Twitter – conversation or not?
I’ve quickly realized that for me, it’s not a converstation. Sure, disembodied tweets will float past with my @tim_gregory handle in them, and from time to time I’ll get a private message that is usually impossible to reply to in a meaningful way inside the 140 character limit. But on the whole, I’m finding it a very narrow-band way to communicate. Or perhaps I should rephrase that – the bandwidth is low (very little real information flows) but the super-low latency almost makes up for it.
I received this notification in my email –
Wow! Guy Kawasaki is following me! Amazing!
Then I took a look at the stats in the mail and saw that he is also following 134,598 other people. More accurately, Guy and a couple of ghost writers are now following me. Or not-following me, because I don’t really believe I’ve entered Guy’s online inner circle.
Frankly, I’m disappointed. I get status updates from real people I know through Facebook. And from colleagues through LinkedIn. It’s sort-of fun to be following Buzz Aldrin on Twitter, but I’ve realized it’s no more personal than watching him on TV. Or reading a magazine. That’s if it’s even him, as we’re starting to discover that celebs like 50 cent, Guy Kawasaki, Britney Spears and others are all employing people to tweet for them.
If you haven’t seen the video “Twouble with Twitters” it’s worth checking out:
In spite of the obvious crush that the traditional media has on Twitter right now, some people are not too impressed with it… take a look at the comments here on The Twitter Debate at the Guardian (ironically, I spotted the link via the Guardian’s Twitter feed) .
Scanning through the positive parts of it, you’ll see a familiar refrain:
“Our world is far too complex and sophisticated to split into Twitter haters and Twitter lovers. It’s a conversation. Twitter is just another way to enable that conversation.”
Why does everyone think it’s a conversation? Is Ashton Kutcher speaking to them directly? Are Guy Kawasaki’s ghost-writers engaged in a conversation with his followers? Not really…. Here are some stats from Harvard Business Publishing Blogs:
- The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets
- Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one
- Over half of Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days
Starting to look less like a conversation and more like a mailing list for the ADD crowd to me.
The next stat makes this idea of Twitter being a conversation even more ridiculous:
On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.
So why is Twitter so popular and growing so quickly? I have a couple of theories…
1. Realtime
There once was a time when internet users weren’t using the web. Yes, that prehistoric age before html, http, and the WWW became the only markup, protocol and application used online.
What did people DO? Amongst familiar apps like email, they used IRC, Usenet News, MUDs and MOOs, and even before internet access was widely available, geeks used to hang out on BBS systems. Old-school Capetonian geeks might remember the Mother City Mail Hub and the Tinderbox BBS amongst others.
All these services were ways for people to communicate with each other in real-time.. to chat, play games, trade files and swap ideas.
Most have faded into obscurity, or more accurately, been marginalized by the ubiquity of the web and web-based apps.
Some of the recent buzz around the usefulness of Twitter as a communications channel out of Iran has obvious historical parallels – IRC was used to report on the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 through a media blackout, and during the first Gulf War.
My theory (which is not particularly profound or unique) is simply that Twitter is a Web2.0 version of IRC.
2. Undemanding
If Twitter is just web-based IRC, why is it so much more popular?
The reason, I believe, is somewhat counter-intuitive – Twitter is undemanding.
There is no presence indicator, so you never really know whether someone is online or not. Even if you send a direct message, you have no way of knowing when they will get it and if Harvard’s stats are right, they’re unlikely to respond anyway. Nobody seems to care whether a particular tweet gets a response.
If you’re busy all day and don’t look at Twitter and a few hundred message go by, you’re not likely to try get through the backlog like you would with your email… you can just jump in at any point.
It’s very telling that celebrity tweeters like Guy Kawasaki measure success not by how many responses they get to their tweets, but by how many times their tweets are retweeted.
Further evidence that Twitter is treated as a broadcast medium rather than a conversation.
The most undemanding part about Twitter is the 140 character limit.. it liberates the user, and frees them from ever writing a fully-formed sentence or a well-reasoned argument.
The limit lends itself to little shorthand bursts of telegraph – jokes, links, ads, quick comments, personal status updates and requests for help.
Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, maybe there’s a conversation going on that I’m not a part of.. who knows. For now I’m pretty happy with the friends I have, and the ones I meet.
And these Twitter followers can **** off.
Updated:
Great report on Twitter usage and trends available from Sysomos – In-Depth Look Inside Twitter
Some highlights:
- 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009
- 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
- 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
- 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people
- 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
- New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
- More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
- There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
- Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people
PDF version of the report is available here
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Beautifully balanced Tim, I enjoyed this one.
Tim: that made for a great read!
I love the way modern technology is redefining the English language: a “conversation” was once something two or more people engaged in – now it seems you can have one on your own; a “friend” was once someone in your close social circle – now you don’t even have to have met them.
I think the description of Twitter that I like most is that its a “stream of consciousness”.
I especially like your observation that “you can just jump in at any point” – that certainly describes the attraction that Twitter holds for me.
Wow Guy is following you as well. He seems to be following everyone. Isn’t there a limit or some kind of ration on twitter. How can you track or have a conversation with so many followers.
I see he is following me as well.
I also find that twitter seems to be evolving into a blog marketing / promotion tool. Very few people actual try to connect, have conversation, albeit only 140 char at a time.
Yes it can be and should be used as a marketing tool. But for me, it is more than that. It is about building relationships, building networks.
My followers go up and down 100 times a day by probably100 followers a day. But that does not bother me. Fortunately I do not have a auto follow on. So I only follow real people. Before I follow, I do a bit of a check up. to see if he is real, to see if I would want to follow them, to see if they will add value.
Great post by the way
Agree about the broadcast vs conversation argument on the whole, although some twits (what I call those who seem to live on Twitter) do seem to actually converse this way. My observations about them:
1) These ppl seem to mainly work in the internet industry, so it ends up being almost twittering about twittering.
2) As a casual tweeter/twitterer, these people can be irritating to follow, since your home page feed becomes dominated by these individuals, leaving little space on the first page for your other less prolific friends, and their volume tending to drown out some good tweets they may have tweeted hours ago.
As a musician, the analogy for me is like a club .. I go there since I know some of my friends are there, and a good measure of “cool people” in the industry. Thus a useful tool for me now, but when the crowd moves on, I probably will too.
Currently finding a combination of soundcloud.com and twitter to be very useful for realtime broadcasts of whats going on my studio though!