I was a big fan of Dodgeball, a service in which you “check in” via your phone with a text message that maps you to a location such as a music venue, bar or restaurant. Then it notifies your friends where you’re at. Useful and effective. They later added a “shout out” feature to send messages to your friends that weren’t location-specific. It was smart for letting your friends know where you’re going before you get there. Google bought Dodgeball in May 2005 and development seemed to go dry. It must have been frustrating. The founders of Dodgeball left Google in April 2007.
Meanwhile, Twitter launched in October 2006 as a service that I thought did less than Dodgeball. You could answer whatever you wanted to the question “What are you doing?” I was initially skeptical of the open-ended nature of this question but little did I know what it’d become! Worried about the signal to noise ratio, I couldn’t help to bring it up when I was interviewed on Future Tense about what Twitter is in March 2007:
…some people will continue to post stuff about, you know, “I’m feeding my cat” or “I’m driving to work.” And a lot of other people end up realizing, maybe I should only publish the stuff that somebody might actually be interested in. And those are the kinds of people I love subscribing to, because they realize “I have an audience here, so I’m just going to publish stuff people might have a bit of interest in.” I tend to not watch the people who end up talking about their commute every morning.”
Little did I realize that more and more people would use Twitter in ways that actually ignores the question “What are you doing?” Also, I was used to Dodgeball, a service that told me directly where people were at and little more.
I’m generally a fan of using an infrastructure of a service in a way that is beyond it’s intention when the results are good. For example, notifying people of emergencies or tragedy is a useful mis-use of Twitter. Unfortunately most of the alternative uses of Twitter, in my strong opinion, take away from the service more they give.
The Chatters
When someone tells you what they’re doing many times there’s an undeniable urge to respond to it. In principle this is a good thing and Twitter gave us the perfect method to handle it with a direct message. I’d argue that this feature hasn’t been used that much and historically most people post replies to other people’s messages as a public message. In other words, instead of telling their friends what they are doing, they send out a message to their followers that’s a reply to someone else they are following. For everyone that receives this when they don’t follow the person they’re replying to, they’re essentially receiving noise. Most everyone who has been on Twitter for awhile has gotten messages like this — the ones where you ask yourself, “what the heck are they talking about?”
As far as I am aware it was was a combination of people not knowing the direct message feature and people wanting to reply publicly that caused the format of the public reply to be more or less standardized as “@username.” Twitter recognized the issue of public replies without context so they gave Twitter the functionality to recognize the @reply notation causing your Twitter message, when viewed from the website, to link back to the user you they are replying to. A good idea but I think it reinforced the wrong mindset: it takes away from answering “What are you doing?”.
Note that it was after people starting using the @reply notation that Twitter developed a system to formally support it.
When people choose to reply publicly to people instead of direct message these days, I don’t think there is generally much thought by most users of how it’s received by people that didn’t see the context of what they were sending. I won’t blame Twitter’s users for this though as this is Twitter’s fault.
I think that by adding the @reply-recognizing functionality, Twitter intentionally or not started to strongly encourage the use of public replies. A couple months ago I got more ammo for my argument that Twitter prefers that people use public replies opposed to a private direct message regardless of the content of the message because they did one more simple “upgrade”: the reply button. Well, the reply button by itself isn’t proof but it was their choice on what the button does. Instead of plopping in the notation for sending a direct message to your friend it forces a public reply. Why would Twitter create a “reply” button that sends a public message instead of a direct, private reply?
Anyone who’s been on Twitter more than a year has noticed it’s a lot more “chatty” and contains less broadcasting what people are doing. Unfortunately, people that have joined Twitter in the last six months or less don’t know Twitter any other way and likely consider this type of chatter normal.
Sidenotes: UPOC is a service I’ve used for over five years and it’s perfect for SMS chat with multiple people. Same with AIM, Meebo and Jabber clients if you’re sitting at a computer. Why not use this for chat? I also think that Quotably, a service that tries to piece together Twitter conversations via the @reply notation is pretty humorous.
The Link Aggregators
The link aggregators are people that treat Twitter like a link blog in a manner similar to del.icio.us or Tumblr or those who use Twitter as a means of syndicating links to their own content. They’re the people that instead of answering “What are you doing?” are pushing URLs. Why would I want to get links sent to me this way? I subscribe to your feeds, add you as a friend on del.icio.us and follow you on Tumblr so I can find out the latest stuff you’re reading and linking to. I subscribe to your Twitter feed because I want to find out what you’re doing right now, not because I need aggregation in multiple places.
I want to arm wrestle Alex King for creating Twitter Tools for WordPress. That plug-in, when used to automatically post a URL to Twitter on your behalf every single time you create a new blog post is one of the most annoying things on Twitter. Especially because like many people that use Twitter, I use an RSS reader to read blogs. I don’t use Twitter to get notifications of when to go to your website every single time it’s updated. I was joking with Ed Kohler last week about Twitter and he was quick to jab that he is “not down with people who Tweet under the assumption that everyone is sitting at their desk and interested in being carpet bombed with URLs.”
It’s frustrating that it’s been generally accepted now that this kind of use of Twitter is okay. Just tell me what you’re up to on Twitter and I’ll read about your links and blogs on your websites.
The Platform of Whatever-The-Heck-We-Want
This is the miscellaneous category I guess. It’s the folks that use Twitter to relay what other people are saying, to organize “wars”, live blog events, make jokes and one-liners, give weather reports, greet their followers every morning or to complain about the day of the week and their commute. Either way, they’re not telling me anything interesting about what they’re doing.
I use Twitter because I want to know what you’re doing!
There are quite a few people that I have stopped following because of one one of the three reasons above. I like these people but we don’t use Twitter the same way.
Twitter In My Perfect World
For the last time, I like the idea of a service where I get updated on the interesting things my friends are up to in real-time.
Without getting too granular and without imposing any rules whatsoever (although I do find the Ten Commandments hilarious and accurate), I think having a simple preference that suppresses Twitter messages that contain @reply and URLs would do the trick. I ask, if you’ve already read this far, spend a minute and think of the ramifications if people used a feature like this and what it would mean for the future of Twitter. I think it’s really quite positive. Twitter already recognizes to a point the importance of something like this as they suppress messages containing the @reply notation when updating your Facebook status on Twitter’s own Facebook application.
…or perhaps more realistically…
Remove that text from Twitter that says in big letters, “What are you doing?”
Just leave the blank text box. Let’s be honest here: it would make it more clear as to what Twitter really is and at the same time admits the kind of medium Twitter’s become (or perhaps always was). It’s truly a 140 character blank slate of whatever you want to put in it regardless of my perceived signal to noise ratio.
It would stop me from being a Twitter purist and I’ll go somewhere else.
I just want a service that lets me know what my friends are doing.
UPDATE: Sara points out that Twitter recently added the ability to block messages with the @reply notation. That helps, and I flipped that switch on my account just now.
UPDATE 27 Mar 08: This exploded into a pretty good conversation about what Twitter is and is not and how people don’t agree on it at all (and should they?). I had a ton of good conversations in person, via IM and email about this in the last 48 hours in addition to the comments. For kicks I’m going to flip-flop and treat Twitter as the free-for-all service it’s become. I started following all the people I said I stopped followed. I’ve changed my habits a bit to go along with what’s perceived as the mainstream. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably write something in April about it but I’ll probably talk more about what I really would love as a next-generation service, which Twitter wasn’t, isn’t and probably won’t ever be.
