Time Magazine: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

[|Zach|]

http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...902604,00.html

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 '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. 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. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

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 #hackedu 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 #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu 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 #hackedu, 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 — 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.


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[Dr. Johnny Fever]

Originally Posted by |Zach|

Get used to it.

I am used to it. I tweet on the work account about every day. I'm also used to the Royals and Chiefs losing. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

[WilliamTheIrish]

Twitter is pretty awesome. When the Tiller story broke, Twitter had the arest of the suspect, his address, license plate etc before any traditional newscast.

It's real time. It's not for everybody. IMO, Twitter is pretty incredible.

[|Zach|]

Originally Posted by WilliamTheIrish

Twitter is pretty awesome. When the Tiller story broke, Twitter had the arest of the suspect, his address, license plate etc before any traditional newscast.

It's real time. It's not for everybody. IMO, Twitter is pretty incredible.

If I need to know something now Twitter search generally provides it much much better than google search.

[teedubya]

What is your twitter id, Beerme?

Also, WAVE is badass... I'm in the sandbox playing around with it...

and have bought two domains to capitalize on its awesomeness.

WaveEDU.com and Wavertise.com

Front end of a trend!! woo hoo!!!

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by WilliamTheIrish

Twitter is pretty awesome. When the Tiller story broke, Twitter had the arest of the suspect, his address, license plate etc before any traditional newscast.

It's real time. It's not for everybody. IMO, Twitter is pretty incredible.

what is your username William?

mine is @teedubya... in the next couple of days, I should break 50k followers.

[Dr. Johnny Fever]

Originally Posted by Ari Chi3fs

What is your twitter id, Beerme?

Also, WAVE is badass... I'm in the sandbox playing around with it...

and have bought two domains to capitalize on its awesomeness.

WaveEDU.com and Wavertise.com

Front end of a trend!! woo hoo!!!

I don't have one it's a work id. I post work stuff only and we don't follow others, just let them follow us so our page stays only about the station instead of getting clogged up with everyone's random thoughts.

[Fish]

Pretty much....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Twitter Frenzy
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

[teedubya]

It's pretty obvious that most of Chiefsplanet is Anti-Facebook and Anti-Twitter.

Chiefsplanet people tend to be late adopters.

I love twitter though. I have more than one account... one, where I follow everyone who follows me, and one where I only follow a few select people.

The industry news I get via twitter is invaluable.

[KCUnited]

Originally Posted by Jenson71

I still don't have a cell phone.

This.

[JD10367]

Originally Posted by BWillie007

i still don't really understand twitter, or know what it is exactly

On a message board, someone starts a thread like, "I'm having Fruit Loops for breakfast". Then, throughout the day or even the week, people will slowly respond to that with various comments like, "You're a pillowbiter," or "I had Egg McMuffins", or, "Fruit Loops are the food of right-wing fascists, you Bush loving tree-killer", or "I don't give a shit what you ate".

On Facebook, it's the same thing, but only your "friends" can see it, and they can be lazy, 'cause it'll pop up on their home page and they don't actually have to navigate to a message board.

With Twitter, it's the same thing, but now they don't even have to use a computer, your pointless blathering will show up right on their cellphones.

The more we "get connected", the less "connected" we are. Remember the old days, when you would actually write a letter, or maybe pick up the phone to talk to someone? Now we AIM and Tweet and do other sorts of shit, and yet--with the instantaneous communication of "I had Fruit Loops two minutes ago"--we still seem even less connected. How long before we're all living alone in giant houses, afraid to go outside or have human contact, like the people in Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun"?

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by |Zach|

Twitter is a lot more large scale...there is a lot more community building and connecting. I see both of these flourishing because I don't think they really step on eachothers toes. Twitter allows you to connect with friends but also jump into topics and it also lets large orgs. communicate well with the masses and vice versa.

Wave on the other hand seems to deal more with actionable productivity. Helping workflow and creating easier communication\functionality with people you know.

I see it as the difference between going to the library and seeing a lot of different people you interact with and going to the library and renting out one of those study rooms and getting shit done.

The social space is always changing and you never know how people will use it but thats what seems to stand out to me going forward.

Personally, I think WAVE is gonna revolutionize things in more ways than one.

If you can monitor the waves that your friends are participating in... and share in the resources, the lure of twitter will diminish.

The love of twitter is finding new talented people with great ideas, sharing great resources... if WAVE brings the thunder on that issue also... then TwitterHouston has a problem.

The problem with twitter is that in 2+ years of my using it, there has been VERY little innovation...

Waves will be embeddable into blogs, websites, forums, everything... its a total game changer.

[Dr. Johnny Fever]

Originally Posted by Ari Chi3fs

It's pretty obvious that most of Chiefsplanet is Anti-Facebook and Anti-Twitter.

Chiefsplanet people tend to be late adopters.

I love twitter though. I have more than one account... one, where I follow everyone who follows me, and one where I only follow a few select people.

The industry news I get via twitter is invaluable.

I just don't feel the need to make sure everyone I know and a bunch of people I don't, know every move I make. I don't really care that they are taking a walk or watching a cool show or that it's raining in Arkansas and I don't know why they'd want to know those things about me. If I want to inform a friend of what I'm doing I have a cell phone, e-mail and I text. Needing 84 different ways to keep tabs on everything everyone does is just dumb to me.

Don't get me wrong if you're into it and it works for you, more power to you. I like to hide so I don't embrace these things much.

We have a station facebook and I've never even logged onto it... and I'm the Program Director. There are people at work who care it about so I let them keep it updated. I have shit to do to make the product worth listening to... my morning co-host can take care of the PR.

[Dr. Johnny Fever]

Originally Posted by JD10367

The more we "get connected", the less "connected" we are. Remember the old days, when you would actually write a letter, or maybe pick up the phone to talk to someone? Now we AIM and Tweet and do other sorts of shit, and yet--with the instantaneous communication of "I had Fruit Loops two minutes ago"--we still seem even less connected. How long before we're all living alone in giant houses, afraid to go outside or have human contact, like the people in Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun"?

This is my favorite paragraph in this thread.

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by Dr. Johnny Fever

I just don't feel the need to make sure everyone I know and a bunch of people I don't, know every move I make. I don't really care that they are taking a walk or watching a cool show or that it's raining in Arkansas and I don't know why they'd want to know those things about me. If I want to inform a friend of what I'm doing I have a cell phone, e-mail and I text. Needing 84 different ways to keep tabs on everything everyone does is just dumb to me.

Don't get me wrong if you're into it and it works for you, more power to you. I like to hide so I don't embrace these things much.

We have a station facebook and I've never even logged onto it... and I'm the Program Director. There are people at work who care about so I let them keep it updated. I have shit to do to make the product worth listening to... my morning co-host can take care of the PR.

Yeah a lot of people post drivel... but, those aren't the ones that I glean value from.

So, say you followed 100 of the top radio station program directors... I would bet that you would get some great knowledge from them... learn some things, make some good connections... and maybe some friends.... chances are, one of these connections could give you a job someday.

So, there is value, it just depends on if you look at that "breakfast" tweets or the industry tweets.

[Dr. Johnny Fever]

Originally Posted by Ari Chi3fs

Yeah a lot of people post drivel... but, those aren't the ones that I glean value from.

So, say you followed 100 of the top radio station program directors... I would bet that you would get some great knowledge from them... learn some things, make some good connections... and maybe some friends.... chances are, one of these connections could give you a job someday.

So, there is value, it just depends on if you look at that "breakfast" tweets or the industry tweets.

I do understand that, believe me. I have e-mail correspondence with some other PD's across the country and we share playlist moves and research and even send sound back and forth to each other. It's nice... I just honestly don't know how much time I have for more of it.

As long as my daughter is still in school I'm not leaving for another job anyway... however when she graduates in 5 years that's a possibility... even then I'm really only am interested in maybe going back home to the KC/Topeka area and luckily I know people there already.

I know things like twitter have value and it's all about how you use them. I'm kind of old school I guess. Hell I used to spin actual records when I got into this business just 20 years ago... lol. Playing everything off a hard drive 20 years later is a trip... and to a degree it's made us all lazy. I'd be happy to dust off and cue up records again.