Posts Tagged: twitter

Software / Thoughts — 11 Comments
26
Aug 08

Twitter, the enterprise’s third space

When describing Twitter, I use a number of analogies. Most commonly, I think of Twitter as something like a slow-motion chatroom, or even a collection of away messages. I’ve got another one to add to this list: subject-only email.

This new analogy actually comes from my use of the iPhone, where the Twitter interface isn’t all that different from the mail interface. Twitter displays a sender and a brief message, which mirrors the sender and subject elements that you’d see in an email inbox. The main conceptual leap is that with email, there’s often a payload of information, tasks or spam waiting for you. With Twitter, you’ve only got the message (an an occasional URL as payload). This very fact is why I enjoy checking Twitter, and detest my inbox.

Thinking about Twitter this way helped me imagine enterprise integration of a Twitter-like service. I envisioned adding a “Twitter pane” to email clients – a pane for Twitter-like communication aside the inbox. This Twitter pane would act as an ongoing message thread away from the inbox, and its uses would be more conversational, informal and informative.

Imagine the scenario of a guest lecture. Let’s say you’re bringing in a friend to give a talk at your company. You send out the detailed email notice, and maybe a few follow ups. To attend this talk, your coworker must process the email, calendar it, and remember. If the talk is fairly last-minute, that coworker needs to be attentive to email information coming in just-in-time. In these models there’s no space for casual prompting – replying-all to mailing list to say you’re “going to hear Sally’s talk” is generally outside of norms. However, the enterprise Twitter affords a communicative third space – a place for coworkers to discuss, remember and remind one another of the lecture, by virtue of their discussion (and perhaps live-Twittering) of the event.  In this sense, the enterprise Twitter surfaces the collective, prompting observers to action.

The enterprise Twitter gives rise to a new channel of communication that offloads from the inbox, and introduces new forms of communication.  In offloading the inbox, one can imagine common/frequent para-social tasks like casual lunch invites moving to the Twitter channel. In fact, the public nature of Twitter might provide unique opportunities to meet others – it might be a little strange to invite a stranger lunch, but a “who is hungry?” message to the public might allow an ad hoc group to form. In new forms of communication, one can imagine messages that might not pass the listserv test (“Can someone help me with this Perl?”) getting passed to the semi-public of the enterprise Twitter. This presents the opportunity for new connections, more efficient work, etc.

The enterprise Twitter is most interesting for its potential vibrancy. Corporations have adopted internal social networks, and while these networks represent a more robust directory, I doubt many would qualify as particularly vibrant. This may be because corporate social networks don’t really address employee needs,  rather addressing the needs of management in analyzing and diagnosing the “structural holes” of the organizations. An enterprise Twitter does address a very real problem – our ever-overstuffed, mismanaged inboxes – and it introduces a vibrant and relevant communication channel to the enterprise.  The enterprise Twitter might just be the electronic, distributed water cooler of lore.

In implementing an enterprise Twitter, I’d argue that one would certainly want to follow the 140-character limit, allow private, public, and semi-public (conversant) threads. The enterprise Twitter would be inside-the-firewall, and would also follow the limited profiling pattern of Twitter (Name, Bio, Link). Political considerations should be addressed. Perhaps an arbitrary follow limit of 100 would be useful – this would prevent everyone from simply following upper management out of “respect.” Other potential benefits would include the enterprise Twitter as a news or safety channel (posts could go out regarding severe weather and so forth).

Although I’ve used the brand name Twitter thoughout this post, there’s nothing Twitter-specific about the practices I’m discussing. The enterprise Twitter is just a directory, sets of permissions, a messaging protocol and integration into the messaging client. If it sounds like a replication of email, the key differences are only the social affordances and the mental model.

This scheme is not without drawbacks. Primarily, the cost of designing and integrating messaging system is not trivial. I would respond that Twitter has introduced a new type of message, one that our systems and devices should support – therefore this integration is inevitable. Another drawback is distraction. Twitter is a notorious time waster, it is addictive, and it is always on. To this I would drawn an analogy of the modern inbox – it is never off, more corporations expect you to carry mobile devices – so a Twitter management strategy should fit into larger communications-management strategies.

Inside the enterprise, individuals rely on a variety of tools and strategies to stay in communication. None have the unique affordances of the enterprise Twitter, and few offer the common social bridging role of an enterprise Twitter. My thoughts are obviously preliminary, but if anyone is working on such a project or thinking of beginning one, I’d be very interested in your thoughts/feedback.

Thoughts — No Comments
30
Jul 08

Twitter, free-riders, and lived community

Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing someone to follow you forced reciprocation. That is, in turn, you were forced to follow your followers. Personally, this situation has always been troublesome: I’ve wanted to keep my Twitters private, mostly to prevent Google from indexing them – not because I’m sharing anything particularly salacious. However, as allowing followers had costs, I was forced to be selective about who was allowed in.

The particular costs of “fame” in Twitter are interesting, not only for their anachronistic nature (direct costs of fame on the web?), but the way they shape the system and uses. I’ve been forced to think of my Twitter stream as a budget. I may like you, and allow you to follow me, but if you post 30 Twitters a day you blow my information budget, and I’m forced to close the connection. I’ve wondered how the distributed cognitive processes of community have shaped norms around posting in response to budgeting. Since fame implies costs, and there is mutual understanding of these costs, have we evolved practice that shapes discourse to our information budgets?

Now that Twitter allows asymmetrical private following, it is interesting to think about how the site changes. At one level, Twitter becomes more like the rest of the web: when you subscribe to my RSS feed, there is no expectation that I’m reading yours. I can now “allow” high-producing followers without worry of my information budget. At face value, all of these things seem “good” and “normal.” It is also useful to think about the consequences of this change, as privacy practice has very literally shaped community in Twitter.

Dourish and Anderson, in the 2006 paper Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as a Social and Cultural Phenomena, describe privacy as a process, one “embedded in social and cultural contexts.” The authors present models of privacy – and I find the particular model of privacy as discursive practice applicable in the case of Twitter. The (admittedly brute-force) nature of privacy in Twitter has shaped our relations to one another, forcing the development of particular practice and strategies of community management. As fame has costs, our information budgets directly enforce our notions of community.

Interestingly, the costs of fame may have beneficial effects on community. To allow in private followers meant reciprocal information disclosure, a social information processing transaction. Within SIP, we develop our own strategies of reading-in, filtering, and information management – that is, we get to know our community. Like it or not, this forms tight bonds, feelings of closeness, and a unique form of community unlike others on the web. I don’t think that the privacy changes will disrupt community in a catastrophic way, but it is useful to think about how this reshaping of privacy to fit more “normal” patterns will shape the lived experience of those on Twitter. Our followers transform themselves from costs to free-riders, and privacy is reimagined from control of utterances and information budgets to simply control of utterances.

The point of this analysis is not to make value judgements about Twitter’s privacy practice, but rather to highlight how decisions about privacy shape the experience of technology. Dourish and Anderson argue that we should explore “privacy and security as social products rather than natural facts.” In this context, perhaps both the previous “forced reciprocal” and current “free-rider” approach to privacy in Twitter are equally arbitrary. Notably, the effects of either approaches on community will not be arbitrary, and this is the important takeaway for the interaction designer.

Cited:
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. (2006). Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319–342.

Thoughts — 4 Comments
10
Jul 08

Information Budgets and Shared Cognition

Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, belong to more listservs than I should, and so on. Compared to others – say uber-bloggers Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington – my information diet hardly registers. I’m always impressed by information omnivores, but I realize that my skills and time availability place me at a different space on the information consumption continuum.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about information consumption as a budgeting process. This is certainly not new – the earliest theories of information explored uncertainty reduction and budgeting. In the early days of the telegraph, Morse’s code, and the machines designed to use the code, were adopted because they transferred information more efficiently than Cooke’s machines. How we can fit the most information in the littlest amount of space/time is the essential challenge for many in the field.

Feeds – be they an RSS stream, Twitter or Facebook Newsfeeds, have driven the concept of budgeting home. Unlike an inbox, to which anyone has access, our feeds are managed, pruned, scoped and, most importantly, gatekept. When we subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow someone on Twitter, the information they send is equated into our budgets. If the person posts 100 blog posts or twitters a day, it is likely that we’re overloaded with information, that our budget is blown.

In the early days of Twitter, I noticed that my information budgets were consistently being blown. As new users joined the service, unaware of the norms and necessary economy of information, my personal information budget was a mess – I couldn’t keep up with the small number of people I tried to follow. However, over time, I’ve noticed a shift. Call it an acculturation, a calming, or perhaps an evolution – but information budgeting seems to have evolved among Twitterers. Of course, this does not apply to publicity-seekers, but I think that more or Twitter’s users are considering their followers information budgets when they cast off a new message.

Of course, short of data collection, I don’t have any way to prove my hypothesis, but it has stuck with me long enough that I thought I might investigate the cognitive underpinnings. In a chapter from Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Krauss and Fussel write about Constructing Shared Communicative Environments. In a nascent communication environment, the communication process is influenced by the development of common grounds; our knowledge of our self, audience and context influence the communication processes. According to the authors, we “do indeed take the informational status of a listener into account” in creating messages.

In a face-to-face conversation, we’re always taking our audience into account. We watch for body language – rolling of the eyes, scrunching of the brow. These cues inform what we communicate and how we go about the communication process. How, then, do we read Twitter? Twitter is full of cues – we know who follows us, how many followers we have, we get direct messages. At the same time, Twitter is new. It is more a living discussion forum than it is a person-to-person IM conversation. With this new form, new behaviors must emerge.

Have we evolved our communication processes in Twitter? I think this is inarguable. We Twitter differently than we did six months ago, and new behaviors and fads are constantly emerging. But are we budgeting our communication, reflecting our desires for a more sensible information space? Has Twitter become more sensible to me because I’ve developed literacies, or have we simply decided that the space works better if we post less and stay on topic more? Again, I’m not sure this is happening, but I do think that our shared cognition – of our identities, the information budgets of self and others – affects our perceptions and behaviors.

The process of communicative evolution in social spaces is fascinating, and instructive for those who study information and communities. One wonders if processes of Gemeinschaft inform information budgeting, or vice versa. Krauss and Fussell note that our communication processes are continually informed by knowledge of audience and the rules of interaction. Notably, both of these are inherently evolutionary, a theory that fits nicely into our always-changing and ill-defined online spaces.

Software / Thoughts — 5 Comments
6
Jun 08

Searching Twitter Better

Update: See Backtweets.com.

My experience watching the percolation of Freedom throughout the web was instructive – a chunk of viral traffic is moving from blogs to Twitter. If you’re not monitoring your blog/company/brand in Twitter, you probably should.

There are two major Twitter search services, Tweetscan and Summize. I’ve adopted Tweetscan – it is blazing fast and seems to have a larger corpus (i.e. more data) than Summize. Both offer RSS, so you can easily set up searches and stick them in your newsreader.

There is a major drawback to these services when it comes to searching for links. As URL shortening is very common in Twitter, and there are hundreds of URL shortening services, it is often impossible to search exhaustively for links to your domain. Unless you search for all shortened versions of your page (i.e. your link shortened by TinyUrl, Snurl, MooUrl, and so on..), you’re not going to find all of the conversation.

This problem is solvable. For a few minutes I though about building a bookmark that would compute shortened URL’s and search all of them in Tweetscan/Summize. However, this approach is horribly inefficient and I didn’t want to submit my el cheapo hosting service to the load if it went viral. Instead, the Twitter search services need to post-process URL’s they find and build an index of the canonical URL’s. This would allow me to search a URL and find all of the URL’s that eventually point to my domain, regardless of the link-shortened context.

The upside of a service building such an index would be I’d be able to find all links into my blog in one search, rather than individually searching each permalink. If Tweetscan has a post-processed index of all links pointing to permalinks inside of Unit Structures, I’d be able to find all of these links by searching on my domain.

In the meantime, has anyone run into viable stopgap solutions for this problem?

Research / Thoughts — 8 Comments
27
May 08

Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks

This past weekend, I was in Los Angeles to attend the wonderful HASTAC conference. Highlights included Howard Rheingold’s keynote, Curtis Wong’s discussion of the World Wide Telescope, and Bill Tomlinson’s demo on human-mediated networking. I was asked to join a panel entitled Trends in TechnoTravels/TeleMobility, so I thought I’d share what I spoke about here – a talk entitled Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks.


The talks on the panel were short, so rather than presenting research I mined Unit Structures to talk about some emergent themes I’m observing in social networks. Readers of my blog may recognize these themes: Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity. A lot my thinking is influenced by sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Muxtape and even ClaimID – sites where people are being social in smaller, more focused ways. Here’s the quick explanation, with links to reference posts with longer explanation:


Closeness: I see closeness in social network sites as a function of smaller friend networks and more personalized content. With more focused networks, the contextual challenges that lead to self-censorship are diminished. Compared to a site where one has hundreds of friends, including the boss, family members and friends, in a close site one knows their audience and engages them personally. Examples: Twitter, LiveJournal, Tumblr.

Curation: Curation emerges in sites built around social objects. Unlike Friendfeed, which is a decontextualized mess of everything a person creates, a curation-oriented site focuses on limited, curated content. Our identity wants to be faceted, and curation-oriented sites allow us to best present certain parts of our persona. Examples: Muxtape, Flickr, Vimeo.

Imagined Identity: Some sites are moving away from first-generation social network profile, one in which your identity is explicitly enumerated. Next-gen sites induce identity in more nuanced fashions. In Twitter, your bio is limited to 140 characters, meaning your “profile” or “identity” in more a function of your production. This is engaging, as the identity you produce naturally winds and changes as you “update” your profile by sending messages. Certainly more interesting that listing your favorite movies and changing them every six months. Examples: Twitter, Seesmic.

I was also asked to think about mobile social networks. I’ve been notoriously down on MoSoNet (or whatever it’s called) because so much of the technology requires freshening of handsets. If we have to wait for the whole world to get iPhones or Boost mobile devices, and then we have to get those devices to work together on proprietary networks, then we’re going to be waiting forever.

Thinking about these themes – Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity – I see a push back against the ideology of bigger, better, faster. Perhaps mobile networks that leverage these simple themes may be able to construct meaningful social networks across devices, with simple tools and techniques. There’s still a lot standing in the way of mobile networks, including cost and carrier interoperability, but perhaps this simpler approach may be beneficial.

There are a number of caveats attached to these themes. They are inherently emergent, meaning we’re not going to see the social networks market change to them overnight (or anytime soon). They also don’t reward the “biggest” networks, instead concentrating on smaller clusters. This is clearly in opposition to the goals of large players like Google, Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps these tools enable the long tail of social networks, which I think is an interesting possibility. We always though niche social networks would be the long tail of social networking. While niche networks will certainly represent a part of the tail, perhaps it is close networks, with inherent small-group personalization, that offer us a way forward.

Thoughts — 11 Comments
5
May 08

Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and thanks to Techcrunch, I’ve finally got my excuse. TC describes a scheme for making Twitter “portable”, with a goal of solving the service’s technical problems. According to the post, if you glue enough “standards” together, a Twitter-killing Phoenix just might rise from the ashes, and service outages will be a thing of the past.

Part I: Economies of Cooperation

As someone who spent almost seven years working in open source, I’m the last person who will argue against openness, but there are a few things wrong with TC’s notion. Most important, “open standards” have to work in cooperation with business, not in fierce competition. As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, free software is anything but free. Both the cathedral and the bazaar have extensive present and built-in costs.

So what does this have to do with Twitter? The idea of the “open Twitter killer” is built on an open service model. Open services are the Web 2.0 version of open source software. Just like open source software, open services have built-in and present costs: hardware, data centers, staff and developers. Because open services are standards-based, there is implied future-protection justifying the provisioning costs. Putting it more bluntly, open services can’t exist without business, especially at Twitter-scale.

When the founder of DataPortability.org publicly brainstorms ways to kill Twitter on Techcrunch, he’s taking the movement backwards. Anyone with engineering skill can dream up a way to “open” a service; the real challenge is bringing companies in to the fold to support open services. Talking about how to kill them is not a good way to do this.

Part II: Interaction and Next-Gen Social Networks

This brings us to our second point: does an open Twitter work? Even if some large companies stepped up to support the cost of an open Twitter, one that never suffered downtime, would we migrate to it? Barring a complete failure by Twitter, the answer is an obvious no. Why? While the DataPortability folks and TechCrunch think Twitter is just a messaging service, the other 99.9 percent of us see Twitter for what it is – a social network service.

I’ve always had a big-tent approach when it comes to social networks; a social network is something you feel, rather than something born from a set of features. Twitter only marginally stands up to the boyd/Ellison definition: Is Twitter bound? Does a 140-character bio really count as a profile? I believe that Twitter forces us to rethink some of the assumptions around social networks. Here’s how Twitter pushes thinking on the subject forward:

  • Message-centricity, as opposed to Profile-centricity: The core of any social network is messaging/communication, as illustrated by Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. In profile-centric social networks (Myspace, Facebook), messaging has largely taken place through the profile (I talk through my profile, you respond through my wall/apps/etc.). By locating the network around the profile, we were really locating it around “communication”. In Twitter, the “profile” is our communication, an always-on, interactive wall.
  • Imagined Identity: In focusing on interaction and communication, Twitter has eliminated many of the social network profile elements that make people uncomfortable. In Twitter, you’re not expected to list your favorite movies and upload lots of pictures (which, to many late 20’s and 30’s users feels like online dating). Rather, your identity is imagined – constructed through your communication and relation to your followers. For those who aren’t in social network expansion, the imagined identity (as exposed to the explicit identity of dating sites/Facebook) is much more comfortable.
  • Close Community: I’ve often described Twitter as a “close” community. While outlying bloggers have thousands of followers, most of us are followed by far less than 100 people (not including spambots). The knowledge of one’s disclosure community in a social network makes interaction more personal. A close community prevents some of the context leakages of monolith social networks; of course, Twitter needs a better approach to scale close community forward.
  • Constant Flux: The previous three elements – message centricity, imagined identity, and close community – interact to create a constant state of flux in Twitter. This is Twitter’s killer feature. For those who use Twitter in a close network, you constantly renegotiate your friends’ “profiles” throughout the day. As your concept of a “profile” is your friend’s last few posts, each new post is new information. This is why you keep checking Twitter throughout the day – people you care about are updating, communicating, and sharing.

Twitter isn’t a platform, it is a unique social network. It is a social network stripped to its most essential elements. Twitter provides social network designers a roadmap forward, a way of thinking about social networks more fundamentally. An “open” clone offers very little by way of competition. Further, an open clone that lacks the design or interaction aspects of Twitter would actually feel very different. Twitter is really about the user experience – something that simply can’t be replicated via an open standard.

Noticed / Software / Thoughts — No Comments
21
Apr 08

Freedom and Close Networks

On Friday, I released Freedom, software that fights the oppression of the internet. Incredibly, through the power of del.icio.us, Reddit, Twitter, blogs and endless Tumblr’s, Freedom has spread widely, with tens of thousands of views. Even more incredibly, I received a donation for my efforts, proving that Freedom is truly on the march. Here’s some of my favorite Freedom coverage:

And while most traffic to Freedom came in from the web or blogs, a substantial bit of Freedom’s traffic and buzz came from Twitter (which I was able to track via Tweetscan’s great, real-time analytics).

Techcrunch and I agree that smaller, more personal networks are the next wave. This has large implications for social (viral) content distribution. First a caveat: By volume, blogs are still king. However, compared to blogs, with their monolith long-post form, and invisible audience, these “closer” networks better fit social content. What do people want to do on the internet? They want to share links. Twitter and Tumblr are precisely tailored to link-based message passing (the fuel of viral traffic), aligning perfectly with our desires.

The real value of “close” networks, in my opinion, is knowledge of one’s audience. Being able to look at one’s Twitter followers and know who is reading you is incredibly powerful, if for no other reason than the milieu of sharing is pre-established. Ever notice how people on Twitter don’t adopt personas? Knowing one’s audience frees users to create as themselves, which is the ultimate sustainable model. The fact that viral content has moved into these close networks is very significant – and we’ll only see more of it going forward.

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