D’Arcy passed on a link to We Travel in Tribes. It is one of the best pieces of writing about Twitter I’ve seen to date. A snippet:

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

Twitter is having problems again and I have to admit it’s trying even my boundless patience. The closer you get to real-time services the more impatient people will be. I get it. The comparable instability of Flickr and del.icio.us back in the day felt less intense.

But I have to laugh at the Net Pundits giving Twitter a few weeks to live before it dies because “the luminaries” such Scoble, Winer, Arrington, etc. will leave. Do people really care if these one-way broadcasters who aren’t following them, aren’t listening to them, and who care as much or more about their statistics than anything either themselves or their followers might talk about, migrate elsewhere?

I have a theory that the pundit migration would actually be a great boon to Twitter. I won’t miss anything actually important that the luminaries say– when they do it gets endlessly amplified in the tech guru echo chamber and I’m bound to hear the echo– and perhaps removing the load on the servers represented by stats-sluts and their ego-searching, Twitter Karma sifting, constantly shouting Tweet personae would improve system stability for the rest of us.

As for me, it’s a stand-off. I won’t move until a significant part of the group I follow moves. The platform pales in comparison to the people… I’d rather get the good stuff with the occasional speed-reducing hiccup than wander a desert landscape inhabited mostly by the bloated carcasses of the punditocracy erecting elaborate, Ozymandian structures to honor themselves.

Patrick Sullivan Jr. (aka editweapon) is having a one-day only, 6-word story contest via Twitter. To participate, follow hashtags (so your posts with tags get indexed) and then post your 6 word story with the tag #6words. You can read current entries via  Hashtags or TweetScan.

[photo by marmota]

While I’m as much about “information like water” as the next person– I don’t get myself worked up trying to keep up with every Twitter or blog post from people I follow or subscribe to– my online habits put a natural cap on the number of people that it makes sense to follow. Over the last few weeks I’ve found a need to cut back a bit on the volume so the good stuff doesn’t get lost. In doing so I’ve stumbled across a few personal principals for following (and not following) people.

I don’t have a magic number that I can follow (if I did, it would probably be something a little insane, like D’Arcy’s 62 so that the avatar grid on his Twitter page is even). I also tend to take the online conversations a bit more personally– even in an informal place like Twitter– so Jen’s approach is a bit too flippant (too informal? I’m not trying to be negative, it just isn’t a good method for my personality) and drastic for me.

If you don’t follow me, I will probably drop you. There are exceptions– a very few people I follow just because they are so funny or informative (in a non-personalized way)– but like the group conversation I always liken Twitter to, I will only sit and make googly eyes for so long before moving on. If my conversation isn’t interesting enough for you to follow, then you better be really interesting or I better really be hoping you will eventually follow me. Otherwise, *snip*.

If you talk too much then for purely practical reasons I’ll probably stop following you. This mostly happens with people who consistently deluge my Twitter-stream with scores of chat-like posts, usually to the same person or three. I do subscribe to a number of loud talkers via their RSS feed. However,

If you don’t talk enough I’ll probably drop you as well. If you have a history of interesting, but rare, Tweets I’ll probably add you to my RSS reader. This is also partially pragmatic: those who don’t Tweet enough tend to get lost in the stream of information anyway. A corollary:

If you are using Twitter for advertising, product announcements, etc., then use it! If you only Twitter once every 3-12 weeks to tell me about something new with your product, then don’t bother. That’s why you have your web site and mailing lists and other mechanisms in place for customer service.

I have no use for locking or blocking… yet. I haven’t found a compelling reason to block anyone yet. If you want to follow thousands of people and I am one of them, that’s OK with me. I don’t understand it, but I don’t care any more than I care that many people subscribe to my blog feeds (and for all I know, Twitter feeds too) that I don’t know. Of course, if I protected my updates that would be different. But on that, my position hasn’t really changed: I don’t see that locking provides enough benefit to outweigh the downsides for how I use (and want others to use) the system.

Some days I feel like the old man of the web… not the crotchety, complaining one mumbling about how USENET, IRC and Gopher did everything the web does now only better, but the dazed and confused one, pointing his palsied finger at all the moving, shiny things he doesn’t understand. It started with class last night, which I thought went pretty well except a fair suspicion that I managed to unintentionally frustrate and annoy one of the younger students in trying to explain some of the history of social software and traditional social networking applications. I’m the kind of person who needs a narrative, and I have a particular narrative about the way MySpace and LinkedIn and Facebook have evolved from the roots of YASNSs that, in my (unnecessary) haste probably makes me less appreciative of the power those networks can have for their users.

My internet dog-years continue when I log into Twitter to find a stream of ranting about the flakiness of Twitter, which has not quite recovered from its downtime upgrades last night. Twitter has only been around for what– 18 months? Perhaps I’ve been jaded by the particular services I’ve stuck with in the past, but not being rock-solid during immense times of growth while only 18 months old (and only perhaps 6-9 months into a serious period of heavy adoption) doesn’t strike me as a horrible, time-to-switch-to-Jaiku problem. Del.icio.us went through this kind of thing, but worse, for years. Flickr is now owned by Yahoo but it still went down during MacWorld. Blogger was going down for 6-12 hours at a stretch for years. People griped, but the vitriol and the tendency to abandon ship sure seemed less than we see now. Now expectations are that a company will figure out how to provide a near real-time service with multiple paths for input and output that scales to accommodate exponential growth and has a full-featured API right out of the box. For free.

I will hold Twitter accountable for one regrettable decision: building a service that they had to hope would scale on Ruby on Rails, which seems to be the Achilles heel of a number of sites. And that stupid cat-with-screwdriver picture that was only remotely funny the first time.

The EdTechTalk podcast used excerpts from my “Donning the Twitter Condom” post as the starting point for a recent podcast (Part 1 and Part 2 … things really start to drift a bit in Part 2 after Alec Couros leaves) and it prompted a few clarifications, further thoughts, and an open question or two.

The big open questions remain: what is it about Twitter that makes it fulfill a satisfying niche in the information eco-system and how is Twitter being used by communities of practice? Prompted by discussions at HICSS, I plan to do a bit of research into both of those questions at the same time… but even in my own online existence– in which Twitter has become an important part– I’m not at all clear about the first.

There was a misconception in the podcast which needs clarification. At multiple points listeners were told that they would see replies or Twitters directed to them (using the @username convention) even if they weren’t following that person. In fact, this is only true if you change your settings from the default (as I noted earlier). By default you don’t see @comments to people you don’t follow nor to those people…

The questions about how Twitter could monetize its users was interesting… but speculation that they were making money from Amazon now is quite the opposite of what appears to be going on. All the requests to Amazon one sees when they load Twitter come from calls to the Amazon storage service… so Twitter is actually paying Amazon for storage and access rather than the other way around!

I think the most interesting parts of the discussion have to do with the way Twitter is being bent to the shape of the people using it. Those who have no experience in a Community of Practice in Twitter or whose only experience involves the aggregated public stream have a hard time visualizing how Twitter is actually being used. This unintended use seems to be the norm for first generation social software apps, to the point that I wonder how much return there is for even trying to predict in advance the usage patterns for an application. Maybe putting up a lightweight set of social functions with a robust API is the secret. I don’t think anyone at Twitter– or anyone who started using it early on– had a clue that it would be put to the kind of small-group oriented, directed communication that characterizes the educational technology set.

An offshoot of this is the obvious need to have some kind of group capability in Twitter. I was surprised to learn that so many people opt to have multiple accounts, a tedious and awkward workaround to the lack of built-in functions to have multiple communities. This would also help take care of many of the issues regarding security and protected updates that were the topic of conversation in my original post.

Twitter on its own isn’t much… but it is amazing what people make of it. Clearly it fills a niche somewhere. There was some speculation in the podcast that Twitter activity was coming at the expense of blogging, a model in which blogging was posited as the more serious and sustained form, borne of concentration, while Twitter was seen as a sign of our ever-shortening attention span and propensity towards sound bites. That’s probably accurate for some… on the other hand, if it can be said in 140 characters to one’s satisfaction, then perhaps it would have been put into a blog only because there were no other better, more practical alternatives. I see Twitter as another piece in a puzzle that, when complete, will provide a full-spectrum of presence options for participation in our particular learning and living networks. I also see it as a way for widely dispersed colleagues to maintain a socio-professional community– a Community of Practice– with all the attendant social games, norm-creation, and expectations that we associate with such communities.

So, thanks to [excised to adhere to Twitter privacy norms] announcement that he was going private and protecting his updates so they can only be seen by followers, my Twit-stream is now punctuated by a river of new red padlocks.

I understand the motivation– in fact I’ve been expecting this for a while given the strong implicit desire amongst info-oriented Twitterers (most of those I follow) for private group capabilities of some kind– but I don’t really agree with it.

My feeling is that leaving Tweets opens actively facilitates people finding me, the network effect of which is allowing me to potentially follow them. Most of the people I follow, beyond the small initial core group I already “knew,” are people I discovered by seeing references to them in my friends’ conversation. Typically I would then go to the unknown person’s Twitstream and read a few pages to see if they are someone I want to follow. Others come from people who find me and I, again, look at their Twits to see if I should follow them. I don’t follow everyone who follows me.

[also excised due to Twitter padlock] notes that he doesn’t care about discoverability… he wants “conversation. conversation is easier in a pub than a stadium.” True, but in Twitter we control the door anyway– we don’t have to follow everyone who discovers us, so the amount of conversation remains manageable. I put a high premium on allowing people to easily discover those they want to follow rather than having to follow them first. They can sit at the table– doesn’t mean I am listening to them.

[yet another Twitterer I can't name] says she doesn’t see any problem because “If I see people having an interesting conversation with someone, I’ll look and add that person, and vice versa.” Well, sure… but it adds another step to the process that seems unnecessary to me. Having to wait for an approval to see Tweets to make a decision whether I want to see those Tweets…

Again, I think of Twitter as a group conversation at a conference. It isn’t my dinner table and it isn’t Wembley stadium… so people can come and sit in and listen and, if they want to, they can listen to me. They don’t have to touch me on the shoulder so they can hear what I am saying. When I go to someone’s Twitter profile who is new to me, I am evaluating whether I want to follow them. I am much less likely to add someone just to see if I want to add them (so to speak).

As I told [excised #2], to each their own. I don’t make my blog private either. I know only a few people read it, but I want more people to. I know that my content can (and does) find its way elsewhere in references akin to Twitter badges, but that’s just another act of sharing… and given my way I’ll share people to their death.

This also closes the ecosystem even more and unless I have a very strong reason to, I opt for keeping things open. I do understand why people opt for protected updates. It’s too bad Twitter doesn’t allow for granular control (public and private Tweets) because the option to privatize information makes all of that information unavailable to other interesting and potentially useful applications leveraging social networks, such as Tweet Scan. A nice system with an open API is a sad thing without data to access!

A paper presented here today analyzing a mobile social network application (kind like Twitter with groups, but only accessible from mobile devices) using “information ground” theory has me thinking about Twitter and the immensely important community of practice that it, like blogging, has allowed me to participate in I’m very curious if Twitter, an analagous system in multiple ways, will demonstrate the same characteristics regarding directed, non-directed, social revelation, witty banter, etc.

It’s still vague, but I have some ideas. One part would involve content coding… what “kinds” of Twitter posts are there that we can identify just by looking at them. A few off the top of my head (and a single Twit could invoke multiple categories… and some of these categories could likely be broken down further):

• link sharing
• social sharing (the classic twit)
• direct questions
• direct answers
• banter (generalized)
• banter (directed to in-group)

Good thing I’m lazy… wait a day or two after seeing the original code and someone makes a nice little Twitter stats web service out of it (found via a CogDog Twit).

What I would like is something that would create a graph Twitter activity for each day and then another that would do the same with a blog’s RSS feed– then we could see for sure if there is the correlation many of us intuitively suspect between Twittering and a decline in blog output.

The rush to the Twittersphere is provoking interesting thoughts amongst the bloggerati (I’m trying to squeeze in as many horrific coinages as possible here). The most amusing one, to me, is the clarion call to arms by some bloggers. Don’t forget the blog, they say (and twit and blog), where contemplation and thought win out over the ephemeral and impulsive! I agree that we should always be questioning our types and forms of discourse, but casting the blog as a practically traditional force is kind of funny. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that blogs were being singled out because they were too ephemeral and constant complaints being aired about the lack of thought that went into such easy publishing? And before that wasn’t it the death of the essay and long form news? What about epic poems? Where is our Homer (and I don’t mean Homer Simpson)?

I question the basic assumption that posting to Twitter is robbing blogs of their vigor. More specifically, I would suggest that the attraction to Twittering that seems to be replacing blogging is not necessarily a matter of people putting in less intellectual effort, as some of the worrying implies, but is a sign that some of the conversation that was being forced into the blog form is more suited to tools like Twitter, which are more analagous to “real” conversation with its fits and starts, dead ends and resumptions, meanders and razor sharp retorts.

I’m blogging less than I did before Twitter, but that’s because Twitter most often allows me to express what I want to express. I don’t need to puff thoughts up into entries suitable for the blogging form (as it has come to be understood), reserving this space for incredibly intellectual and compelling posts like this one…