Blog of Mr. Tweet

This is a guest by Luke Razzell (@weaverluke). Luke is the Director of Weaverluke Solutions, as well as the CEO and User Experience/UI design lead for i-together Ltd. You can find Luke’s original short paper on Twitter here

Twitter has been called “the railroad tracks…of the 21st century.” Andy Murray, Stephen Fry and millions of other people use it. Even Britney Spears - or at least her “people” - have joined the party.

But what’s it actually for?

In trying to answer that question, let’s begin by finding out the opposite—what doesn’t define Twitter’s utility.

Log into twitter.com and you’ll see a prompt: “What are you doing?” However, two years from Twitter’s launch, status updates are just one of myriad ways we are actually using Twitter.

Here are some examples:

• For impromptu, topical, collective-action in the US (during the 2008 Presidential election campaign): “Let’s Use Twitter To Track Robocalls In Real Time”;
• To track notifications of delays on specific lines on the London Underground (very useful for a Londoner, this);
• As a means of getting out of jail, writing a novel and talking to ones plants (presumably not all at the same time).

So is Twitter just about communicating useful information?

Not all the time. People are writing short stories in 140 characters or less, amidst messages detailing their breakfasts for our reference. It’s hard to make a case for the usefulness of such things, at least in a conventional sense.

It seems that practical utility alone isn’t enough to explain Twitter’s appeal.

Me/We

If you can’t define what Twitter is for, how about who Twitter is for? Twitter could be beneficial to:

• Individuals
• Groups
• Objects

Collective applications of Twitter can be quite compelling. Steve Bowbrick (@bowbrick), editor of BBC Radio 4 Blog,

“favorite use of Twitter: the learning blogs and the school trip blog at Fair Field Juniors http://www.fairfield.herts.sch.uk/ fairfieldtrip”.

It must be heartwarming to be able to follow your child’s and their friends’ story of their school trip - live.

Non-individual Twitter identities, such as inanimate objects, are also proving highly popular. @LJRICH writes:

“I follow a few inanimate tweeters, @towerbridge is soothingly zen in its tweets, and @marsphoenix sounds pretty easy-going.”

Interestingly, when public institutions such as the British (@downingstreet 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s office) and @r4today (Radio 4’s flagship news program, Today) start tweeting, the Twitterati (a name for people who spend too much time on Twitter)  seem to feel honour-bound to ferret out the individual human being behind the official Twitter-persona facade. We are getting used to authentic, human-to-human conversations, and we like it!

What does Twitter and Face-To-Face Interaction Have In Common?

It strikes me that Twitter is uncannily like…socializing!

Consider the aspects of Twitter that are closely analogous to how we socialize face-to-face:

- Every breath you take
Small chunks of text (the 140 character limit for each tweet ensures this point) mimic phrase lengths of natural conversation.

- Talk to her
An message can be directed at a particular user or users with the “@” symbol, while still being visible to all. Just like a conversation held in public.

- A word in your shell-like
A “d” (direct) message is only visible to the intended recipient, as with a conversation held in a private space.

- Oyez, oyez
Standard tweets are addressed to anyone who cares to listen. In Twitterland, we can all stand at the lectern and at the same time all be in the audience. It’s quite mind-bending as an abstract concept, but soon comes to feel quite natural in practice, in my experience at least.

- Dear diary
Speaking to experience: just as some record aspects of their lives for posterity in their diaries, so do Twitter users sometimes use the service as much for its own “memory” as to communicate with other people.

- In your own words
Twitter seems to be inspiring a revival of wordsmithery - a trend birthed by the blogging boom - in this age of Pop Idol and America’s Next Top Model. And this focus on linguistic precision and expressivity is analogous to the immense sophistication we bring to our offline conversations, in terms of tone of voice, body language, choice of vocabulary and syntax and so on.

- The fuzz factor
Physical-world social networks are naturally “fuzzy” in two key ways: in how we define our relationships within our social networks, and in the boundaries we draw around those networks. Our associations and feelings about any given person are far richer and more complex than the labels “friend”, “colleague” or “partner” can encompass; and someone who is a member of your running club might become one of your group of drinking buddies in the course of a Saturday afternoon.

Twitter “gets” this social network fuzziness by allowing people not in our explicit “friend” network to impinge on our attention through @ messages (if we enable this feature)—pretty close to the way “toe dipping” chit-chat we use to get to know people face-to-face.

Imitating Real Life

When you recommend a film to a friend, you don’t then proceed to recount the whole script to them (or at least, if you do, you are a very strange individual). Similarly, on Twitter, one points to interesting stuff - often adding a hyperlink added to the description - rather than reproducing it whole.

For example, @jlojlo writes: “Working at a startup sounds fun | Venture-backed startup seeks pet-loving Accounting Manager http://twurl.nl/hpik3j”.

In my experience, great social technology is transparent to our innate ways of being, and at the same time amplifies and extends them beyond the limitations of the temporal, physical world. Twitter is a great service because it does all that so effectively—imitating but also transforming how we communicate and socialize with one another.

What do YOU think?

• What do you think Twitter is for?
• Does it imitate the way we communicate face-to-face?
• Would you put it differently?

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you’d like to read a version with more quotes, links, pictures and two extra sections at the end (”Where is Twitter” and “But does it scale?”), just click on through to weaverluke.com.