User Devices

I haven't, and I object to this in The Guardian:

At first glimpse, it seems vacuous and empty: just another "look at me" service like blogging or MySpace - and likely to draw derision from mainstream users or those snorting fuddies who think the kids are an alien species who will eventually grow up to be Just Like Them.

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Can't something draw derision just because at first glance its vacuous and empty and a "just look at me" service

(btw I have kids - and they are an alien species, they all chat on World of Warcraft - the twitterbugs ain't the kids any more either!.)

My view is probably echoed most closely by M Parekh here:

To younger internet users and European/Asian cell phone users, Twitter may seem as nothing special at first glance, given that those groups are already huge adopters of instant messaging and SMS text messaging respectively, for some time now.

i.e the current "good enoughs" are good enough for now - in Europe, anyway. In all seriousness, I think at some point a usable combined sms/IM/mail service will have a use, but I don't think this one scales that easily, especially if ones' friends twitter like canaries about the incredible lightness of their being. I think Dave Winer puts it well when he says:

At the very least this is a good sandbox for experimentation. As I said yesterday, what matters is that there are users.

Or Matthew Ingram:

I also think it is another piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how we relate to each other in an online world, and how those relationship mechanisms are changing.

There are benefits to being late Early Adopters sometimes

As noted in our earlier (exceedingly witty and erudite) posts, for Twitter to glittr, it has to:

- Get a better Signal to Noise Ratio

- have more to recommend it than being the vehicle du jour of the chatterati - nearly all the use cases to date were once advanced for email, sms, egroups rss etc etc

However, we have decided to make available our incredibly valuable blog content on Twitter - as a public service, you understand! I was influenced mainly by this post and the above, i.e. lets start playong with it and see what else we can make it do apart from filling empty heads with vacuous stuff.

But give it a go, make your own mind up. But I don't want to know what you had for lunch thank you!

Thought sparked by a post from Kathy Sierra

To recap, Shannon's law states that in a communication channel of limited capacity, useful information is transmitted at:

C = W log2(1 + S /N ),

where C is the channel capacity in bits per second, W is the bandwidth in hertz, and S /N is the signal-to-noise ratio.

So, cometh the Broadband 'Net, and C rises by an order of magnitude.

Surely Shannon's Law would predict a huge jump in the amount of useful information available. How then, does it explain the emergence of stuff like Twitter?

It's all in the S/N ratio - more C allows more S, and more W.

....but also more N.

Ergo, Twitter et al are the unintended consequences of the Broadband Revolution

But why stop at Twitter...why not a system where I can for eg have my 'phone log where I am, and every time I say anything, make a transaction (or take a pee or whatever) little RFID's in situ broadcast it to all my friends - saves me the trouble of actually writing anything.

Hey - maybe I should patent that

(In other words, as bandwidth goes up, cost of a comms transaction goes down, and the barriers to editing disappear. Self Published becomes User Generated becomes Stream of Consciousness becomes Torrents of cr*p - It may even be that the S/N ratio goes down, as the effort required to generate drivel is << than that necessary to generate intelligent thought)

As an aside, reading the blogs re twitter it seems that many people don't only read their friends on twitter but sub to A list blogslebs to get their every digestive accomplishment etc - so maybe its just Hello! magazine for geeks ?

Shannon would be turning in his grave........Orwell would just be smiling mischievously

Postscript...the Reverse Shannon's Law of Twitter as measured in Uncertain Cats

Postscript....even GigaOm is wittering on about twitter now!

Tara Hunt has written an interesting post about Twitter...

Now, I am one of those who just cannot see the point of Twitter - not because I don't see what its trying to do, but because I just don't need yet another river of data in my life - maybe its just me, but I already have IM, Skype, email, groups, sms, mobile and rss already - I am busy managing down my data deluge, not up.

However, Tara's post is useful because she lays down what she gets out of it in a structured way, and she starts to contrast the original Twittr with the Twitter of today, though sadly she doesn't say which she prefers:

I’m not trying to say that I’m uber cool ’cause I was part of Twitter before others are, but I would like to stand up for the service in the face of the multitude of naysayers and hype machines that appear hell-bent on taking it down before understanding why it has become so popular in the first place. Those of you who are arriving here now are experiencing a very different Twitter than the Twttr I fell in love with ages ago.

'nuff said

Then she goes through what Twitter means to her, and it is interesting - and I had to respond:

1. Twitter is a representation of my stream of consciousness

Exactly! And I don't want my friends streams of consciousness - give me edited thought, high signal to noise ratio anyday.

2. Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my attention data -

But I don't want my attention data tracked!!! Maybe its just me, but I'm already concerned about the level of privacy that is being compromised by the behavioural analysis from my digital footprint. I can't wait for the first Twitverts and Twitspam......

3. Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my activity

Now this is an interesting application, but it can be done in less intrusive ways, Sony for e.g. does this, but this is a valid point imho

4. Twitter helps me keep track of my friends

Hmmm....there were some interesting notes about how it helped at SXSW, ie in a closed environment. Overall though, maybe its just me again - but I just don't want to know at that level of detail. I can find them when I want them via the IM, Skype, email, mobile et al. And sometimes I also want to be able to move around without everybody knowing where I am all the time.

5. Twitter has led me to making more friends. (Tara later notes it has more helped her to increase her relationship as well).

This I can see, but I would argue its not Twitter per se, its the comradeship of pioneering a new thing with like minded enthusiasts (before the masses rush in ?). Email, chatrooms, blogs etc all did this in the early days.

This is kind of implied above in her comment about Twittr v Twitter, and when she notes that:

There are many more reasons why I love Twitter and Twittering. I love the common language emerging from this less than 140 character medium. That people come up with clever words to describe Twitter phenomenon, which become a shared language between us.

This also happened to email, where a style emerges in text to show emotions :-{ - and in sms, where a txt language emerged partly because of the clunky interface and partly to facilitate 1 liners - of course now txt is mainstream, and more used by marketers 2 lk cool than n e thng else.

But to me, I think the most telling comment is this:

Do I think Twitter scales? Nope. I don’t think community ’scales’, either. I look at my long list of friends and feel I need to start switching some off (although it’s an insanely difficult decision because I’m actually interested in learning more about the people who update rarely as well).

I feel the same....10 friends wittering away is one thing, 100 is.....another! And its happened every time - lots of email buddies, groups joined, IM friends, rss feeds...and than after a while we start to manage it down again.

So, will Twitter evolve into something where the chatter moves above the level of drivel, or will it, like IM, move to just another flirtr device

And as for the name..............

Postscript...NY Times has an article on Twitter over here, Tara is quoted:

Twitter's expanding popularity has frustrated some users. "I'm a little annoyed by some of these newbies," said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco who complains that many users seem to be focusing on quantity over quality in their updates. She blames the influx of new users on Mr. Scoble, a Twitter user who began writing frequently about the service on his blog earlier this year. She removed him from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. "He Twittered about Twitter," she said.

Levels of quality in streams of consciousness - who would have thought......maybe Twitter will develop as an art form like haiku

Or maybe not.

However, it does seem from this that Twitter is a fad, and now the barbarians are at the gates the Cool School will be looking for the next Social Network Differentiator.

Post Postscript - there is a whole article on Web Worker Daily eulogising Twitter. All I can say is every one of the points raised has been used for sms, email, mobile, egroups, the altnet, and IM in the past. I suspect its all due to the points I made in 4 and 5 above. These twitterbugs are really addicted!