A good analysis of Twitter's allure

Luke Razzell has written a very good short paper on the Twitter experience. You can download it over here. This is no fanboi pap, Luke is a User Experience consultant and also co-invented BlogFriends, a social blog filtering service way in advance of its time.

When tech geeks like me look at Twitter we see it in terms of UC distribution, asynch comms and non aligned link following rules etc - ie we see it in in gobbledygook terms to most people. Luke puts it much better:

Physical-world social networks are naturally “fuzzy” in two key ways:

1. Fuzzy relationship definitions: we tend to have a unique set of associations and feelings about each person we know, rather than simply categorising them in our brain as “friend”, “colleague”, “partner”;

2. Fuzzy social network boundaries: although we may participate in specific and notionally-separate social networks in the physical world, the boundaries of those networks are often highly porous. Someone who is a member of your running club might become one of your group of drinking buddies in the course of a Saturday afternoon.

The vast majority of social web services - including giants like Facebook - construe social networks primarily in terms of a binary division between “contacts” and “not contacts”; in general, one must request that a person becomes a “contact” before engaging them in conversation on the network. Just imagine if you had to do the same thing in the face-to-face world!

Twitter, conversely, by allowing even non-contacts to impinge on the periphery of one another’s attention with “@” messages (provided that the recipient of the message opts in to such a possibility - see “Talk to her”, above), emulates much more closely the way that we naturally socialise with one another, very often dipping our toes into relationship through half-gestures and casual observations on the weather etc in order to test the relationship’s potential before taking such a high-risk step as asking the person in question to be our “friend”. In fact, just how often, since primary school, have you asked someone to “be my friend”? Perhaps never?

Its a good read, and good thinking to boot.