Revision as of 02:03, 15 August 2009

Description

"Twitter allows users to send and receive abbreviated communications or "digital shorthand" from a computer or mobile device. These are called "Tweets." The open-source nature of the application has spawned countless "mash-ups" where Twitter technology merges seamlessly with other open-source technologies such as Google Maps. Widgets and desktop applications such as Twitteroo and Twitterific take you outside of the browser and act as a sort of social instant messenger, sending and receiving rapid bursts of text and links." (http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/apr2007/id20070409_372598_page_2.htm)

Characteristics

Howard Rheingold on why he uses Twitter:

"My reasons:

Openness — anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else (unless they restrict access to friends who request access)

Immediacy — it’s a rolling present. You won’t get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.

Variety — political or technical argument, gossip, technical info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, repartee, scholarly references

Reciprocity — people give and ask freely for information they need (this doesn’t necessarily scale or last forever, but right now it’s possible to tune your list — and to contribute to it — to include a high degree of reciprocation)

A channel to multiple publics — I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds — and each of the 1300 people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks. I used to just paint. Now I document my painting at each stage of the process, upload pix to flickr or flicks to blip.tv, then drop a tinyurl into Twitter. Who needs a gallery or a distributor?

Asymmetry — very interesting. Very few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.

A way to meet new people — it happens every day

A way to find people who share interests — I follow people I don’t know otherwise but who share an interest in educational technology, video, online activism.

A window on what is happening in multiple worlds, some of which I am familiar with, and others that are new to me." (http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/02/23/why-im-hooked-on-twitter/)

Discussion

Twitter as a tool for un-groups

Jennifer Palmer:

"networks. When I’m on Twitter I’m tuning into “collective life streams” as opposed to interacting as a member of a criteria-based group. The fact that Twitter is mobile and able to be used by text messaging via cell phones provides new possibilities for making the most out of “between” moments. Many people find the time to tweet as they travel between the places where groups meet -- in other words, when they are outside of the group and defined only by their individuality. This in turn opens them up to the possibility of finding new groups from far flung places on the social graph. Tweets take place in taxi cabs and in airports, while waiting for trams and waiting for a concert to start. A group could be formed around people who are fans of a movie -- or around passengers stranded together at an airport who use Twitter to craft a “real time” letter of complaint to an airline CEO. Twitter is about being untethered from the world of heavy buildings and offices and computers, but at the same time being aware and informed. The more people you follow, the wider net you cast with which to gather information. I follow fewer people than many and I still hear about most breaking international, national and citywide news from someone on Twitter first.

Twitter is a great tool for DIY, self-organizing “un-groups” such as the stranded airline passengers mentioned above. As the name would imply, an un-group doesn’t have a membership policy or an explicitly agreed upon set of rules and hierarchies. Un-groups aren’t meant to be solemn brother or sisterhoods that one swears an oath to uphold. They are the practical, quick and easy collaborative attempts to solve any number of problems. What’s more, the specificity of the un-groups makes it such that belonging to one doesn’t define you as a person -- perhaps you work as an executive for Phillip Morris trying to figure out how to sell more cigarettes but also coordinate your neighborhood’s recycling efforts in a city or a town where the municipality refuses to do it." (http://www.realitysandwich.com/radical_interdependence_online_telepathy_twitter)

Psychological aspects of Twitter

Moses Ma:

"Most interesting is how the Twitter system acts to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The unfortunate reality is that we are a culture starved for real community. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have resided in tribes of about 30-70 people. Our brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival.

However, the tribal context of life was subverted during the Industrial Revolution, when the extended family was torn apart in order to move laborers into the cities. But a deep evolutionary need for community continues to express itself, through feelings of community generated by your workplace, your church, your sports team, and now... the twitterverse. This is why people feel so compelled to tweet, to facebook or even to check their email incessantly. We crave connection.

It's useful to dig a bit deeper into our need for community. In fact, needs analysis one of the most powerful tools for innovators to understand, which invariably leads to the meaning of their products. So let's look at Twitter in the context of Abraham Maslow's concept of a hierarchy of needs, first presented in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation."

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid, with lowest levels of the pyramid made up of the most basic needs and more complex needs are at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to higher levels of needs, which become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment become important. Finally, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.

Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.

An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter. Twitter allows normal people to feel like celebrities. At its worst, Twitter is an exercise in unconditional narcissism - the idea that others might actually care about the minutiae of our daily lives. I believe that this phenomena of micro-celebrity is driven by existential anxiety. I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggoneit, people like me!

"We are the most narcissistic age ever," agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it."

This leads me to a few other problems I have with Twitter and social activity monitoring in general. First, it makes it much easier for stalkers to follow you. Stalkers give me the willies, and better tools need to be in place to identify those you don't want following your every move. However, in Los Angeles, most people celebrate their first official stalker as a benchmark of success. Second, there is a remarkable loss of focus and presence that comes with the information overload that multi-tasking brings. Twitter is like digital crack that invariably turns you into a tweetker - no matter how much of it you get, you'll never be satisfied. If you've ever woken up at 3 am to check your email or read tweets, you know what I mean. You know the cold clammy fingers of existential anxiety." (http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tao-innovation/200903/understanding-the-psychology-twitter)

Open Source aspects of Twitter

"When we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to use open source whenever it makes sense. By this approach, much of Twitter is now built on open source software.

In some cases, our requirements—in particular, the scalability requirements of our service—lead us to develop projects from the ground up.

We develop these projects with an eye toward open source, and are pleased to contribute our projects back to the open source community when there is a clear benefit. Below are two such projects, Kestrel and Cache-Money. Every tweet touches one or both of these key components of the Twitter architecture." (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/building-on-open-source.html)

Why the Twitter platform sucks

Robert Scolbleizer:

"This is a company that is building a channel for celebrities, bots, spammers, and a few of other types who like to tell each other short sweet nothings but really wants to be a platform for the world’s people, APIs, devices, etc to talk with each other.

I want that world too, but Twitter has made it so I — and increasingly the developers I interview who are building stuff on top of Twitter — don’t trust Twitter. Why? Because of several reasons:

1. I can’t get to my old Tweets. Seriously. They are, I’m sure, on a server somewhere in San Francisco, but I can’t get to them. Twitter search only shows the last few weeks and I’ve asked developers if they can get them but they can only get to the last few thousand Tweets. I’ve been through this before. The first two years of my blog are gone. Someone turned off a server and I was stupid enough not to back up those items first. Oh well.

2. Follower numbers are about as inaccurate as Google’s numbers are (we all know that when Google says there are 685,000 mentions of Robert Scoble you know that’s a total made up number, right?) Follower numbers are just as made up. Twitter artificially adds followers to people it deems important by putting them on the Suggested User List. And last week I learned that there are tons of followers who just follow you to get you to follow back (about 7% in my case). These are mostly fake followers cause they only cared about bumping up their follower numbers, not in listening to anything you had to say (which is provable because if they had listened to me over the years they would have joined FriendFeed cause I’ve talked about that so much that most people think that’s all I’ve talked about lately, which also proves they never watch my videos. Anyway, I digress, only 46,000 out of my now 93,500 followers have come over to FriendFeed, which demonstrates that I have a lot of followers who won’t do anything I ask them to). It’s worse than that, though. Twitter regularly cleans out spammers and such. Last time they did that they restated my follower count as 2,000 lower.

3. Twitter rarely discusses any changes or problems with its APIs with its developers. This is well documented, but doesn’t seem to change much. Developers tell me they are playing footsie with Twitter, trying to build stuff and also get to be friendly with them so that they are picked from the crop instead of their competitors. Think what would happen if Twitter bought or picked, say, TweetDeck. Would Seesmic have the market power to continue as a Twitter developer?

4. Twitter “picks” — at its whim — which companies will get displayed on its home page. Right now I just saw Seesmic displayed there. That artificially gives Seesmic a huge amount of users developers tell me and there’s no way for a company to know when it’ll be picked, or what the rules are. Totally up to Twitter’s team, just like being included on the Suggested User List is. I’ve heard from many that if you beg to be put on either list, too, you won’t get put on and will be blacklisted. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a common enough belief among Twitter developers that the threat of that is probably enough. 5. Twitter has built a system that relies on a third party for functionality. Even now, if we use bit.ly links like Twitter recommends, there’s no guarantee that Twitter will keep those links working in the future if Bit.ly’s investors decide it can’t make money. Since money has NOT started flowing through the Twitter system yet we’re all wondering just how Bit.ly will make money. And that’s before we consider the fact that to really make money Bit.ly would have to do something like what Flickr does: charge us money for access to our old items and/or put some sort of weird advertising into the link (hey, interstitial advertising, if you hated it when the news sites did it, you’ll REALLY hate it when the URL shortener sites do it).

6. Twitter has already demonstrated it will stab both users and developers in the back with no notice (IE, Twitter messes with the marketplace and “picks” winners, both on the user side and the developer side). This is nasty stuff for a platform vendor to do. It makes both users and developers distrust the system and makes investors very skittish about potential risks which are much higher now (you’ve gotta not only build awesome technology, but you’ve gotta take @ev and @biz out to lunch a lot and make sure you do whatever they tell you to do — even then you might get stabbed in the back).

7. Twitter talks trash about a lot of its potential partners as we found out when the Twittergate papers were published by TechCrunch. Yes, do you want to do business with these folks that don’t even have the professionalism to keep their name calling off the Internet? (If I had trouble with a partner I’d NEVER write it down or record it anywhere unless I intended it to be public — I’ve seen too many times when employees go “postal” or leave disgruntled and then leak stuff out)." (http://scobleizer.com/2009/08/10/twitters-platform-shortcomings/)

The Open Microblogging alternative of Identi.ca

"How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?

Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users' autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services that can receive your notices

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one)." (http://identi.ca/doc/faq)

More Information

Tag: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Twitter
Study: What People Do on Twitter: three types of conversations [1]
Twitter is a form of Lifelogging, Lifestreaming, Microblogging
Aspects of Twitter: Exhaust Data, Phatic Communication, Ambient Intimacy
How Twitter was born, the history: http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/
Profile of the founders, and their dreams, February 2009: http://nymag.com/news/media/54069/

Twitter: Difference between revisions