the 200ok weblog

Social networking discussion seems to focus on which service will kill another, which ones are going to be the winners or losers. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't want them to kill each other; I just want them to let me publish once and syndicate wherever I choose.

is that a crowded market i see before me?

Social networking sites and services continue appearing thick and fast. Every service wants to be the one that people use; and every new service is evaluated to see what it's supposed to be killing - right now Google has 19,800 results for the query pownce "twitter killer".

But do users really think this way? Do users want one service to rule them all? Do superior services win? MySpace suggests not. Personally I think people just go where their friends are - it has nothing to do with technical merit or clever hooks. There's no point sitting on a technically superior service with nobody to talk to. So you sign up wherever your friends are.

But the thing is your friends don't actually move in neat ranks and dutifully sign up to one social network. They join up all over the place, wherever they saw a concentration of early adopting friends. Since your friends are on these other services, you either sign up to those too or you miss out on the interaction .

Sure, some people are fiercely loyal and attempt to convert their friends; but they are competing with both the force of habit and human nature - they're screwed, in other words. Once people are comfortable with a service, they'd kind of like to stay put. It becomes their primary service for that kind of data. They might sign up for some others, but they're secondary to their chosen service.

the joy of repetition

After signing up for a few services even the most casual observer will notice the similarities. In fact what they'll really notice is that the more social networks you sign up for, the more they subject you to dull, repetitive work. We start thinking "hang on, weren't machines meant to be doing the work?".

People have long since wished that social networks could share contact details so you don't have to grind through finding your friends on the next service. I've long since wished for the next step: syndication of similar information:

• I don't want to write a LiveJournal, I just want it to syndicate my Blogger posts.
• I don't want to create status updates in FaceBook, I want it to import my Twitter statuses and use those.
• I don't want to sign up to Zoomr, but I'd let it import my Flickr stream.
• I'd like del.ico.us to mirror my ma.gnolia bookmarks since most of my friends use del.ico.us.

I have primary services for most of the information social networks are sharing. If something new pops up, say I decide to get into Cork'd or Last.fm, I'll happily add that to the pool. But if something is asking me to do the same thing I'm already doing elsewhere... well, I've already done that. I don't want to do it again. If I have to do it manually, eventually I'll stop doing it in at least one place.

pattern recognition

There are some distinct patterns in the type of personal data people create:

• Notifications - system alerts/updates, action required, action recorded
• Messages - short, long, statuses, chat, comments
• Files - photos, videos, music, documents, etc
• Data - URLs/bookmarks, events, contacts

Most network communications are variations and combinations of these basics. Yet the networks don't let users share the same stuff between services. Why not? Well filthy lucre of course. Each service attempts to create a walled garden, so they can make some money in some way.

But by creating walled gardens, the services are insisting that someone has to fail. At the very best, they all bleed. It's a war of attrition and users are the pawns. Realistically all of my status updates should be "updating fifteen social network sites, can't sleep, friend requests will eat me..".

they've shared before

Email and chat have both survived competition. Consider all the options for chat and email - there are far too many to list. Despite the direct competition, all the services survive. How? By sharing or allowing users to combine services.

Email doesn't have to be manually resent to every friend on a different ISP or email provider. The system just handles the transfers regardless; and any provider can survive so long as they can reliably send and receive email.

With chat, users can now run multi-protocol clients which take care of all the options. They have multiple accounts but they only run one bit of software to manage them all. No specific chat service had to beat all the others - they all just accepted their fate and let the multi-clients access their APIs.

Wouldn't it be awesome if status updates worked the same way? Write one Twitter status and friends get that status whether they're on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or FaceBook.... sweet!

comments

Then there's the next step... comment aggregation. If we can syndicate information, we'll want to be able to collate comments across all these services. No sweat, in your XML feed include a reference to a definitive source for each message - remember how we have primary sources? Services can share comments and display them according to timestamps.

can't we all just get along?

Surely all of this is possible. It's not that long ago people couldn't imagine networking everyone's computer in any meaningful way! Probably the biggest challenge would be to convince all the services to share data openly. They don't want to share, they want to recruit page impression monkeys (that's the humans, you at the back) so they can make money.

But if services were open, users could choose whichever service they wanted and still get updates from all their friends. No particular service would have to live or die. Users wouldn't have to choose, nor would they have to miss out on what their friends are up to in yet another walled garden.

It seems social networks are anything but social with each other. The people running them seem to hope that their competitors can be beaten. But consider MySpace vs. FaceBook - even if that war can be won, at what cost the victory? Isn't it more likely that the whole thing could force a migration to some other service entirely?

By sharing data instead, services could decrease churn rates. Why shift to another service if you get those updates anyway? People could actually choose the service they like the most, not the service their friends liked the most. Surely that would make them more likely to just relax and actually write new updates. More usage, more data, more hits. Then everyone wins.

Update: if your Twitter stream is public, you can now synch it with Facebook - Integration between Twitter and Facebook Status | TwitterSweet. Of course if your Twitter feed is protected, you're still no better off.

Labels: chat, communication, cork'd, email, facebook, flickr, jaiku, myspace, pattern recognition, pownce, social networking, syndication, twitter, web patterns, xml, zoomr

So debate continues about Twitter. Is it great? Is it awful? Is it a chat tool? Is it a status updater and damn it you chatters are ruining it for everyone? :)

I've come to the conclusion that ultimately it's not really the format that really gets people hooked. Twitter doesn't do anything that we couldn't already do. We already have chat, we already have blogs, we already have post-by-SMS and so forth. sure, Twitter rolls it into a neat package but I don't think that's the key factor.

Personally I think the real reason that people love Twitter so much - the Killer App if you will - is that it's ubiquitous. Twitter pretty much goes wherever you want it to go.

If you're on the web, you can be on Twitter. If you're signed into IM, you can be on Twitter. If you've got your phone in your pocket, you can be on Twitter... ok, you get the point! Twitter followed us home and we want to keep it.

connected

So what Twitter really does is puts your (Twitter-)friends within easy reach. You can always let them know what you're doing. You can always hear from them. If you're travelling, you can read about the little moments of important people back home. If you find yourself walking home unexpectedly, you can tweet about it.

You don't have to have ground-shaking news. You don't really have to have any justification, Twitter doesn't demand formality or deep and meaningful thoughts. Twitter is basically like hanging out with a big group of friends. You can wander in and out and nobody minds; but they're happy to see you when you are there. You can be pretty sure someone's always around.

you-biquity

I had to mention it. I think Twitter feeds into Mark Pesce's concept of youbiquity. It can provide a timeline - some people tweet when they post a blog article or a particularly interesting photo on Flickr. Twitter can also fill in the gaps on services like Jaiku which attempt to track your 'presence stream'. Blogs, bookmarks and photos still feel a bit disconnected... but twitter adds a certain je ne sais quoi and the sensation that you really are seeing a picture of what you've been up to online.

ubiquitous or intrusive?

If it starts getting intrusive, you can close the window/app, or text OFF... and that's it. It'll leave you alone until you feel like dropping back in. Whether we have that willpower is not really Twitter's fault, nor is it unique - we don't close our email down much either, and emails usually take a lot longer to read than a tweet.

So, sure... it can be just as intrusive as any of the communications channels it uses. Mobiles, web and IM can all be intrusive. That's not new to Twitter either :)

the medium is not the message

...but the medium shapes the message. I write longer text messages via USB (ie. on a proper keyboard) than direct on my mobile's keypad. There's no reason to expect anything different when I post to Twitter.

Khoi Vinh observes that the different interfaces subtly encourage different writing styles - that the input mode changes content. I do believe that people using mobiles will post less and be more focussed on 'what am I doing?' tweets than people using the web or IM interface. After all, they're out and about doing it.

twitterbiquity!

So there's another theory: Twitter's addictive quality is ubiquity. It uses technology which is mundane in our worlds, but it achieves a sort of magic. We can stay connected even when the computer is off. We can post by mobile and friends get it via chat.

Twitter pulls together three of the most successful communications methods of the modern world. Then it's interested in what you're doing. Then it tells your friends.

Go-anywhere technology that connects people. No wonder it's popular!

n minutes ago from web... ;)

Labels: communication, khoi vinh, mark pesce, presence stream, social networking, twitter, ubiquity

The first time I heard about Twitter I thought it was a stupid idea, possibly because the name seemed like it would be too accurate for comfort. I also didn't really like the idea of another social network requiring care and feeding. But in the end I got sucked in, and having used it for a couple of weeks I think it has a lot of potential.

some terminology

I've noticed a few terms floating around, so let's cover a few of them before we get started:

Twit/Twitter/Twitterer

A person who uses Twitter ("twit" is tongue in cheek, you at the back).

Twitterati

A group of Twits, eg. "the Aussie Twitterati" (aka. the Auspack)

Tweet

A Twitter update. "where's that tweet about the bar meet?"

Twitterchat/Twitter chat

A stream of Twitter updates that read like IRC/chat rooms.

Microblogging

One term used to describe the short posting style of Twitter.

Not everyone will agree with the terminology of course.

life with twitter

It seems fairly obvious that people use Twitter in ways the creators didn't intend. Although it's a service rather than content per se, this quote from Jeff Veen still springs to mind: Few use your content the way you intend. Everything you create online is being ripped apart and recombined with other stuff by thousands of curious geeks. Or at least, it should be.

Twitter was intended to be a status system, with all posts answering the question "what am I doing right now?". However as soon as you do that, other people want to respond - humans are social animals, after all. The result often turns into something like a chat room or IRC - and I pity anyone trying to keep up via a mobile phone. It has been said that Aussies use Twitter in IRC mode more often than other groups.

So at once it creates a tension - the great idea was to know what your friends are doing. The problem is that as soon as people respond, the traffic can easily make it impractical to follow the flow when you're out and about (unless you really are happy to be glued to your phone). If you really just want to know what people are doing, Twitterchat adds noise to the signal.

However if you're at home on the computer, Twitterchat is just dandy. IRC was always plagued with technical issues - you had to get the client installed (or know your way around shell) and find a server for a start; then find a channel and hope you didn't get a netsplit (seemed quite common for Aussies). Twitter avoids those problems - you can just hit a website and away you go.

should it be about status or chat?

Twitters know that they should just be saying what they're doing (posting their status). But they also get sucked into the chats. It's almost like you need a filter - actual status tweets versus general chatter or responses. But then you'd need people to tag their tweets one way or another - and if they followed rules like that you wouldn't have the problem in the first place.

So is Twitter a status stream or a chat tool? It's both, depending on the hive mind's mood. Is that a problem? Depends on what you want out of it at the time. Given that the status aspect is rarely going to be seriously useful to me, I don't mind the chat.

You could perhaps have Twitter proper, then let people spin off to a Twitter chat room for general chatter. If you piped the status posts into the chat room, you'd get the best of both worlds. People who don't want to chat wouldn't have to; those who do would still get status messages.

interesting uses

twitter tours

A Twitter Tour is a string of Twitters forming the tale of travelling somewhere. Gian is leading the charge on my contact list with two detailed Twitter Tours so far. I really like the way the string of status messages can tie together a routemap and photos.

The output is not really that different to blogging about going somewhere, except for the fact that you can follow the person's progress and chat to them while they're actually doing it - which is pretty cool, really. Plus you're getting the actual impressions of experiences along the way, rather than the overall/filtered impression after the fact. It feels a bit more "real".

twitter games

Put people together and sure enough they'll come up with new ways to amuse themselves given the toys...err...tools at hand. Twitter games are a classic case. On my list, Molly is definitely the ringleader for Twitter games. I went to make a list and discovered it was Molly who had suggested all of the following:

• post in haiku
• post in "blues"
• twitter telephone
• twitter thirds

Twitter games can be quite fun, although I have to admit it's hard to discuss the finer points of different operating systems using haiku.

twitter polls

Twitter Poll is just a term I use to describe a message along the lines of "should I do x?" or "what do you think about y?". Users regularly solicit thoughts and advice from other users. I've even seen quite effective technical support take place within minutes of someone grumbling that something was broken.

twitter news

Several flavours of BBC news (eg. twitter.com/bbcnews) are being Twittered thanks to one enterprising user, who used the Twitter API to crunch the Beeb's newsfeeds. No idea what the BBC thinks of it, if anything.

I'm not sure I would really want the news following me on Twitter... I wouldn't mind getting BOM weather alerts though!

what sucks about twitter

There are many things that show that Twitter is a new service that really needs some rough corners knocked off. I'll just cover a couple of them, since I'm not aiming for an exhaustive breakdown of its interface and design.

handling of connections

For a social network, Twitter is rather bad at handling friends requests. For a start, you can't import a list of friends - a problem which has already been discussed at length. So you're left trying to work out which of your friends is on Twitter, using which variant on their online identity... which just feels like work. Boring, repetitive work.

Once you do find people and start adding them, you discover some people have opted for a minor layer of privacy - so you have to wait for them to accept your request to add them to your Twitter friends list. If people notice your request and respond quickly, all is peachy. If they don't notice, it can go pear shaped.

The only alert that a request has been made is a text link on the web interface, so a user could literally never notice that someone has made a friends request. If they don't actively accept or reject a request, there's no way to know if they've been online or not - have they even seen your request?

So it can be quite easy for one user to appear to snub or ignore another user - intentionally or not. It can lead to a new variant on social networking anxiety.

direct messages

Direct messages are like really private tweets - short emails, essentially. They suffer the same problems as friends requests if they're sent while you are not receiving updates via mobile or chat. The web interface just tells you how many direct messages you've received, not how many are new or unread. You can't archive the old ones, so you just sort of have to remember the number you're up to. So you could easily miss a direct message - once again, social network anxiety fodder.

archive handling

Twitter's interface makes it quite hard to get a view of the the tweets posted since you last logged in. I guess the intention was that people would just jump back into the flow - or never leave it ;) But naturally enough people want to know what they missed, but can only find the last 24 hours. Which is silly really since everyone's entire history is stored.

teething problems?

It seems like the volume of SMS traffic generated by Twitter is causing some trouble in some parts of Australia.

what rocks about twitter

Twitter at its best is a little like a coffee shop full of friends. You can tune in and out, lurk, or start conversations. Because it's not actually IRC people know that you could be dropping past rather than actively watching. So you can check in a couple of times through the day or have a window sitting open all the time. It's your choice.

It also has to be acknowledged that Twitter really can go where you want it to - web, IM or mobile. That's really quite a broad reach. Since it uses SMS rather than WAP or wifi, even Aussies can use it from their mobiles (although beware of pocket posts).

Twitter is a nice, informal way to keep up with people - especially if you're not in regular email contact. Twitter's forces quick, easy messages - you can't get stuck writing a 1000 word email which never gets sent. This keeps it "light" - even a busy person can participate.

where's the money?

Sooner or later I think we'll see a business plan emerge. A few obvious ideas:

• premium features requiring paid subscription
• charging to receive updates via mobile
• ads on the site
• direct marketing (twitterspam)

In any case, someone must be paying the bills for all the text messages... sooner or later they'll want to see some return on investment. I'll be curious to see how/if Twitter is changed when that happens.

so what to make of it?

I think the tweet that most accurately sums up my experience so far was when I posted: blogs about twitter, twitters about blogging, then goes to bed. If you take it too seriously, you'll go nuts.

It's faster than email; slower than IRC (in a good way); doesn't demand immediate attention like IM and has a social/group aspect that SMS alone can't touch. It is quite odd, but I can't help thinking this is a sign of things to come. Communications channels that are flexible and quick, personal and tribal... it's approaching what I imagined when cyberpunk authors talked about personal comm units. In fact, more recent reading like Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is a little freaky when I consider the disrupted circadian rhythms of certain Twits.

So what do you make of something like Twitter? Whatever you want to, really - at least for now. No doubt it will evolve as time goes on... it will be interesting to watch.

Labels: communication, social networking, tribalism, twitter