Jan 25, 2007
Musings on Twitter
So, I’ve been using (?) Twitter for a few months now, and I’ve noticed a few things about it which I thought might be worth trying to crystalise into a post. Let’s see how this goes.
1. Different people use it in very different ways
The Twittering classes are:
- The Briefers, who provide only bulletins relating to current location or status. Example: Waiting for the bus. Cold.
- The Detailers, who use Twitter to give an insight into what they’re thinking, eating, listening to, looking forward to, planning, and so on. Example: Wondering what to have for tea tonight. Pasta, maybe.
- The Kitchen Sinkers, who use Twitter as a new form of blogging, recording thoughts and links and opinions and ideas, addressed to no-one in particular. Example: Traffic lights broken at the corner of high street. Phoned work and told them I’ll be late. That’s the fourth time this week. Sigh.
- The Pongers, who respond publically to other users whose updates they are receiving via Twitter (so called because they return each IM ping with a pong). Example: @Jim: Hahaha! Yes!
I’ll come back to the latter two in another section, because they deserve to be singled out for special attention.
2. There’s a difference between consensual eavesdropping and broadcast
Twitter got me thinking about who people are Twittering for. Is it for themselves? For a closed group of trusted friends? For a wider audience of friends, fans and followers? For public? For posterity? Each driver leads to a different type of use, and a different approach to the medium.
So, for example, there are people who use Twitter as blogging-lite – a way of publishing short bursts of personal output in a more convenient way – via mobile, or IM. This can then be aggregated and displayed on a blog, in much the same way as del.icio.us has provided a handy way for people to maintain and publish a linklog.
The trouble with this is that just as thoughts can be published in a different, more immediate and more convenient (for the author) form, they are also consumed in a different, more immediate way, and one which is often less convenient for the reader. As far as the reader is concerned, they’ve got a constant dribble of opinion and blether in their IM window – distracting at best, downright annoying at worst.
I think of this as a bit like one of those Round Robin letters at Christmas – you know, the kind of thing that you receive from well-meaning friends who think you’re interested. The difference is that you can put a letter down, while the twitter blogs just keep on coming.
If uninvited mail from friends is fram (like those fwd fwd fwd fwd this is funny!!! things), and spam via IM is spim, and friends distracting you via IM is frim, then can we call the same activity using this new medium fritter?
Without wanting to be a misanthrope, that isn’t why I signed up to Twitter. I like blogs, and I like reading them, but I think of them as like appointment-to-view TV: I take time to sit and read big chunks. So having a constant dribble of opinion and blether in my ear doesn’t suit my reading style, however much I like reading the same stuff on someone’s blog in its own context.
The thing I like about Twitter is the light touch – small nuggets of people’s lives: what are YOU doing/thinking right now?
When it gets more in depth and descriptive, it loses its magic and becomes irritating. My own personal crackberry, that never stops beeping away at me. Sad as it is, for that reason, it leads to Twitter users having to de-friend or de-follow various friends because they’re suffering from too much info, too often.
Bottom line: is Twitter a broadcast mechanism or a communication medium?
3. Who’s listening?
So I’ve noticed that Twittering frequently becomes a conversation – it’s natural that it does, because people are for the most part using an application which is set up for exactly that – instant messaging apps allow people to engage in text conversations.
But Twitter is some things which Instant Messaging isn’t: for a start, it can be via mobile, and having one’s phone go off every eight seconds soon wears the battery down (so THIS is what it feels like to be a teenager in the twenty-first century…) and that’s a pain in the bum if the messages you’re receiving aren’t actually for you. Secondly. Twitter is public, or semi-public, at least. And the trouble is, not everyone who’s listening can hear all parts of the conversation. So that gets us back to those Round Robin letters: did you ever get one which had personal messages printed at the bottom of it, but sent to everyone on the list? Did you boggle at how weirdly innappropriate that was, when the writer could have sent a personal message just to the intended recipient, even if it was scrawled on with pen before sticking it in the envelope?
Forgetting about privacy settings for a moment, consider this: each person using Twitter has their own network of friends. Unless another user has exactly the same group, there’s always going to be a disparity between the individuals who are “hearing” each update. So, for example…
Jenny is a Twitter user. She has two friends on the Twitter network: Bill and Ben.
Bill has two friends, too: Jenny and Sarah.
So, if their networks were circles, Jenny and Bill are in the area where they overlap. Meanwhile, Ben can only hear Jenny and Sarah can only hear Bill. It’s a very basic Venn diagram, and it’s not complicated.
Here’s a bunch of Twitters, as Jenny sees it:
Bill: I’m tired
Jenny: oh, why?
Ben: Watching cricket
Bill: @Jenny: too many late nights recently. I’m a dirty stopout
Ben: You can take the man out of England, but you can’t take the England out of the man. Or something. A six! A six!
Jenny: Wishes she was a dirty stopout
And here’s the same period of time as experienced by Ben:
Ben: Watching cricket
Jenny: oh, why?
Ben: You can take the man out of England, but you can’t take the England out of the man. Or something. A six! A six!
Jenny: Wishes she was a dirty stopout
Blimey. Half the conversation. None of the sense. Frustrating and not a bit irritating when overused.
People use the familiar @ to denote that their message is directed at a particular individual, but why have that conversation in public anyway? Isn’t it better as a private message?
There’s a little-known (or well-known but little-used) feature in Twitter, which allows people to send private messages to each other. All you need to do is send: D USERNAME message. So, for example: D meish I quite agree!
(If Twitter were smart, they’d adapt the lingo so that it understood @ to be the same as D in this context – in other words, listen to what users are doing and refine features to suit their actions and behaviours, rather than trying to get them to adopt a new command. In the meantime, though, it’s not too difficult for people to remember that D means DIRECT.)
I found a great quote on another blog saying exactly what I was going to say about this, so I’ll save myself the finger-strain and let him say it for me:
To my friends: The next time you’re about to submit a message to twitter, please think to yourself. “Is this something that all 73 of my friends need to see?†And does what you’re writing actually answer the question, “what are you doing?â€
Friends don’t let friends Twitter badly.
4. What does Privacy really mean?
The concept of privacy becomes especially interesting when you have a situation in which people can publically respond to your private twitterings. Let’s go back to Jenny and Bill and chums.
Jenny, whose updates are set to friends-only, announces to her friends that she’s just found out she’s pregnant.
Bill, whose updates are set to public, and in fact are republished on his blog, extending the readership even further, and not to mention enabling the whole caboodle to be indexed and archived by search engines, sends her a hearty congratulations, and asks if can be the godfather.
Now everyone knows she’s up the duff. Way to go, Bill.
So the inequality in the privacy settings can cause problems, because what one person wants to be private isn’t, as long as someone’s holding their half of the conversation in a public forum.
How many times have you been on the bus and heard some dimwit blethering loudly on their mobile?
“Hello?…..Yes…..No, but I wouldn’t work with Anderson Spade associates again…Didn’t I tell you?….Oh right…..No, the MD’s a sweaty pig…..yeah, twice…..OH MY GOD! Did I tell you about Gillian?…..She’s got gonorrhea….yeah, she found out yesterday….seriously….yeah, you should call her…..hang on, one sec….got a pen?…..Gillian Jungsdottir….two Ts….01234…no, 234……567….890….Don’t tell her I told you, though, will you?….Ok, got to go…byeee!”
Now, you don’t want to be that person, do you, blabbing other people’s business all over town?
Anyway. Some musings on Twitter. Interesting tool, being used in lots of different ways. Yet to find its feet, I think, as people experiment with how it improves and connects their (social) lives. New technologies were ever thus….
I was thinking about the different ways people use it last week, and posted some thought. Personally, I believe at this point (ie when the privacy settings are pretty much binary) there’s an argument for keeping your friend groups very tight and limited to people you’re actually interested in.
Where Twitter does have some layering is in letting you opt out of IM or phone updates. For example I choose to only get direct messages sent to my phone, precisely because it would get too many updates otherwise.
As for @, I think we also have to consider that the response to “personal” messages is actually *intended* to be public a lot of the time. Or, at least, people realise they’re public (sometimes they don’t).
In that sense, it becomes more like a comment thread than IM sometimes. I suppose it comes down to picking friends that you’re comfortable with (and yes, I’ve had to prune here and there).
Very interesting, especially the comments about privacy, and the “IM-ness” of the medium. I was looking into Twitter earlier this week, and it inspired me to write about how Web 2.0 can be like quicksand.
Interesting musings. There are certainly many clashes, eg. between people who have set Twitter updates to “friends only”, and people who have tweaked their blogs to display their most recent messages to the non-Twittering world at large.
Speaking as someone who has never and will never use IM: one major weakness of the web interface is the lack of an alert system for private messages. The only way to find out you’ve been messaged is to memorise your existing count, and to remember to check whether the number has gone up. The whole thing is clunky, involves too many actions and page loads, and works in direct opposition to the immediacy of the rest of the service. Which I think partly explains the preponderance of “@Fred: Good luck!” type messages on the public area.
But there’s often a desire to address someone directly, but semi-publicly, in front of your other shared friends. In these situations, it’s a shame that such messages couldn’t somehow be sent just to the friends which the two of you share, excluding all others. But that would pull the service further away from its central “what are you doing right now” concept…
I’m glad that you’ve written this, because I have been having similar thoughts. Since I signed up I have had to remove a couple of contacts simply because they were filling up the page with remarks addressed at invisible friends. I think that anyone who uses the system to publicly respond to another person’s posting has clearly misunderstood the concept.
As Mike says, the solution would be to allow users to “attach” a message to another message, so that it would only be seen by users who can view both. In this way, each message would become simultaneously a blog post and a comment on a blog post. It would also dilute the service’s strength.
Or, people could just use an actual chatroom, and then the other people who wanted to write about what they are doing wouldn’t have to keep removing contacts just because it’s turning into Witter.
The conversational problem is one that Obvious is well aware of and looking at. My personal preference would be to solve this with some predictably smart code: Recognise anything that starts with “@NAME”, work out which user NAME is, then only show that message to NAME’s other followers.
However, I’m confused about the difference between the Detailers and the Kitchen Sinkers. Why’s one okay and the other not? And I don’t think that the distinction between broadcast and communication mediums is clear enough; as far as I’m concerned, broadcast is communication.
Here’s a different question: Would you rather follow someone on Twitter because they’re a friend, or because you want to hear what they have to say? This is what concerns me now, because my RSS subs are reasonably private, whereas my Twitter friends list is public, and more of a public statement of friendship. Will a friend get more annoyed if I unsub from their blog or de-friend them on Twitter? One of the smartest Twitter features is being able to stop getting alerted by new messages from certain friends while keeping them as friends – though, since I consume Twitter through the web, this doesn’t work for me.
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