can potentially see the use for Twitter if many of your friends are using it, but it still feels a bit too navel-gazing and pointless to me at this stage and I expect to continue to loathe it as much as I loathe MySpace.
We have created a new Twitter community and forum if anyone is interested, come by and get some discussions on Twitter going.
twitterforum dot com
You can tell how slow twitter is by how long you have to wait for evhead.com to load. About 60 secs of "waiting for twitter.com" at the moment. Beware adding the badge to your blog.
» by smackfu on Mar 20, 2007 at 04:23 PM
Why should we beware to add the Twitter badge to our blog? or to Myspace?
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
