Making Twitter Work for the Masses

Back in February, I attempted to demystify Twitter for the non-tech oriented.  The service was (and still is) trying to find its place in the crowded marketplace of tech innovations.  It’s been plagued by serious downtime, and has even had to cut back on some of its features in order to provide more stability.  While it continues to slowly gain recognition outside the narrow audience of technophiles, it still suffers from a big problem: you can’t explain it to your grandmother in just a few sentences.

The easiest way I know how to explain Twitter is as a “microblogging system” or “a tricked out Facebook status update”.  In my blog post I called it a combination of text messaging, Facebook status, blogging, and instant messaging.  Little to none of that would make sense to someone who doesn’t own a computer.  Of course, it’s not like those people are the audience for Twitter.  But if you can’t quickly and easily explain your product to audiences that aren’t already embedded in these developments, how can you become relevant or attractive to them?

Saul Hansell at the NYT Bits blog touches on this during a post today.  Twitter has created an election portal that aggregates politically-oriented “tweets” based on keyword filters, and Hansell reviews it (pardon the liberal editing on my part):

Personally, I haven’t been a big Twitter user. [...]  And I haven’t been sure that Twitter is a product that will have broad appeal. For sending messages to your friends and acquaintances, I’ve wondered whether it is better as a feature of a social network, like Facebook, rather than as a stand-alone service.

But something feels different to me looking at the election site. It has aggregated all these personal communications into a mass medium. [...] When I mentioned I was going to write this post to my editor here, he punched up the Twitter election page and dismissed it as a bunch of lame wisecracks.

He’s right. But Google’s YouTube can be written off the same way — nothing more than a bunch of leaping pets and lonely teenagers. At the same time, YouTube has become the catalyst for an important new media format that engages millions of people.

I think Twitter as well might well be the birth of a media form that combines talk radio, Digg and late-night comedians.  Like talk radio, you get an unvarnished and largely real-time window into what a wide swath of people are actually talking about.  Like Digg, you see people point to the articles and videos that they want to share.  And like late-night TV (or a politician’s sound bite for the evening news), there is a premium on pithy one-liners that try to get to the heart of the matter.

I think ol’ Saul is on to something here.  If the average web surfers were to go to the Twitter home page today, they’d see a stream of junk.  Maybe, just maybe, something will be relevant to them, and they’ll dive deeper.  Maybe they’d set up an account, start to tweet on their own, maybe follow some friends, family members, or people in their industry.  But most would look for 10 seconds, not understand what was happening, and move along.  Only the truly geeky motivated stick around.

But the election portal provides, for once, a point of true, sticky relevance that will show Twitter to be an evolution in technology that everyone can understand.  With this service, Twitter becomes useful.  Sure, there will be lots of chaff among the wheat.  But the election portal, especially when viewed concurrently with real-time political events such as the debates or conventions, shows a sort of collective stream of consciousness about something important.  Not “filing my nails while watching Conan” or “just got dropped off at mall to hit the arcadez, thanks mom LOL ROFL”… but a glimpse into what people are thinking as they watch history unfold.  From the IM/SMS/status/blog hybrid description, we see “forum” or “bulletin board” emerge.

This is a smart move for Twitter.  Of course, the company won’t be able to create destination portals for every single interest or event.  But if it manages to give users the ability to create “rooms” and to cluster their comments in easily distinguishable categories and themes, then it will be able to spread the addictiveness and relevance of its service to the greater web audience. Indeed, many of the times that Twitter has broken down was when it experienced large volumes of visitors during a live events (see: Steve Jobs keynotes).  People want to know what other people like them are thinking and saying about common experiences, right now.

It will also help it along with a business model (which is has yet to deploy), specifically by being able to target ads to audiences talking about different topics.  Twitterers live-tweeting a show will get ads for concert tickets; those conversing in real-time about a TV special or sports championship will get relevant advertising for those markets, as well.

And of course, in all this, Twitter will have to avoid crashing while their user numbers explode.  Good luck with that.