Why Twitter?

If you would grant me this boon, I wish to spend this post waning and waxing over Twitter and it's benefits (and with some luck, I'll delve into a bit of philosophy). The motivation for such a post is pretty simple. Twitter has recently started hitting actual mainstream media, last week Rove obsessed about it the whole night on his show. This is an Australian television show people! I'm still trying to get over the fact that people here know what Facebook is :P

As is normal in these situations, most of these sources mocked and trivialised the notion of "micro-blogging" or "following" people, or the worth of pithi statements of 140 chars in length. Even in my personal life, when Syntax and Byte and Archie and (now!) Vorn too have all got themselves a Twitter account, Comit still expresses the distaste at the idea.

The culmination of this sudden saturation is a lot of people just 'not getting it', not that I can really blame them. Sometimes these things are hard to get when you're stuck one paradigm. This has lead me to do a great deal of thinking about the matter, and as is customary, you lot get to hear about it.

People look at Twitter and they see two benefits that could be derived: a quick and simple way to document one's thoughts and what one is doing, much like a blog; the other is a immediate means of communication with ones followers, but also the victims of one's stalking.

The first benefit is quickly refuted by comments that one should just get a blog. That one can more easily create substantial thoughts and coherent messages and publish them in an accepted internet publishing platform.

The second benefit is just as, if not more, immediately denied by the suggestion of just e-mail or IM'ing a person, instead of publically having a Twitter-conversation.

There are several things that I could very quickly argue regarding both these arguments. Twitter isn't designed to be a medium through which one systematically addresses certain issues, and if you try to do so then you're missing the point. Nor is it a medium where you just dump links to external sources (such as an RSS feed). It is first and foremost a social media platform. There's a reason your contacts on Twitter are called "followers" as opposed to "friends".

It's not a closed ecosystem. You're not limited to just following your close friends and having them follow you. It's designed as a way for you to network with other people, via @replies and DMs. It's a quick and easy way for companies in particular to find out what people are saying about their product/service and quickly address the issue. A company can't pry into one's private conversations and find out precisely how their producted is being bitched about.

I'm sure it was the case that people used to trawl blogs for keywords relating to some product/service and try to help through a comment or e-mailing the blogger. But that is a cumbersome and slow system. Twitter unifies all these streams (keep this in mind, I'll come back to it) of thoughts in a systematic and more importantly, IMMEDIATE fashion.

I've experienced it. I follow @BigPondTeam, who are my ISP on Twitter. If there's internet woes, they'll report it. This reassures me they know of the situation and are working to rectify it. More importantly, if I have a problem, I can report it directly to them and receive instant feedback. The team on the other end are very helpful, not only knowledgeable on the help files and can concisely deliver assistance in 140 characters, but also can pass my woes onto someone who can give me more personalised help.

And in following them, sometimes I see them going "@somerandomguy Maybe I can help you?" to some total stranger who isn't *asking* to be helped. He was just going "FUCKING BIG POND!! %$#$%#@" and not only can he vent, but he's unwittingly ellicited some kind of help.

But it's not just major companies. The majority of the people I follow are Youtubers whose videos I enjoy. I get to see it being used as a first-hand, self-branding marketing tool. People who broadcast something hoping for some immediate feedback, such as needing some inspiration or topics to discuss in a latest video, help with school work, coming to a live broadcast etc. One gains the ability to connect with their fans in a way they couldn't before.

So now I've prattled on enough, I think, about the social and marketing financial benefits of Twitter. I think I'm going to move onto what I really wanted to talk about.

Before I joined Twitter, got my @GotAbMo account, or even cared enough to take a look at its users, I remember quite vividly a first person's account of what Twitter meant to them. They explained that at first it's hard to get used to. Afterall, you're just reading a whole bunch of 140 character messages.

Strangely though, as this woman started getting into the swing of things, a curious phenomenon occured. She began to see something beyond just the blocks of text and developed a kind of 'feeling' or intuition about the people she followed. One obvious thing was that she began to be able to think in terms of their usual schedule ("It's Tuesday morning, such-and-such will be getting ready for work"). But there were more subtle things. She began to more accurately tell precisely the mood a person was writing in jut by the language/grammer of their recent tweets. Whether they were genuinely angry or just feigning it etc, without what would be obvious clues, such as :P's and !!1111!!'s.

This description, or rather, this notion of streams really stuck with me. And now we have things like Twitter, Friendfeed and the new Facebook design (and even the new new one that's coming out this week) are calling themselves lifestreams. The activities you do, the manner and place you interactions you make with your contacts getting broadcasted, that's the growing trent of all social web services.

And really, I think this hits the nail right on the head. People suggest the idea that Twitter, and to a larger extent the internet, is ruining our relationships with other people. People wonder at what is the value, what can truly be said in 140 characters that could be worth a damn to the people writing them or their followers.

And I think, more than anything, the 140 character restraint forces people to not only keep their messages concise, but also compels people to forgo the social ideal (that is, they do not try to 'censor' or 'cater' their messages as taken as meaningful, ironically making their messages much more representations of unconscious and free ideas) and most importantly, it helps build the stream.

Yes, if you take a person's tweet stream and just read it in one go, you don't feel at all enlightened. And you most likely aren't. This is a situation, however, in which the total is greater than the sum of its parts. You can look at all the information there, but unless it's delivered to you with the time delays between each tweet, without you trying to stick an @reply to them when they ask a question, you lose that thing that makes it special and important.

Compare this to just meeting a friend in real life. You'll find it to be very similar. You could transcribe a conversation I have with Gobi or AJ, or indeed, anyone I have fabulous conversations with. Then read the transcript. You lose the eye contact, the voice inflections, the laughter. You lose the things you see and do that have nothing to do with the conversation, such as that person at the table in the corner who's picking their nose.

Fine, you might as, watch a video of the conversation or hear an audio recording. Neither of these can replicate the feeling of the sun in your eyes, or its heat on your skin, or the breeze of the waitress as she walks past. You will lose that feeling of awkwardness, sure you can see the video you squirm, but that feeling, that unique feeling only you can feel is lost.

For me, the lifestream/Twitter stream and when you sit there having coffee with someone is the same. You do get a whole bunch of sensory input and data, but adding them all together, you miss out on the main point of it entirely.

In a similar paradigm, I think it's how friendships work as well. I feel sorry for the people who insist that each of the 140 character messages have to be meaningful. Do they demand such rigid efficiency in their real life? Do they question why their colleague crosses their legs in the conversation if it conveys no meaning about the global recession they are currently discussing?

To dictate such Draconian standards leads to a very bleak life. It's those little sybaritic pleasures, the things that are in excess, things unecessary, that give life the full colour, flourish and vigour that makes it worth living.

I would go as far as to argue that the direction that the social web is heading (most prominently for a mainstream audience, I think, is Facebook's move to becoming more and more of a streaming service, ala Friendfeed), is an indication that these people are realising this web is a far more accurate translation of notions of friendship and social interaction that the web was before.

It also nicely summarises the way I've appoached this blog. It is for the most part totally uncensored and uneditted. Raw and pure. And frequent. I also try to make it as social as I possibly can. So it's like a Twitter for me, but clearly far more than 140 characters, far more than 1400 words, in most cases. But the things I write about reflect my actual thinking at that precisely moment in time, what I've been musing about over the past day.

Unfortunately that's now how it's treated by many other people. You may argue that many blogs out there isn't concerning itself with social interaction, rather with information imparting. I would actually disagree with that, but that's not for this post. Even if I accept that, there is still a very large majority of blogs out there that are personal and are designed for small systems of friends.

They are designed in such a way that it is meant to be a substitute for what most people would consider "regualar" interaction. People read the blog in a bid to keep up the friendship. Most people would scoff at that. My argument is that they only scoff at that notion because of what we have now, a Twitter/lifestream approach that far more accurately emulates precisely what it means to have a friendship and engage in social interaction.

What I think is most amusing about this whole thing is that the people who criticise Twitter cite the very reasons WHY it makes it so vital and important. They argue that it is just a fad that cannot eclipse the traditional mediums. But they are wrong. Twitter is just an indication of a much larger movement, one that has revolutionised our notions of what the internet is capable of. It not only has eclipsed the traditional mediums, but it's rewritten things to have made them obselete.