What's all the Chatter about Twitter?

By Joanna Bawa


What are you doing?

If you can answer that question in 140 characters or less (around 25 words), you're probably already a Twitterer. Twitter is the newest social network phenomenon, a curious mix of the banal and the profound, and a tool to tax the minds of the finest Web 2.0 researchers.

Sign up for a free account and you're immediately able to create 'tweets', short messages which capture what you're doing at that exact moment. Your tweet is displayed on the site's public timeline (along with the tweets of everyone else who's posted in the last 30 seconds). You can send and receive tweets between designated friends, and you can choose to follow any Twitterer of interest to you, in which case you'll receive updates whenever they tweet. Or you might be followed yourself. Twitter allows tweets to flow seamlessly between mobile phones, emails and instant messages, which is one of its technical claims to fame. Twitterers can update on a minute by minute basis, and many do. The service can be embedded in blogs and will mercilessly send you emails, text and instant messages as your friends update their lives.

But why? What is the point of Twitter? Does it have any genuinely useful use? And, more pointedly, who's making the money?

There are various theories behind the popularity of Twitter. Writing in Slate magazine, Michael Agger suggests that "... Twitter is not a mere procrastination tool. It acts as a mental escape hatch. When answering the Twitter prompt — 'What are you doing?' — people have a way of checking in with their essential nonwork selves: 'thinking about fried pickles for lunch' or 'daydreamng about a boy that i fancy and how i can snog him.' It's the 21st-century equivalent of passing notes in class."

Annalee Newitz, writing in the San Francisco Guardian, cites a more elaborate theory to explain Twitter's bizarre popularity: "... an article published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used data from hundreds of cities to create a mathematical model suggesting that the 'pace of life' in urban areas speeds up exponentially relative to population size. What that means is if your population grows at rate n, your pace of life grows at the rate of n-squared. In other words, really freakin' fast. Pace of life, according to first author of the study Luis Bettencourt, includes everything from technological innovation to wealth and the speed of walking traffic. So you'd expect that as the populations of cities grow, for example, the speed of communications technology such as Twitter should grow exponentially faster.

"Twitter, primarily an urban phenomenon, makes perfect sense if you look at Bettencourt's model. More than half the world's population lives in cities, and many city centers such as the Bay Area are growing. As these populations grow, tech innovation grows far more quickly: thus the move from daily newspapers to blogs to Twitter in just 10 years. Twitter's popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time)."

So Twitter reminds us to stay in touch with ourselves and our friends and consider, as often as we like, what we are doing. That sounds like a good thing - except few of us are doing terribly fascinating or important things every minute of every day. Which means maybe it's nothing more than a distraction, a waste of time, yet another annoying claim on our precious time.

But is Twitter any use, and if so, who's making any money out of it? Perhaps by answering the second question you can get a feel for what the answer to the first might be: no-one is currently making money out of Twitter. It doesn't cost much to run but (so far) there are no subscription fees and no advertisers. Obvious Corporation, its San Francisco-based parent, was waiting to see where it goes and what applications evolve before introducing any sort of serious business model. Now Twitter is a separate corporate entity, so hopes are clearly high.

An evolving application is always an exciting thing, but much of that excitement derives from uncertainty. Twitter, simmering already, could explode into something incredible and produce a torrent of millionaires overnight. Or it could fizzle and die, as everyone gets overwhelmed by updates, depressed by the mundaneness of their daily routine, or just plain bored. It's hard to see quite where it might go beyond a 'where are you? I'm here now' level of service, but maybe that's just the point - if its final purpose were obvious, it would already exist.

Twitter deserves the attention of everyone working in humancentric web applications. Not because it's so useful, but because so far it's not. It's just incredibly popular. And if you think about other apparently-useless-but-popular applications (text messaging springs to mind) it might be as well to be prepared.

Associated Link: Twitter

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