Twitter is a social networking application that does only one thing — allows the mutual sharing of 140 character communications (called “tweets”). Why the 140 character limit? So you can send text updates from …
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Great reviews. I myself using twitter to update my Facebook status, but I keep checking my Facebook again to see if there’s any responses from my friends to my updated status.
Thanks for the antidote to the predictable but still tiresome backlash from other psych sources:
via @Scobleizer: Liked “Let the Twitter backlash begin: Times calls Twitter users narcissistic” http://ff.im/-1bhUN
Great article and I decided to Digg it for you Dr Grohol, however you are missing an important point and that is that Twitter encourages users to develop their intuition (and not rely on technology so much) by providing so much information that only a highly intuitive person will look at Twitter at the right time – when there is something relevant.
Armand, I get the RSS feed of my Facebook friends status updates, and also when they comment on my or a friends status update, all sent to my email, so I only visit Facebook when there is something I want to say or need to reply to. If you use Firefox, get the Facebook toolbar.
VERY interesting regarding age of users – not our experience at all (anecdotally). DeeAnna Merz Nagel reglarly tweets about how few of her under 20 students use of have even heard of twitter, and I did a straw poll of every under 20 year old I know and they all just use MySpace or FB.
Thanks John, good read!
Kate
Kate,
Your experience maps with the Pew Internet data – younger adults (ages 18, 19, 20) are more likely to be on Facebook/MySpace than on Twitter.
Median ages (meaning half of users are older, half are younger) according to Pew Internet surveys of internet users, age 18+
Facebook: 26
MySpace: 27
Twitter: 31
LinkedIn: 40
I find twitter the first useable social networking tool and have to say that I find the audience more ‘mature’ shall we say. The only useful thing on Facebook now is sharing photos and videos – the endless stupid applications are childish and boring. Twitter allows you to connect with like-minded people and for me is geared towards sharing business or hobby information as much as simply chatting.
Interesting article though.
I use http://ping.fm to do all of my updates.
John –
Thanks for your very insightful post. You really clarify the issue of normal conversations having a beginning, middle and end, as opposed to Twitter being continuous and nonstop. Perhaps this explains the need of many folks to routinely tweet “good morning peeps” and “good night tweepts.”
You also really nail the signal:noise ratio issue. The ‘unfiltered stream of consciousness’ is both the strength and weakness of Twitter.
Carol
Well, this is the first time I’ve appeared in a screen grab of my Twitter activity!
Great post, John. For me there’s an additional aspect that’s been a phenomenal rocket ship ride: connections.
Ted Eytan told me early on that it’s all about the conversation, not the individual tweets. He’s right. I started following a couple of interesting people. Seeing their tweets, I saw some people there that seemed interesting; I clicked on their names and saw what they’d been tweeting, and if they were indeed interesting, I followed them. Then when I had something to say to them, I’d say it, and they’d start following me, and I might follow them, and it grew exponentially.
Today I’m being followed by an insanely large group of people I’m unlikely to have ever met, certainly not that quickly: @WSJHealthBlog, @SciAm, Elizabeth Cohen of CNN, several IBM executives involved in healthcare, two dozen MDs, and many others. My tweets have been picked up and forwarded (retweeted) around the world. Wow.
It’s a far cry from the “Dude, I’m in line at Ben & Jerry’s” tweets of the early days. Here’s a big shout-out to @JonL of Social Web Strategies – he was darn right to steer us there.
BUT – thanks for explaining what it is, more clearly than anything else I’ve seen!
Thanks everyone for the interesting discussion points and additional insights…
I think Ted Eytan is missing a component that is important to more people than not when talking about conversations — we value those that are easy to follow and bring value to all parties.
Twitter doesn’t differentiate “value” to the listener (just as a blog can’t either). That means that no matter whom you follow, it can be a very random experience. Some people I follow sometimes say something valuable, insightful. Sometimes those same people will go to a baseball game and give me a play-by-play (that I neither want nor find interesting). So then I spend more time “managing” people I follow, off and on. And spend even more cognitive resources in managing this new information stream.
Granted, I think it has some value. But that value varies greatly, from day to day and even from hour to hour. Following the “right” people is a start, but it doesn’t guarantee anything… And if you’re on the computer all day, it’s probably a lot more valuable to you than if you’re on a construction site all day. Which is to say, most people don’t have jobs that allow them to follow other people’s online conversations and stream of consciousness.
Very apt.. and it is for a more older thoughtful audience. but it is time consuming. you need to find ways to streamline
I haven’t tried Facebook toolbar yet, I’ll seek for it after this post. Thanks for the tip
Like the people who walk around in constant contact on a cellphone, twitter and blackberry addicts are insulating themselves from who they really are. Hopefully, some loved one will be there to pull them away.
I agree with the author–I am already overloaded. I can’t imagine I would have anything useful to say on twitter–it IS narcissistic, if you think about it. Also can’t imagine wanting to “keep up” with anyone’s 24/7 thoughts or movements–would be lost in an endless stream of data.
I’m sorry, I didn’t have the attention span to read your whole article. Please rephrase it in 140 characters or less!
I find the site very annoying. Can you imagine seeing 30 new Tweets every 5 hours, and then finding most of them to be conversations between their friends? I only use it as a status updater, rather than a conversational tool, because to “Reply” to a Tweet means that your status on your profile will change to your latest reply — so when someone views my profile they will see “@Amanda: Hahaha what time is it tomorrow?” rather than “I’m feeling overwhelmed with school, please bring me ice cream~ haha”
You’re absolutely right about Twitter not differentiating “value”. But I don’t try to “manage” people I follow. I trust that I will see what I need to see, and if I missed it I really haven’t “missed” anything. I use the search function to find like-minded people and it’s yielded a joint venture opportunity and some interesting and insightful info
“Despite the relative ease of creating a web page and putting it somewhere online in 1996 (GeoCities was an online community that hosted such pages and had millions of users at one point), online conversation really began on the web with the advent of blogs.”
USENet (the current major instantiation is Google Groups) has been around much longer than blogs, allowing users the ability to carry on online conversations.
“A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B…” (Lessig). If blogging gets us thinking socially / conversationally, engaging in and through personal philosophies with others around us, microblogging (i.e. twittering) gets us thinking socially on-the-fly, encouraging us to cut through flourishes and decorations to get to the point. What we need to watch out for of course is that we do not turn out into a culture of people walking around talking in elevator pitches.
http://pareidoliac.blogspot.com/2009/02/twitter-diagram-art-of-communication.html
Excellent post John, hope to see you at the conference in Canada!