Twitter - arousing savage passions in.........

We were wrong re the Twitternuts being more secure now - music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, but Twitter on the other hands seems to invoke savage passions in those same breasts. GigaOm's Anne Zelenka has royally fisked Scott Karp's complaint about the Signal To Noise ratio on Twitter:

Isn’t that what human interaction is like? Sometimes there’s an urge to say something just for the sake of saying something — just for the sake of interaction or recognition. Sometimes there’s conversation that doesn’t really mean anything; there’s no signal in the noise of ambient intimacy.

Oh it’s the old productivity thing! Got to optimize the human right out of our lives:

I agree with Scott btw....Twitter is a River of Trivia - but I wanted to pick up on the Ambient Intimacy point (I referred to it in my original post on the matter yesterday, seems like its been picked up ) as I had some thoughts on this when I heard Leisa Reichert speak on the subject at FOWA.

Firstly, unlike ambient music where I can still multitask, ambient intimacy means I have to turn my attention to the messages (like email in the early days...you just had to respond then and there) and frankly I don't have the time ( and after the novelty has worn off, the interest ) to keep that low level of social grooming going.

Secondly, some people then abuse it - it becomes "push voyeurism" at best, ego-spam at worst, and the Signal to Noise ratio hits the roof. So you have to turn off the whole person, and thus miss the stuff they say which may be relevant

I have a suspicion that Twitter is most useful for people with a lot of "lumps of time" on their hands - either home-alone-workers, or frequent travellers (or, dare it be said, distracted employees) - and for them its a useful medium to connect as they have time to manage the Noise bit down.

However, to really work scalably it requires us to have - and this was my discussion with Leisa after her talk - "Intimacy Filters" which can take context from the network parameters and winnow the twits down - ie the SocNet has to be far more nuanced than it is now to be useful as a utility for most people.