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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