Twitter and Opaqueness
First off, I’m headed to Ireland this weekend for the Electric Picnic. If you happen to be around, drop me a line.
Okay, now on to some real stuff. I want to talk about Twitter. For those unfamiliar with the service it’s a sort of microblogging platform that allows you to send posts via text message, web or third-party app. Friends subscribe and can receive your posts through any of those portals. For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the point of Twitter was. It seemed like it was solving a problem I didn’t have.
But then we built House of Naked and included Twitter integration. All of a sudden everyone from work was Twittering back and forth as it was the easiest way to add content to the site. Once I had a real-life social network on the service it became a far more useful tool. Twitter has become a place for exchanging funny quotes and inside jokes within a network who exists within a certain proximity and mindset. The majority of people I’m subscribed to exist within this network and while occasionally I find it annoying that my phone is constantly buzzing with new text messages (or that I get a $300 phone bill because I hadn’t turned on unlimited texts), overall I love this connection point and feel like it’s brought much of the office closer.
Overall I think the service has been quite brilliant in the way it’s handled itself. Twitter never really tried to describe what it did and rather has allowed its users to determine the path of the service. For instance in July they streamlined the friending process. Rather than having to chose between “friend” and “follow” (which no one quite understood), they changed it to just “follow” and gave users the option to receive notifications via SMS. In doing so, they solved what I believe to be the most fundamental problem with social networks at the moment.
As anyone on Facebook can attest to, making friendship a binary decision makes things quite difficult on occasion. Sure you can give someone a “limited profile”, however, the user on the other end knows that you’ve done this. It kind of feels like calling someone an “acquaintance” to their face. Friendship is not a binary thing. We all have different levels of people we call “friends”, ranging from folks we talk to every day to those we’ve met once.
Twitter solved this problem incredibly elegantly. You can add anyone as a follower, however, you can be very selective about who you subscribe to on your mobile without letting the other party know. This kind of opaque management of social connections is almost completely unheard of anywhere else. There are lots of people trying to figure this problem out at the moment, but no one besides Twitter (which is also a fundamentally different kind of social software) seems to be doing a particularly well.
Not quite sure what to do with all this, just wanted to get it out there.
And I wanted to find a way to put “opaque management of social connections” into a sentence. Have a great long weekend.
Update (9/11/07): I signed up for an Orkut account and they have a feature that seems to do just this. It allows you to opaquely decide where someone falls on a friendship scale of 1-5.
Hi, I'm 
My good friend’s band, The Greenskeepers, is playing at Electric Picnic. Look for them – they give a great show.
yeah. it’s like if you were at a crowded bar with a large group of friends and friends of friends, it would be pretty weird if you went around and told each person whether you were going to listen to them or not. it’s much more natural to just quietly shift your attention from one person to another without broadcasting it.
I guess at the same time it says something about how you can use Twitter in different ways.
Most people I know (including me) use Twitter solely on the web. In fact, in Australia you have no option but to use it on the web, you can’t get messages sent to your phone.
What I dig about Twitter is the immediacy and personality. You’re tapped right into someone’s head and you feel like you know exactly what they are thinking. It’s remarkable how quickly you can get to know how someone thinks through 180 character tweets.
Have a great time in Ireland. I really like the “immediacy” of twitter. See you next week!
Bonnie
I think there’s something about Twitter being a “status signal.” Not status like you’re better than me, but status like “hey, bud, how are you doing?” No twitter is ever going to get you deep inside your friend’s mind. But if nothing else, it sends a small flare that says that they’re still alive, you know? A small proof of continued existence.
I’m one of those folks on the other end of your twitters, Noah, and that small proof is a really nice thing when, for example, I’m away on business and I still want to feel connected to everyone sitting there in our loft in Soho. And for me to know that despite my absence, you all haven’t forgotten about me.
Mike, that’s just the metaphor I was looking for. Thanks.
Paull, you’re right. I didn’t give enough of a nod to the fact that I use it in a very specific way. How often do you check the site?
Pak, I think you’re absolutely right. Check out this entry by Grant McCracken about that very idea.
Oh, you can tell if you give someone a limited profile on Facebook? Does it actually say “limited profile” when you go to the page? I didn’t think that was the case. This reminds me of when I blocked invitations from someone on evite. I just thought they wouldn’t come through to my inbox, but evite actually notified the person and then that person asked me why I did it. Um, that was a bit awkward.
By the way, on Orkut, I don’t think that the rating system actually does anything. It’s just a reference for you, I guess. I could be wrong.