Posts Tagged: twitter

Noticed — No Comments
11
Mar 09

Baym on Blogs vs. Twitter

Nancy Baym has hit the nail on the head with her post “Blogs vs Twitter? It’s the Interactivity.”  As the title states, she takes on the Blogs vs. Twitter discussion, highlighting differences and concluding (correctly) that Twitter isn’t the death of blogging.  I like points 1, 3 and 7:

1) Twitter isn’t a substitute for blogging. Some people may choose to Twitter instead of blogging, but I wouldn’t assume that anyone has that kind of either/or relationship. A tweet is not meant to accomplish what a blog post is meant to accomplish. Neither’s killing the other, they aren’t in competition anymore than, oh, say writing books vs. writing a blog.

3) Looking at a Twitter feed or profile isn’t the same as following someone on Twitter. People who don’t actually use Twitter think that you have to read all the tweets that are directed specifically @someoneelse.  If you follow from within a Twitter account, there’s a setting so you don’t have to watch that banter unless it’s between people you also follow. That changes the signal/noise ratio  a lot. Yes, there will still be tweets you don’t care about, but let’s be honest, can you name a single blogger who posts only posts you find interesting? I sure can’t.

7) Ugh. Can we just quit judging every new mode of communication that comes along and finding it wanting in comparison to the last one? Haven’t we been doing that for millenia? Don’t we always look back later and feel kind of silly?

If Nancy’s blog isn’t in your newsreader you’re truly missing out.  Read the full post here.

Hacks / Noticed — No Comments
8
Mar 09

BackTweets

Via Waxy:

BackTweets, search for links on Twitter (unlike Twitter Search, this dereferences links from URL shorteners like TinyURL)

Something I asked for a long time ago.  Don’t know why Twitter search still doesn’t do this, perhaps now they will.  Great execution, smart defaults, instantly indispensable for anyone monitoring Twitter.  Excellent.

Noticed / Software / Teaching / Thoughts — 18 Comments
23
Feb 09

Twitter as Courseware

David Silver is using Twitter in his media studies classes (check out the amazing “Eating San Francisco”).  Twitter is the class’ main mode of communication, and he writes that Twitter has replaced three classroom technologies:

twitter has replaced the class listserv. for years, i’ve used a listserv (alternatively called a mailing list or discussion list) to extend our discussions beyond the classroom. these days, when we want to continue conversations, the 12 students in DMP, the 17 students in ESF, and i use twitter.

twitter has replaced email announcements. in the past, if something’s come up, or i want to add a reading, or we have a location change, i would send all the students in class an email. these days, when i have something to announce, or when my students have something to announce, we use twitter.

twitter has replaced the cardboard box i used to bring to class on due dates. in the past, my students would print out their papers and bring them to class; i’d collect them in a box and take them back to the office to grade. these days, my students write blogs, design flickr sets, upload video, and post works-in-progress. when finished, they tweet about it so that i – and, more importantly, their peers – can check it out.

This is instructive for designers of educational technology.  The “traditional” trajectory of educational technology is specialization and feature-creep.  For example, a class must have an email list, a forum, website/CMS, each with its own space and identity.  When I log into BlackBoard, I see about 30 different things I can do, and for each I have to click a link and go to a page to do the action.  Twitter strips away the features, instead using an inherently flexible textual space to facilitate communication, accomplishing the same goal of other feature-ridden “course technology.”

I see Twitter’s artificial limit on post size as an important factor in classroom success.  First, it keeps the information space managable, meaning information is economized and easily retrievable.  Second, and this is pure speculation, but I see Twitter’s short form as a communication equalizer.  In any class, you’re going to have verbose individuals and quiet individuals – the same applies online.  Twitter forces the verbose to be concise, and it makes it easy for the quiet/reluctant to contribute “normally.”  To illustrate this point, let’s imagine a traditional class forum.  Our verbose individuals may contibute multi-paragraph posts.  Our quiet individuals may look at those long posts, struggle to replicate them, and end up not enjoying or participating in online communication.  We’ve lost “communication” because a student struggled to replicate a “form.”  In the case of Twitter, the difference between the verbose and the quiet is 140 characters.  Form goes away, more or less, and the forum focuses primarily on the communication of raw ideas.  Again, this is just speculation – but there’s plent of research in CMC on media richness and form effects that might provide theoretical basis for this sort of research question.

In my class, we’ve used Facebook groups for discussions with (in my opinion) great success.  We’ve also experimented with Ning, where that success was not replicated.  I believe that Ning suffered from the problems endemic to BlackBoard and other CMS – too many functions, too many buttons to push, too many markup styles to remember.  This “overfunctioning” leads to a segmentation of communication, and in an online discussion where communicants may be reluctant, segmentation is death.  Twitter is the opposite of segmentation, forcing all communication through a single, flexible channel.  This creates the impression of activity, again stimulating discussion.

If I were going to build a CMS (Course Management Software), I would start with Twitter as the prototype, and only add features to the dashboard screen.  In this sense, the CMS would only have one page, and everything would tie into and key off the communication sream (i.e I would join Twitter with something like Facebook’s News Feed).  If I were to employ Twitter in my classes, one thing I might ask for is “Groups” or “Rooms.”  It would be a challenge for me to keep track of all of my student communication (though a second Twitter account would probably suffice).

Noticed — No Comments
12
Feb 09

Pew Internet: Twitter and status updating

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

via Pew Internet: Twitter and status updating.

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.

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