The Zen of Twitter

Saturday, June 20. 2009

There has been quite a bit of hype about Twitter of late, if you hadn't noticed. However, what tends to get lost in all this is that it works so well in spite of the vapids , PR Ho's and the slebs who spam it. As Jonathan Zittrain noted this week that:

It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

Its useful to just list what these qualities are. It has a rather unique architecture, something between a chatroom and social net, with a lot of hard edged Unified Messaging too. Here's a starter for Ten

1. Publish/Subscribe push system - efficient, as no need to request stuff. Scalable as it lends itself to everything from broadcast to one on one comms

2. Asynchronous - you do not have to be online to get the messages (same as email)

3. Asymmetric- you don't need permission to follow someone to get their messages - makes it very flexible, and very quick to set up to listen to many sources.

4. (Near) Real Time - news moves as soon as it is input - makes the system very responsive. Twitter search massively outperforms Google for "new" news for example

5. Unified Communications - can take messages in and pass them out in multiple formats - text, email, web, mobile, computer.

6. Simplicity - 140 character simple messaging format makes Unified Comm easier to do in multiple networks

7. Low Transaction Cost - This short message also makes messaging easy for users as very low transacation costs both to write and read, and promotes heavy usage

8. Multi-Media - carries text, photos (twitpic), voice, video (clips), links

9. Open Applications Interface - leads to huge creative effort leading to rapidly building functionality on top of the transport architecture - and outsourcing this to "the community" makes it very fast to evolve. Also, develops organically with customer demand so stuff is immediately useful

10. Increasingly forcing other systems eg Facebook to mirror them, and then sucks in those messages as well

One of the interesting thing is to watch the evolution of social nets, as one generation builds on the lessons of the previous one. Twitter launched with quite a few competitors, but it got that mix of features more "right" than the others. It was the most boned down and simple to use initially and that allowed it to win out. There must be a Zen thing about that, surely?

Be interesting to see what builds on top of Twitter.

(Update - interesting article on Twitter in Iran etc with another 6 points orhogonal to these above)

Posted by Alan Patrick in Microblogging / Unified Messaging at 10:36 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Great list. The one thing I'd shift is that it doesn't carry photos or multi-media. Rather it carries hyper-links... the original invention that makes the web work.

Now there are two types of hyperlinks - the original http:// and the links that Twitter enables (@account and #topic).

Also, they went with default to public - which is a nuancing of asymetric. This default to public again mirrors/levers the original spirit of the web.

And while I'm going... I believe the collection of these attributes create a unique form of publishing - not just in the medium but in what/how people publish. I don't really know what the impact is but do feel it's an equally important part of the technical/logical impression that this new medium is a big piece of the rewiring/reconnecting/reconfiguring of the web.

It's moving from being destinational to evolving around people (defined by what they put into the web).

Or so I see anyway... for now...

#1 Michael Lewkowitz (Homepage) on 2009-06-20 14:10 (Reply)

I like your list. I also wrote about Twitter:
http://enterknowl.blogspot.com/2009/01/clever-old-twitter.html
but you've covered more facets.
What's brilliant about Twitter is some sort of elusive balance. Hard to express.

#2 Simon Carswell (Homepage) on 2009-06-20 20:38 (Reply)

@Michael - good points, will update post. I am also mulling over how to structure axes of new form of publiing, you may be onto something imho

@Simon - yes, that was my thought re Zen - soething balanced om Twitter that Jaiku, Friendfeed just didn't get - might be simplicity?

#3 alan p on 2009-06-21 11:46 (Reply)

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