if we really live, we don't have to rely on twitter to know what
people are doing.
On Jun 7, 2009, at 8:46 AM, peter altschul wrote:
Friday, Jun. 05, 2009
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
By Steven Johnson
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a
terrible
first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send
140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the
world
need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four
years ago
scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that
would
allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real
time about my
choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-
creator, a
couple of times in the dotcom '90's when he was launching
Bloggerddcom. Back then,
what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our
attention
span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format
articles
and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications
platform that
limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software
that let
you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to
have
unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your
friends had
for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The
technology writer
Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick,
abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social
network, you get
a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't
think it at all
moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is
going.
Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken
lightly. But I
think there is something even more profound in what has happened to
Twitter over
the past two years, something that says more about the culture that
has embraced
and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-
status
updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought But the key
development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do
things that
its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's
doing to us.
It's what we're doing to it.
The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted
to
education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private
affair:
40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture
capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about
the future
of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that
conversation would
have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a
transcript
might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five
years ago, a
handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences
after the
fact.
But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time,
real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on
Twitter. At the
outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted
to post
live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word
813kedu in
his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a
running feed of
tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow
conversation
unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the
occasional joke,
suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument
flared up
between two participants in the room -- a tense back-and-forth that
transpired
silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.
At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created
exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or
BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out
into the
Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of
schools was
happening at 813kedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from
strangers
announcing that they were following the 813kedu thread. Then others
joined the
conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further
exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't
been invited
to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and
questions
from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.
When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a
public record
of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the
conversation
continued -- if you search Twitter for 813kedu, you'll find dozens of
new
comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference
happened in
early March.
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the
rules of
engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider
audience
into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event
an afterlife
on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages,
but the
sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive,
like a
suspension bridge made of pebbles.
The Super-Fresh Web
The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish
tweets -
those 140-character messages -- from a computer or mobile device.
(The character
limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform
used by
most mobile phones.) As a social network, Twitter revolves around the
principle
of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that
user's tweets
appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If
you follow
20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page:
breakfast-cereal
updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on
the
future of education. Some celebrity Twitterers -- most famously
Ashton Kutcher -
have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a
broadcast-size
audience. The average Twitter profile seems to be somewhere in the
dozens: a
collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities The mix
creates a
media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it,
strangely
intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your
Twitter
feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out
that your
nephew got into med school and Shaquille O'Neal just finished a cardio
workout
in Phoenix.
In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a
real-time
view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable. You can see
conversations people are having about a presidential debate or the
American Idol
finale or Tiger Woods -- or a conference in New York City on education
reform.
For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have
bemoaned the
demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who
Shot J.R."
cliff hangers αι" the folkloric American living room, all of us
signing off in
unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation
booths. But
watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and
you'll see
that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but
now when we
have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a
group
that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door
neighbors. Some of
that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living
room when
we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving,
witty,
observant, subversive.
Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via
140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun
to find a
route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device
instead
of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles,
discussions,
posts, videos -- anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once
saw their
traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number
of new
visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and
Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as
easy to
use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New
Yorker article
as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.
Put those three elements together -- social networks, live searching and
link-sharing -- and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to
the most
interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At
its heart,
Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of
authority:
pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in
part, how many
links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had
time to
build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-
quality needles
in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web.
But it's not
a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying
right now,
the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle
calls the
"super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more
efficient supplier
of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting
articles
or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking
for
interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-
pointer
Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.
From Toasters to Microwaves
Because Twitter's co-founders -- Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack
Dorsey -- are
such a central-casting vision of start-up savvy (they're quotable and
charming
and have the extra glamour of using a loft in San Francisco's SoMa
district as a
headquarters instead of a bland office park in Silicon Valley) much of
the media
interest in Twitter has focused on the company. Will Ev and Biz sell
to Google
early or play long ball? (They have already turned down a reported
$500 million
from Facebook.) It's an interesting question but not exactly a new
plotline.
Focusing on it makes you lose sight of the much more significant point
about the
Twitter platform: the fact that many of its core features and
applications have
been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.
This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool
designed to do
something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning
the tool
itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag"
-- 813kedu
or #inauguration -- was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user
base (as was
the convention of replying to another user with the at symbol). The
ability to
search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up
altogether,
Summize, which Twitter purchased last year. (Full disclosure: I am an
adviser to
one of the minority investors in Summize.) Thanks to these innovations,
following a live feed of tweets about an event -- political debates or
Lost
episodes -- has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But
just 12
months ago, that mode of interaction would have been technically
impossible
using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking
around a ye
later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured
out a way
to turn it into a microwave.
One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the
vast
majority of its users interact with the service via software created
by third
parties. There are dozens of iPhone and BlackBerry applications --
all created by
enterprising amateur coders or small start-ups -- that let you manage
Twitter
feeds. There are services that help you upload photos and link to
them from your
tweets, and programs that map other Twitizens who are near you
geographically.
Ironically, the tools you're offered if you visit Twitterddcom have
changed very
little in the past two years. But there's an entire Home Depot of
Twitter tools
available everywhere else.
As the tools have multiplied, we're discovering extraordinary new
things to do
with them. Last month an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was
organized via
Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists
in China
that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to
censor
discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
A service
called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas,
tracking
references to flu and fever. Celebrity Twitterers like Kutcher have
directed
their vast followings toward charitable causes (in Kutcher's case, the
Malaria
No More organization).
Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of
teens and
20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that
three or
four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor.
But the key
elements of the Twitter platform -- the follower structure, link-
sharing,
real-time searching -- will persevere regardless of Twitter's
fortunes, just as
Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past
decade.
In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one
way or
another in the coming years:
News and opinion. Increasingly, the stories that come across our
radar -- news
about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item -- will arrive via
the passed
links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of
> tificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper
>
will be
compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social
network.
This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same
time: your
networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-
newspaper front
page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private
echo chamber
will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.
Searching. As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the
value of
searching for information via your extended social network will start
to rival
Google's approach to the search. If you're looking for information on
Benjamin
Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might
well be more
valuable than the top result on Google; if you're looking for advice
on sibling
rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be
the best
place to start.
Advertising. Today the language of advertising is dominated by the
notion of
impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front
of a
potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a
NASC
hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with
the enduring
relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions
of Twitter
followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new
language of
tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers
engaged:
early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer
involvement in brainstorming for new products.
Not all these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have
learned
firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox
can be.
But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and
Facebook, an
entire new empire of distraction has opened up. It used to be that you
compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had
happened in your
personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last
night's date.
Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other
people's
lives. And because, on Twitter at least, some of those people happen
to be
celebrities, the Twitter platform is likely to expand that strangely
delusional
relationship that we have to fame. When Oprah tweets a question about
getting
ticks off her dog, as she did recently, anyone can send an at reply to
her, and
in that exchange, there is the semblance of a normal, everyday
conversation
between equals. But of course, Oprah has more than a million
followers, and that
isolated query probably elicited thousands of responses. Who knows
what small
fraction of her at replies she has time to read? But from the fan's
perspective,
it feels refreshingly intimate: "As I was explaining to Oprah last
night, when
she asked about dog ticks ..."
End-User Innovation
The rapid-fire innovation we're seeing around Twitter is not new, of
course.
Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter's,
went from
being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the
Social
Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new
applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game
creators, political groups and charities. The Apple iPhone's long-term
competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new
applications
that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality in
countless ingenious ways.
The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform
originally
designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you
watch
television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish
your own
newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend -- and, yes, tell
the world
what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child
for this new
model of social creativity in part because these innovations have
flowered at
such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so
simple. It's as
if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving
us a
platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we
accepted the dare
with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to
start a
political uprising.
The speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to
a larger
truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global
competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents
and Ph.Ddds.
It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since
peaking in
the early '70's. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate
degrees in
science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the
mid-'80's, a
long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market
share in
the patents-and-Ph.Ddds business augurs dark times for American
innovation. The
specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy
us in the
'80's; now it's China and India.
But what actually happened to American innovation during that period?
We came up
with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia,
Craigslist,
TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter
itself.
Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global
innovation
in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad
students,
the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.
How could the forecasts have been so wrong? The answer is that we've
been
tracking only part of the innovation story. If I go to grad school
and invent a
better mousetrap, I've created value, which I can protect with a
patent and
capitalize on by selling my invention to consumers. But if someone
else figures
out a way to use my mousetrap to replace his much more expensive washing
machine, he's created value as well. We tend to put the emphasis on
the first
kind of value creation because there are a small number of inventors
who earn
giant paydays from their mousetraps and thus become celebrities. But
there are
hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value
in these
innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use
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