A Narrative of What Twitter Was, Is, And Might Be
One of the most interesting things about Twitter is that, despite it being so minimalist and simple and seemingly single-purpose, it is so darn difficult to come up with concise and satisfying definition of what it is. Twitter is used to do so many things that no one interpretation is satisfying.
Over the last four years, the narrative about Twitter has reflected this difficulty, evolving continuously to reflect users’ changing usage and understanding of what can be accomplished with this medium. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to briefly summarize some of the most prevalent and salient perspectives on Twitter — and their evolution since the product’s introduction.
tl;dr
Publishing: Twitter was status updates only. Twitter was news. Twitter was your organization’s message.
Discovery and Self-Curation: Twitter was following your friends. Twitter was following organizations. Twitter was following people you found interesting.
Real-Time: Twitter was ad-hoc group communication. Twitter was protest. Twitter was back and forth live conversations.
Platform: Twitter was search. Twitter was trends. Twitter was empowering 3rd-party applications.
Pulse: Twitter is the world’s heartbeat.
(Then emerged a dramatic and encompassing meaning: Twitter is our history.)
Status Updates, SXSW, and Iran
The first narrative about Twitter is that it was a way to share one’s status— indeed, this was a part of the founders’ blueprint (e.g., this sketch by Jack Dorsey). “In bed”, “Going to park”, “Coding”, “At Hamilton Deli”, “Can’t sleep”, “Out with Andy and Liz”, etc. Unsurprisingly, early media coverage of Twitter was often negative due to the uninteresting, self-centered, and trivial nature of shared information — why would I care what you are eating right now?
This taint remains with us today. Among the very private (“Why would I share my status with the world?”), the real-lifers (“If I want to know what my friends are up to, I’ll just hang out with them!”), and the semi-luddite (“Social networking [(whatever that is)] is a productivity black hole.”), Twitter lies beyond the periphery. They just don’t see the point. Twitter as status messages, even where it hints at a glimmer of usefulness, is far outweighed by the trivialness of the communication enabled.
This first impression of Twitter as dominated by the trivial started to change when some users moved from “about me” status updates to commentary and news. News was something the media could relate to and understand. For the technology press, SXSW 2007 was the tipping point. With the conference’s attendees grouping tweets using hashtags, Twitter became a way to report on interesting SXSW happenings in real-time — parties, great speakers, commentary, etc. Twitter became a digital mirror-image of the conference itself; micro-reporting was born. For the tech blogs, Twitter was not only the way to get at what was happening at the conference, it became the defining story of the techie SXSW.
It took longer for the non-tech media to understand and accept the usefulness of Twitter; that the communication it enabled could have real value and not simply be a medium for self-centered promotion. By 2009, Twitter users reporting on a number of events helped redefine Twitter away from its early status update-centric definition. Twitter was crucial to reporting about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the 2009-2010 Iranian presidential election, etc. Twitter as reporting was something the news media establishment had to recognize.
This narrative, however, was rooted in the publishing-function of Twitter — users acting as reporters of the trivial, the newsworthy, and everything in between. Thus, the perspective on Twitter that first reached the public at large, as reported on and defined by the likes of the New York Times and other preeminent news outlets, was focused on its publishing function and ignored its many other facets (curation, discovery, or history).
From Individuals to Communities to Organizations
At the same time that the media was grappling with what to make of Twitter (status messages or much more?), usage of Twitter was migrating from individual users to ad-hoc communities (attendees of conferences, protesters) and organizations (campaigns, governments, corporations). The Twitter stream did not simply provide news about the Iranian presidential election — more importantly, it allowed the protestors to organize in a decentralized and anonymous way (“Twitter Revolutions”).
Organizations and personalities started adopting Twitter as a lightweight medium through which to establish their brand and message, reach fans, or influence discourse in a way that is more free-flowing and accessible than press releases or blog posts or the press. Indeed, Twitter democratized the rather static modes of communications between organizations and the public at large. For organizations, it provided a much easier way to reach their audience; and for the public, it allowed them to question and respond to — as individuals or ad hoc groups — the large organizations which just a few years earlier would not have paid any attention to them.
Customized Curation and Discovery
Although the publishing narrative is the most easily understood use of Twitter, its follow-based distribution and curation facets are at least as important. It is a shame that this curation narrative has gotten much less attention (although it is well-recognized in the technology community, where Twitter’s follow semantics are understood as a more concise and accessible version of RSS).
Consider someone who does not use Twitter for publishing — 140 character updates are not her preferred way of communicating, for whatever reason. However, she follows other users on Twitter. She does this because it gives her access to those users’ expertise. Twitter is her customized window into the topics she cares about, curated by the individuals and organizations she finds to be intelligent/funny/controversial/etc. In this narrative, Twitter provides a custom curated view of the world’s information, updated in real time.
This kind of follow-based curation fits very well with a view of the world where fewer people are producers of interesting information than are consumers of it. Even assuming an even balance between production and consumption of information, it is clear that the curation aspect of Twitter is at least as important as the publishing aspect. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin.
Moreover, Twitter is not only curation, but also discovery. And the discovery is not limited to links contained within tweets: via retweeting, Twitter allows for discovery of people, permitting users to incrementally improve the quality of their stream by refining its sources. For example, as I see more and more retweets of a user that I am not following, I decide to start following that person who then introduces me to new topics — incremental discovery.
Furthermore, discovery on Twitter goes well beyond the organic incremental kind provided by shared links and retweets: Twitter’s own search functionality, trending topics and hashtags, location information, meta data and lists are all aimed at helping users find relevant content.
This curation and discovery narrative is what has made Twitter successful, because while there aren’t hundreds of millions of worthwhile publishers, there are hundreds of millions of readers and consumers (and soon billions); Twitter’s success was and is predicated on these readers finding the publishers, topics, and tweets that interest them. Whenever I ask someone why they don’t use Twitter and they respond that they don’t have anything interesting to share, or don’t care about their friends’ daily activities, etc. I realize how the preeminence of the publishing narrative is a real disservice — publishing is not the added value to the majority of users. Publishing and following one’s friends’ tweets is a use-case, but it pales in comparative importance and usefulness to following the interesting, the famous, the specialized, the in-the-know, the niches, etc. — consumption, curation and discovery.
Twitter Minors: Conversations and Access Everywhere
A more recent narrative is that tweeting is often an invitation to start a conversation. Twitter is not simply a one-way broadcast; users can and do communicate back and forth in real-time using the @ reply. Thus, over a 10 minute window, you’ll find small groups of people using @ between one another at such a fast pace that Twitter will act like IM. This idea has gained momentum over the past 12 to 18 months with the increased focus on real-time web services and the recognition that Twitter was the first mainstream provider.
What’s interesting about this kind of behavior is that communication can seamlessly move in and out of such a pattern. I.e., an organization can tweet something, the audience can react, then the organization can enter into separate conversations with its audience, and after a few minutes every participant can go back to a more asynchronous way of behaving. Twitter is unique in providing a way to smoothly and continuously move from unidirectional (broadcast, like a blog post or press release) to bi- or multi-directional communication (responding to one’s audience). And these modes of communication can alternate seamlessly between asynchronous and synchronous; welcome to the real-time Internet.
Another secondary characteristic of Twitter is its endorsement of access anywhere. This means the Twitter stream isn’t limited to what people are thinking while in front of a computer, or what articles / links / images / videos they are finding online. You can relate things you are experiencing out in the real world through text, images, videos shared from mobile devices. Twitter was one of the first Internet services to endorse the idea that the Internet should not be limited to our homes and offices, but should be available everywhere. Although today other web or Internet services that can be accessed from a cellular phone share this, what makes Twitter different is the extent to which such behavior is part of the service’s DNA. In the pre-Internet-phone and pre-geolocation world, Twitter worked because it just required any old regular cellular phone with text messaging. Thus, from its very beginnings, Twitter has encouraged the breakdown of the boundary between the virtual and real worlds.
Platform
So far, I have limited myself to narratives that come out of the core Twitter, as offered by Twitter, the company. But a critical dimension of Twitter is that it is a platform open to 3rd-party developers. The openness to developers is a large part of why what “we think it to be” is what Twitter becomes, as these third party developers offer a testing ground for innovation.
There is a clear tension here between third-party developers and Twitter, especially if Twitter follows a strategy of taking the best of the third-party world and moving it in-house, as opposed to letting 3rd party companies thrive or acquiring them (e.g., lists or clients for mobile devices). As much as we want to think of Twitter as a public good — a utility providing an Internet-scale publish/subscribe platform — it is very much a profit-seeking enterprise. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if this profit-seeking will limit Twitter’s growth and the kind of resources 3rd parties are willing to dedicate toward innovation on Twitter-as-a-platform.
Pulse
So far, I have aimed this discussion at those narratives that affect the individual user – what can Twitter do for you and what can you do with Twitter – but the most fascinating facet of Twitter is what it says about all of us taken together. Although, as discussed above, status updates are often dull when looked at individually, a different pictures emerges when many users’ uninteresting status updates are looked at together. I.e., what isn’t very interesting at the micro level (“I am tired”, “I am eating sesame chicken at Ollie’s”, etc.) may be fascinating at the macro level (the aggregated tastes, likes, dislikes, interests, and concerns of every Twitter user).
Twitter is a live real-time pulse or heartbeat of the world. It’s a little bit like a stock market for small pieces of information or a dispatch system that everyone checks into. What can we do with such information? One need look no further than how financial firms use twitter: sentiment from Twitter as a leading indicator used to predict stock prices. What else? Product trends, political sentiment, fast-food eating tendencies, etc. Finding what is important in this sea of trivial information is one of the most interesting avenues for startups and research in the Twitter ecosystem.
The Pulse Is Our History
Because tweets are informational atoms that live forever, this pulse is persistent and allows us to look back in time.
Let’s compare this facet of Twitter to the Web generally. The Web’s contents are generally transient. You can’t go back in time and see what the web looked like 4 days ago, 4 months ago, or 4 years ago (despite the best attempts of the Library of Congress and archiving efforts everywhere). The truth is that there is just too much information and that a lot of this information changes too quickly for us to be able save old version of everything.
Moreover, even where some information is archived, it is often poorly indexed by time. Say you want to see the price of all items of Amazon on January 28th 2005, sure the information is somewhere (Amazon servers, receipts from people who bought the items on those dates, etc.), but it’s either not public, or very difficult to get in a structured way. You won’t be able to find my old websites on the web. Versioning is simply not part of the web’s DNA.
Twitter, however, is a time series (along with a geolocation series, and other meta-data series). Tweets can’t change (beyond deletion). There are no “edits to tweets” to keep track of. A tweet just is, it’s an atom, with a message, set at one point in time, with a location, and other meta data, and that’s it; it never changes.
So Twitter history is a forever-record of people’s small likes, dislikes, interests, and a macro record of our history. Twitter is fundamentally changing the way the human timeline is recorded; for all future it will provide us with the ability to go back in time to see how people felt about just about anything. With better NLP, big data analysis, etc., this will revolutionize our ability to understand humanity’s direction.
Twitter is our history.
Defining Twitter Is Not That Interesting Either
Defining Twitter: a world-scale publish-subscribe message bus.
That’s not very interesting. One can see the possibilities, but the definition itself is bland. That’s why we need many alternative narratives of Twitter, ones that go beyond its being just a platform for publishing.
Twitter is like the telephone in that describing the medium isn’t nearly as interesting as thinking about what to do with the medium. With the telephone, the initial narrative is simple: it allows you to speak to someone who is far away. Eventually, the narrative broadens and gives us telemarketing, the red telephone, phone-sex, and cellular networks. We are still only in the very early stages of the Twitter platform. How innovative are we willing to get and where will this innovation take us?
