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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[irishjayhawk]

Originally Posted by Mr. Flopnuts

I don't deny the fact that I have become more of a hermit as the internet has progressed. But I like it that way. If I didn't, I'd get out more.

Paradoxically?, I agree.

[Hammock Parties]

Originally Posted by Ari Chi3fs

Exhibit Z81. Going to my facebook page and saying "**** You"

and all of the other idiotic things you do online...

You can't help that you are socially handicapped... if you weren't you would have been laid long ago.

Don't hate on me, I'm just a spewer of truth.

Why don't you cry about it, bitch?

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by Claythan

Why don't you cry about it, bitch?

Exhibit Z82

[Hammock Parties]

Originally Posted by Ari Chi3fs

Exhibit Z82

Stop running your mouth. You started it, punk.

[teedubya]

Haha... yeah, I said you are socially handicapped... then you totally prove me to be correct.

EPIC WIN for Travis.

EPIC FAIL for Clayton!

[Hammock Parties]

Keep it up, douchebag.

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by Claythan

Keep it up, douchebag.

Is roid rage kicking in? Too much testosterone?



Epic win!!!

[|Zach|]

I personally work hard to use these social networks to reflect and drive my real life that I am meeting. Twitter (again this is just me) has opened the door to a lot of business contacts and things that keep me active in person. Travis runs around in the same circle and can attest to this...in addition to the business side I have met and become close with some really amazing people that I consider good friends.

[teedubya]

Originally Posted by |Zach|

I personally work hard to use these social networks to reflect and drive my real life that I am meeting. Twitter (again this is just me) has opened the door to a lot of business contacts and things that keep me active in person. Travis runs around in the same circle and can attest to this...in addition to the business side I have met and become close with some really amazing people that I consider good friends.

Exactly... aside from that... If I were single... I would be using the power of twitter to score some poon. Because, the social media events have a lot of good looking women at them... who are computer savvy and generally brilliant.

In fact, I know a couple HOT HOT girls who live in Houston... too bad that Clayton here only likes to hang out where only dudes are. heh.

But, yeah, the business friendships made via twitter are UNREAL.

[booger]

who cares about twitter. Tickling her little pink tweeter is where its at.

[kcxiv]

Twitter is almost the same thing as using this messageboard. Its just 1 huge ass one is all.

People can hate all they want, but its just a global message baord. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Otter]

I think Twitter has much potential but like everything else on the internet it takes a lot of fine tuning to sort through all the bull shit.

As an example, I started following a Kansas City Chief update (I forget the name and I can't get on the website from work to check) before I left for work on Monday. When I logged on again Wednesday Morning I must have 120 posts telling me every scrap of information this person could dig up and 99% of it was worthless. I could come here and check for relevant news easier than dig through all that spam.

Deleted him off the list.

On the other side of the spectrum I searched the burg and found a guy who sorts though the local news, bar reviews, restaurant reviews and posts that's worth reading from the local media. Found a local "Campaign for Liberty Group" and meet now up with them twice a month right up the road from where I live. They have guest speakers and all kinds of useful information going on 2 miles away from my house that I had no idea about.

I'm starting an update for local fly fishing and kayaking update. Little stuff like where the fish and game is stocking the streams, what flys are working, techniques, best locations (the one's I'm willing to share) and when we'll be meeting up for a beer and burger at the end of the day.

One thing I wish they would implement is a separate thread each person or group you follow instead of one big linear file. I've already sent them psuedocode and the suggestion. I'm waiting for my six figure offer letter.

It's a neat tool that works exactly as you use it for the most part.

[Donger]

As I understand it, Twitter is used to learn about what other people are doing. Since I don't really care about what other people are doing, I fail to see why I would want to participate.

[|Zach|]

Originally Posted by Otter

I think Twitter has much potential but like everything else on the internet it takes a lot of fine tuning to sort through all the bull shit.

As an example, I started following a Kansas City Chief update (I forget the name and I can't get on the website from work to check) before I left for work on Monday. When I logged on again Wednesday Morning I must have 120 posts telling me every scrap of information this person could dig up and 99% of it was worthless. I could come here and check for relevant news easier than dig through all that spam.

Deleted him off the list.

On the other side of the spectrum I searched the burg and found a guy who sorts though the local news, bar reviews, restaurant reviews and posts that's worth reading from the local media. Found a local "Campaign for Liberty Group" and meet now up with them twice a month right up the road from where I live. They have guest speakers and all kinds of useful information going on 2 miles away from my house that I had no idea about.

I'm starting an update for local fly fishing and kayaking update. Little stuff like where the fish and game is stocking the streams, what flys are working, techniques, best locations (the one's I'm willing to share) and when we'll be meeting up for a beer and burger at the end of the day.

One thing I wish they would implement is a separate thread each person or group you follow instead of one big linear file. I've already sent them psuedocode and the suggestion. I'm waiting for my six figure offer letter.

It's a neat tool that works exactly as you use it for the most part.

No doubt finding quality people to follow is the name of the game.

[Mr_Tomahawk]

Some girl at the bank asked me if I twitter. I was confused at first but then just proceeded to stick my hand down the front of her pants.

...that is NOT what she meant.