philcrissman.com

I suppose I’ve been using Twitter for a few weeks now; more so in the last week or two. It’s not a long time, but Twitter is not a complicated application. Here are some thoughts.

I haven’t gone and looked for interviews with the founders or other stories about Twitter, but in my own humble estimation, Twitter is based on the assumption that communication is valuable, connections are valuable, and the two together are more valuable. Twitter’s creators may put it differently, but I’d be very surprised if the meaning would vary much. Twitter is a social network, period, on where you have only three avenues of expression:

• Your profile.
• What you actually say.
• Who you are following.

The profile is minimal, so far as online communities go. You can put your own photo (or a reasonable facsimile), customize a few colors, and (if you want) your own background image. That’s it. No lists, no favorites, no custom applications, no videos, no articles, no photo galleries. Just one external “more info” link, a short-short bio, and your location. I like that about it; it forces you to sort of say “Hey, this is me,” without leaving your choice in music and film to define you.

“What you say” is the meat and potatoes of Twitter. You have 140 characters in which to say it. (Aside: I wonder if that number is the fruit of any actual research, or if it was just serendipity? In practice, it does seem to be enough to actually say something, but restrictive enough to enforce brevity.) The Twitter question is, “What are you doing?” Chris Brogan told Guy Kawasaki that he re-interprets that as “What has your attention right now?” Others seems to use this in varying other ways, but I think Chris’ question nails the way most Twitter users use it.

Who you are following actually says quite a bit, I’m beginning to think. Before I started writing this, I had glanced at Scoble’s Twitter page and was surprised to notice that he is following more people than there are following him. At first I was sure I had read the numbers wrong. Listen, Scoble is as close as you will come to a celebrity blogger; he is well known because of blogging, but pretty much only to other bloggers. (Sorry Robert). All reason would assume that Scoble would have many, many more followers than there are people whom he is following.

This is not to say that you “should” be following more people than there are following you — that’s not the point. It’s that the fact that Scoble is following more people than follow him says something about Scoble. It says (to me, at least), that he’s sold; he sees Twitter as valuable, and sees the connections he has on it as valuable, and he’s enthusiastic about it.

What I’m saying here is not rocket science, and it’s not meant to be deep or profound; simply the observation that who you choose to follow on Twitter says something about you.

Twitter is often dismissed as “noise”. Could be true from some vantage points; there is plenty of noise on Twitter. That’s where your choice to follow comes in, of course. If a certain user is just noise, then you stop following. Doesn’t matter who they are; if it’s not valuable, stop following. Now, value is a stretchy concept here; that doesn’t mean we expect everyone to be profound in 140 characters or less, to do nothing but opine about tech, community, and/or politics (this isn’t reddit), and always be coherent.

I have plenty of people I follow who seem to tweet (yes… that’s the verb. No, I’m not sure I like it either) a LOT. Spin (Eric Rice) always has a lot to say. Other than via Twitter and a few times reading his blog, I know nothing about Eric. A lot of the time, I think he’s just complaining. I don’t really care, because every once in awhile he says something or links to something that I’m glad I’ve seen. Conversely, I’m a big fan of Guy Kawasaki’s writings. On Twitter, however, most of what he says is simply the Best of Truemors, something which I really don’t care about. I stay following Guy because; well, I’m not sure why.

The missing feature of Twitter that I would like to see is groups. For example, you could have your co-workers on one group, and if desired could restrict the tweets you’re reading to only that group. Okay, work is really the only application I have for that feature — you can probably think of more (Of course, you could always have you and all your coworkers create new, private profiles for work, and then just all follow only each other. Groups would be simpler, but that would work.)

However, adding groups to Twitter might break it out of the enchanting minimalism in which it rests; I don’t know. It seems like a small things, but next thing you know, you might have two hundred Twitter groups, and instead of being Twitter, it’s email. Except you can only write messages of 140 characters or less. (Which would be an improvement on email, IMHO.)

All this musing leads me to compare Twitter with blogs. I’d reckon that Twitter users are bloggers; period. I would be very surprised to learn of a regular Twitter user who did not also blog. I think part of the reason for this is that the value-added by Twitter will not be apparent unless you have already been exposed to an example of it, and the most glaringly obvious example would be the blogosphere (can we use that term without being ironic, now? Is there a better term? Blog-o-world? Blogunity? Blogocosm?). That being the case; which is more valuable: a Twitter feed, or a blog feed? Off the top of my head, I’d say the blog feed, hands down. In a weblog, you have more room to say… more stuff. Assuming you have anything to say. Blogs lack the “built in” community of a Twitter or any other explicit social network, but they wind up forming their own loosely joined social network anyways, via comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, and the like.

That’s the extent of my opining on Twitter, for today.