Twittering away
I am an information junkie. I admit it. I have 75 RSS feeds set up in my reader as a sidebar in my browser (Sage in Firefox). I have, after much much pruning, reduced my bookmark set to only 35 sites here at work (at home, it is maybe 5 times bigger than that). If I am honest with myself, they turned into RSS feeds, mostly. Worse, every day I visit at least four message forums and scan through recent posts.
I am also on IM and email. I hit the news sites, like CNN or BBC, usually three or four times a day. I get both Time and Entertainment Weekly delivered at home, and actually read them cover to cover (usually on a two week delay). Plus, I get two or three other magazines that were given as gifts.
It’s easy to get into information overload mode.
At SXSW, all the buzz was about Twitter, a service which is sort of like public texting, or microblogging. It’s all the rage among the lifelogging crowd: the folks who want to maintain records of all their activity — often publicly. The idea is that you send out quick little updates about what you are doing, pretty much constantly all day. You can subscribe to channels for groups or individuals, and basically monitor what they say they are doing. For a sense of what this is like without actually joining Twitter, check out this nifty map that shows Twitters based on location.
There is something hypnotically addictive about Twitter. At SXSW they had plasma screens up showing conference-related tweets as they went by. People found it incredibly useful for coordinating gatherings on the fly, since they could access it via their phones, get updates constantly on where their friends were having dinner, and let everyone who might care know that they were running late.
Me, I mostly spent my time at SXSW arguing about Twitter. To me, there’s a fine line between a tweet of real information and well, twittering. Watching the plasma screen scroll by, I was struck by how many messages were “How do I get this to STOP??!?!?”
I’m not the only skeptic. I have commented that something about Twitter felt a little faddish to me: something that felt like it was hot in techie circles, but maybe not quite in touch with the real world. And the dictionary definition of twittering, after all, is that it is “trivial information.”
twit·ter [twit-er] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation –verb (used without object)
ər
1. to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird.
2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.
I voluntarily absorb enough trivia as it is… a couple of years ago, there was a lot of attention paid to Linda Stone’s notion of continuous partial attention, and the fact that psychological and cognitive research shows that in some ways there ain’t no such thing. Multitasking is a myth, because task switching has a cost to humans. We may grow more comfortable at floating between streams of data, but the fact remains that we cannot pay deep attention to too many things at once.
But of course, there’s more going on than just the exchange of information. There’s also the sensation of being present in a social matrix. We talk to others not only because we want to trade data, but also because we want to see a response, we want to know at some atavistic level that there are others out there who care. In that sense, the sensation of reading Twitters is like floating in a vast sea of connectedness.
To some degree, it feels like illusory connectedness, in that Twitter is really not a good medium to hold a conversation (defined as the mutual turn-based exchange of information). You subscribe to people, you don’t engage with them; indeed, already, much like blogs themselves, we see celebrities with large groups of followers.
In the end, I find myself ambivalent. Will Twitter be successful? Yes, I think it probably will. Will it be good for you? I’m torn, and think the answer is probably not. Will it sustain? I don’t know. As an information junkie, I ditch the feeds and forums and sites that aren’t giving me a high-enough caliber of stuff on a regular basis. Twitter wouldn’t make the cut, most likely.
19 Responses to “Twittering away”
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Creating Passionate Users: User Community and ROI – Mar 22, 2007 – Raph Twittering away – Mar 22, 2007 – Raph Ludium II announced – Mar 21, 2007 – Raph Keynote at ETech – Mar 21, 2007 – Raph Third-party metaverse developers – Mar 21, 2007
Twitter is definitely interesting. The very nature of it seems to stem from the generational shift discussed in the often cited New Yorker article about the end of privacy.
It may not be traditionally a good method for a conversation, yet in actual use, it is often what it’s used for. In particular, in can be quite effective as a cast-response form, effectively simulating a roundtable: pose your question, listen to the responses, respond to their questions.
Honestly, where Twitter really shines as an emergent medium is when used in conjunction with third party applications, such as Twitterrific, which allows Twitter to become transparent to the user, and as passive as the user cares to be. The whole notion of innocuous “push”-based information is remarkably appealing, and I’d love to see the concept (if not the implementation) explored in other media (such as MMOs).
Looks like a novelty, but if made into a game, perhaps with a mechanism for rating twitters… Well, I can just envision a massive competition to create the most engaging and entertaining twitters. Imagine that! People actually doing more with their lives than sitting in their cubicles, making calls, and pretending to be well-travelled because they browse Flickr.
I’m in much the same boat. I still run out of things to read and I have over 180 RSS feeds I subscribe to, forums I track, etc. So much of the information that already flows past my filters is absolutely useless to me… well, at the moment it is anyway.
But I can’t find myself terribly excited about knowing what people are doing every single moment of their day. Perhaps if everyone’s life was terrifically exciting, or even mythic, I might care more.
But come to think of it, I could probably even stand to track other people’s daily routines. I can see a odd value to having that large of a pattern sprawled before you every day.
What I can’t imagine is committing to updating my own feed in any sort of meaningful fashion. A stream of sub conscious gibberish would be the most I could commit to and that’d probably get old after a week or two.
[…] Twitter is the hot new website. I’m not much of a social person, though, especially online. As I’ve probably said […]
I’m a bit to busy for twitter but that map was seriously very cool
When I first saw Twitter, I thought it was just a fancyfied version of old-fashioned .plan files and finger. Of course, that’s like saying that blogs are just fancified home pages, or that RSS feeds are just fancified EDI.
At any rate, Twitter will probably prove as faddish as all the other purely social networks (LiveJournal, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, etc.), and will be replaced by something that’s even more of a time suck.
I already pinged it on my journal, but I’m surprised it hasn’t appeared here, so I’m just going to link Andy Havens’ take: Continuous Partial… Look! A Bunny!”
Here are couple good reads comparing Twitter and Dodgeball. Personally, I htink both are promising, but only so promising that they will fail. Someone else will clone them with something that addresses their shortcomings and consumers are fickle. The second article in particular has some very good points about stuff to address (eg management off state across devices, say on phones when you don’t have an all-you-can-eat data plan, for example):
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/sxsw-showdown-dodgeball-vs-twitter/
http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/18/tweet_tweet_some_thoughts_on_twitter.php
Humans appear to be really poor at multi tasking during verbal conversation, a lot better when doing written conversation and quite good when just producing written output. As things the langugae part of the brain seems to engage in.
Personally to multitask properly, for example when playing the guitar and singing at the same time the trick at least for me lies with practicing the thing until one of them can be done by the subconcious parts of the brain. Maybe you can train yourself to output interesting written conversation as a subconcious process too?
I dunno, it looks like more of the same. They’re taking what’s already there, and making you access it differently. Not necessarily better, but differently. But maybe I just don’t understand it properly. 🙂
Not bad Raph 😉
My info consumption was never as out-of-control as yours, and has grown more modest over the past year or so.
I skim Google News, Slashdot, your blog, Damion’s, sometimes Brian Green’s, and Richard Bartle’s everyday blog (but that one not every day). I now avoid forums of all kinds, they waste too much time. The amount of Slashdot (or real news) that I read in a day is directly proportional to how much I don’t want to work on whatever I’m supposed to be working on (there is always more than 8 hours worth of stuff to work on, so on the days when I’m keen to work I often end up not reading anything at all).
Wow, thanks for this Raph. Amazing. Looking at it I feel a sense of awe at all the people around the world. I know intellectually of course that people are out there doing things but to see it real time is a different feeling.
If a tree doesn’t fall in the woods, and Twitters about it, does anyone give a fat rat’s ass…
I love me my many RSS feeds, my emails, my IMs, my cell phone, my blogs, my wikis, etc. But I just don’t get Twitter. Somebody explain to me how it’s any better than just setting my IM message to display what I’m up to at the moment?
On a related note, a NYTimes article on the limits and pitfalls of info overload / multitasking:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/25multi.html
[…] early in the nineteenth century were probably about as distracting as Twitter is today. Perhaps a distinctive feature of modern life is that the admonition “stay […]
Andy quit being so 2006! Its multichannel communication! So you can broadcast your existence moment to moment in REAL TIME! OMG!….
ugh…
[…] – 80 of about 86,100 for korean friendster like websites… Raph’s Website » Twittering awayI hit the news sites, like CNN or BBC, usually three or four times a day. …. purely social […]