Corvus Consulting

This post is the first of two about Twitter and its potential to be an effective and meaningful way of communicating. Today I’ll share some thoughts on objections to the micro-blogging groove, and try to show how Twitter does achieve meaningful communication because of, and not in spite of its format. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how Ma.gnolia is using Twitter to help us keep in touch with our members.

Pretty much anyone who has heard of Twitter has an opinion about it. Not just the casual, evaluative kind where we give a thumbs up/down or numeric rating, but a serious consideration of whether it’s somehow bad for us. The arguments go along one or both of these lines:

Objection 1. Twitter is noisy, and as such adds a high frequency interruption channel to our environment. With so many interruptions, getting focussed and into a productive state becomes more and more elusive, and we end up with something like late-onset ADD. Perfect instance: Kathy Sierra’s pondering if Twitter is the end of attention.

To hear that Twitter is noisy makes me point to the name and raise an eyebrow. It feels like it’s supposed to be a little noisy, and while that can be part of the fun it also has to be managed. Outpacing email and instant messaging, the phone, children, pets and the person who sits next to you, Twitter can be a serious interruption engine. And like all those other interruptions, learning to keep them from running and ruining you is part of working and playing in the Internet.

Objection 2. Twitter is a river of banal narcissism, in that answering the question that drives Twitter, “What are you doing right now?” produces only familiar, ordinary moments. Waiting for the bus. Eating a sandwich. Is your sandwich that important that the world must know? With 140 characters, what can you possibly say of substance? Perfect instance: Nick Carr calls out Twitterers as a navel-gazing chattering class.

Context is Key

The answer, I think, is quite a lot, and it’s not so much about what gets sent out as it is how it is read. Twitter posts (I really can’t call them ‘tweets’, not yet), aren’t consumed like most regular blog posts and web pages, because we usually read those items in the context of a search for information or in a passive, news-reading mode. Twitter is just sort of happening, and as such most Twitter posts can seem pretty trivial when read without some kind of context.

Since Twitter streams grow and intersect by adding ‘friends’, the most natural context is a personal relationship with an individual or group. Common, but important relationships, like friend to friend, organization members, teammates, and so on. In the context of these relationships, the conversation is already flowing in some way or another, opening up shared values, vocabularies and timelines as informers of each Twitter post.

To demonstrate, let’s make a fictional Twitterer. We’ll call him Adam and say he’s in university. When Adam posts to Twitter:

“Talking to Amanda on the phone”

We can imagine that being read in a few different ways:

Adam’s lab partner: Who’s Amanda?

Adam’s best friend: Awesome! He finally got the nerve to call her up!

Adam’s ex-girlfriend: Her?? I can’t believe it. He’s still rebounding.

Adam’s rugby coach: Whatever

Amanda: doesn’t use Twitter, which is probably a good thing at this point

How Adam’s post is read is determined largely by the relationship he has with the readers. There’s a neat trend in that scenario, where the more involved the shared context, the deeper the understanding, and the stronger the resonance. Indeed, Adam has moved the shared timeline between himself, his ex, and his best friend in under 140 characgters. As a relationship builds, Twitter posts can say more with the same number of characters, and I think that’s how Twitter posts can communicate very well with few words. This isn’t to say they always do.

Same Time, Different Space

Dropping into a bunch of Twitter posts might leave you feeling a bit lost if you don’t have any reason to be looking at them. Something has to tie you to the person making the post for the resonance to happen. The campus gossip scenario shows this in theory, but please try with me this comparison of experiences:

First, check out the public timeline from Twitter. You get the idea right away, but it’s just kind of there.

Next try this view, and let it play for a half-minute or so.

Bada-boom! Context! Every post gets a place on the world map, and you’re seeing it barely a moment after it was sent. With our understanding, or lack of, about places in the world we can establish a context for the person behind the post, and a powerful one at that. What does it do to know that someone who just posted “getting ready to go to the market” lives in Baghdad or in Paris? The difference in locality from our own or from what we are familiar with becomes a binding element in reading a given post and knowing where it comes from.

Place raises notions of environment, culture, language, stereotypes and more, and as such adds richness to each Twitter post. By also answering ‘where are you from’, Twittervision adds something engaging and human to what is otherwise can feel like a bulletin board on Red Bull. Twittervision adds the context of geography, an alternate to the context of interpersonal relationship.

Though overlapping Twitter streams with different types of contextual information are novel and interesting, the context of relationship seems to be the one in which Twitter works best. Returning to the scenario with Adam, we can see that the value starts to go down with the degree of interpersonal involvement. That would seem to relegate the best uses of Twitter to existing friends and family circles, but in fact, with the right circumstances and the right approach, Twitter can be a great tool for strengthening ties in communities that gather online around services or initiatives.

Next Time, on TwitterTalk

In the next post, I’ll show how we’re doing that at Ma.gnolia, and talk about some of the unexpected benefits of doing so.

Every so often a story about one or another web service passing a big milestone catches my eye. Numbers like 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, and so on, they make for good headlines, but what do they mean?

As milestones go, their significance is largely psychological, like the satisfaction (and mild thrill) of watching your car’s odometer roll over from 999,999 to 000,000. Even if we know that the last kilometer isn’t all that different from the ones before, it still feels special and is fun to watch.

Website registration counts are sort of the same: they impress, they’re fun to recognize, but they don’t tell you as much as they might seem.

This is not to say it’s a big scam; as the saying goes, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and we can safely say that where a site is growing in registrations there is definitely some attention and activity.

A few reasons that signup counts don’t tell the full story:

Multiple Accounts: people can sign up multiple times because they forget user names and passwords. In socially-oriented services, multiple accounts are used to manage multiple identities and manage exposure of personal interests and activities.

Hit and Run: especially common when websites launch, people will sign up to check things out, but then not return. The site’s design can enhance this effect by hiding desirable content from non-members. The result is plenty of dormant accounts that are counted on par with active ones.

Uncontrolled Registration: Sites that don’t require some kind of verification step are subject to having plenty of fake or otherwise invalid accounts. Sites that are a popular target for any kind of spam activity and don’t control registration are almost certain to have a high count of accounts that aren’t used by people or for legitimate purposes.

I considered not posting these reasons because they do provide a bit of a recipe for artificially driving up registration counts, but there is a way to see through the illusion no matter how it comes about: just watch the site for a few days. Are there other signs of life? Do you see evidence of the site being used for the reasons it was made? For example, I could tell you that Digg.com has x number of registrations, but that’s meaningless until you take a look at Digg Spy, and see in real-time the activity there, you know that it’s a site where things are indeed happening.

And that’s the key point here: the strength of a site is in the members who use it and use it well. That’s a real measure of how well the relationship between the product and customers is working out, even if it doesn’t make for catchy headlines.

Language changes with the times, so when we stop to listen to the words being used we get some insight into the intentions and dreams of the day. When we see patterns of use, we get a deeper sense of underlying values and how people are thinking. Take the way people talk about the web, and how it’s changed from Web 1.0 to 2.0.

In a recklessly informal and undocumented manner, I’ve been listening to the words that people emphasize when they talk about what’s important in Web 2.0, and it’s definintely different from the first time around (not that these things have real, discernable boundaries until we name them).

Hot Words in Web 1.0

Page Views

Eyeballs

Content

Push vs. Pull

Links

Hot Words in Web 2.0

Social

Interactive/AJAXy

Community

User generated

Sharing

Open

Now, this is a very selective and small sample, and it’s meant to demonstrate rather than prove a trend I’ve noticed in conversations and writing about what’s happening online. I see two significant differences between these sets of words. The first is more emphasis on human activities and experience (and more touchy-feely, to be fair); the second is that adjectives rather than nouns.

This second change is pretty interesting because it suggests more than just a new set of buzzwords in play. Instead, it suggests that we don’t talk as much about the technology being cool as what we do with it being cool.

Consider the leap being made here. In Web 1.0 we were impressed by streaming media, online translation services and shopping carts. It was a feeling of techno gee-whiz. It was fun, for sure. But now, services like MoveOn and Upcoming are moving people from online shared interest to physical world shared space. Flickr and LiveJournal let people express their personalities through words and images. This is a lot differeent from being able to catch CBC Radio online or to watch a news clip.

Try it yourself. When you hear a conversation going on about the web, what are the words that you hear the most? Are people talking about the nuts and bolts, or are they paying more attention to what they can build? Listen to them. They’re telling you what’s important.