Untwisting Twitter

Have you heard of Twitter?  If you’ve heard of it, do you know what it is?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer to one or both of those is “no.”  I consider myself a close follower of web developments, and fairly adept at figuring out what some of these newfangled services are for… but Twitter is one of the rare ones that had me dumbfounded.  It literally took me months to understand why anyone would use this, and to understand why all the bloggers that I follow see it as such an important service.

And if it took me this long to figure out what Twitter is or how it’s useful, then it has a ways to go before it hits the mainstream and becomes adopted by the masses.

After drilling down to the FAQ, Twitter describes itself as “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“  Anticipating your next question (“But… what is the point?”), the FAQ responds:

As it turns out, your best friend is probably interested in knowing if you’re “loving the new Radiohead album.” And yes, your Mom may want to know if you’re “skipping breakfast in favor of a latte.”  You might want to know if your significant other “feels like taking a roadtrip.” Find out what your friends are doing; keep each other abreast of your quotidian rituals.

If you’re still not following, let me try to help.  Twitter is basically a mix of instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, and the Facebook status update.

• Like instant messaging, messages (in Twitter they’re called “tweets”) are often composed on the computer and can include links to other websites.  Messages can also be directed to specific people, as opposed to the whole public.
• It is similar to text messaging in that tweets are limited to 140 characters, so messages must be brief.  (Twitter updates can also be made by text message).
• It is akin to blogging in that tweets are logged in reverse-chronological order for each person on their Twitter page, and a user’s feed can be subscribed to both through an RSS reader and through the built-in “follow” function.
• And finally, it is like the Facebook status update because a tweet usually says something about what the person is doing or thinking.

But still… why?  We already have instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, and Facebook.  Why is there a need for this service that pulls characterisitcs from each of those and makes something completely new?

The jury is still out on exactly why it is catching on, but the fact is that it is spreading like wildfire.  Twitter has been widely adopted by journalists on the campaign trail, who send their instant reactions either to colleagues back at the office or to readers who want “live” coverage of events.  This trend has been referred to as “microjournalism.”  Indeed, many of the candidates themselves (Obama, Edwards, Paul, Clinton) have embraced the medium to keep their fans up to date.  When Steve Jobs gave his MacWorld keynote, Twitter almost crashed because of the number of bloggers and journalists logging their thoughts on Apple’s new products and services.  Wikipedia notes that the L.A. Fire Department used the service to provide updates during the wildfires of last fall, and it tweets on today.

New websites are popping up every day that make use of Twitter.  Twittervision shows realtime tweets on a Google Map (warning: highly addictive).  Politweets keeps tabs on mentions of presidential candidates’ names.  I Want Sandy is a virtual personal assistant that can be interfaced with using Twitter.  Commuter Feed aggregates messages from travelers to update others on road and metro conditions.

So, the potential for Twitter is enormous.  We’re moving more and more into an age of “lifecasting,” where we ping our friends and family with updates on what we’re doing (or thinking), and why.  This data will be tagged, filtered, forwarded, debated, and acted upon.  We’re moving further and further into the era of the “now”, of the quick and dirty, of the unfiltered and unrefined.

While thousands of people are signing up to tweet every day, it’s still not mainstream.  Twitter still has a lot of self-defining to do, and as it does so it needs to remember the golden rule of user privacy and user choice.  And Twitterers need to remember, too, that every update they make — unless carefully controlled by privacy options — will be forever searchable and discoverable.  I can’t wait until the first celebrity Twitterer slips up à la Don Imus… but in this day where every person is leaving their digital footprints in text, photos, and videos, we must all be cautious.

So if you choose to Twitter, be sure to think at least twice before tweeting.  Same goes for putting up photos on Facebook, blogging, or however else you expose yourself on the web.  Jason Pontin of the New York Times puts it wonderfully in his write-up from last April: “A little secretiveness is, perhaps, a necessary lubricant in our social relations.”  Or, as Danah Boyd suggests in her excellent post: just because we can expose everything about ourselves on the Internet doesn’t mean we should.