BLOG | APRIL, 2009

More on Twitter

April 23, 2009 at 11:45 am
by Christopher

Twitter talk is going nuts since celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have started using it. In fact, did you know that Twitter traffic has jumped 43% since Oprah's 1st tweet and more than 1 million new users joined since then? That's huge. Accordingly, there's plenty of Twitter coverage in big media outlets like the New York Times. Here are some opinions:

Jena Wortham, in Why I Am Obsessed With Twitter, says:

"Twitter is much more than the collective musings of the tech-savvy elite. It’s a window into the public mind... Since the service tugs at our innermost navel-gazing, Vanity Smurf — by asking us to share whatever we’re thinking about — the flood of messages can deliver surprising insights into the digital pulse... As one friend and longtime devotee described it, Twitter is also a self-propagating recommendation engine. By carefully selecting which users and companies to follow, you can tailor a stream of steadily refreshed news that appeals to you, much better than any Google algorithm could."

Claire Cain Miller, in Putting Twitter’s World to Use, says:

"...But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures. "

Also, Wortham recommends Tweetmeme as a way of seeing what messages and themes are popular on Twitter. I've pasted in a widget below showing the five most popular technology-related Tweets below:

Chris Butler | April 23, 2009 3:38 PM

And this just in from Anne Trubek at GOOD magazine, who discusses Twitter in light of her role as a college writing professor. Among her notes towards a "theory of Twitter":

"Twitter is an associative writing form, not a narrative one. In Twitter, we are sent somewhere else—via a link—or reminded of something. We are not telling stories. Thus, while the “Hint Fiction” contest is swell and cute, I think it misses the generic boat. Twitter promises a new slate for poets. For fiction writers, not so much.

1.a.) Twitter does not operate on the narrative arc of rising action, suspense, climax, and denouement. There is no arc. Instead, Twitter is horizontal—one thing reminds one of another thing, instead of one thing leading to another thing. This works on the level of interTwittering (i.e.: Read something on the web. Think it would be nice to share. Link to it in Twitter. Go back to what you were doing), and intraTwittering (i.e. Read an interesting tweet. Respond by posting a new tweet. Go back to reading other tweets)."

Brett | April 23, 2009 8:37 PM

The way Anne Trubek describes twitter reminds me of how I browse for new music online now: Listen to a clip, click a link to a related band, listen to another clip, click a link to a related album, listen to another clip, click a link to a related band, listen to a clip, and on and on... Hours can go by like this, which is frustrating and exhausting because I'm only trying to find some new music. By the time I give up, I have no idea what I've heard or where I started. Whatever happened to listening to an entire album all the way through? For that matter, whatever happened to reading a whole book?

Larry King | April 23, 2009 9:45 PM

CNN will still bury that Kutcher kid.

Chris Butler | April 24, 2009 3:59 PM

@Brett, I know exactly what you mean. What you describe sounds exactly how I am prone to waste lots of time on emusic.com.

@Larry King, really.

Also, another mention of Twitter in the news. This time, how your Tweets can incriminate you if you make threats to the government in them.

Chris Butler | April 29, 2009 9:33 AM

I've been meaning to do some kind of a write up about these articles, but will just link to them for now:

The Chatty Classes, by Matt Bai (New York Times):

"It turns out, though, that the weirdest thing about Bob Graham, at least by the standards of the current moment, is that he recorded all of his arcana privately, without assuming that the rest of the world would be dying to read it. Not so the politicians who have in recent months fallen madly in love with Twitter, the Internet service that lets you send out constant brief updates on whatever you might be doing at the moment — which, when you come right down to it, is really just a Graham-like diary beamed out to hundreds or even thousands of voyeuristic subscribers."

The Fickle Twitterer, by Nicholas Carr:

Everybody who's anybody is giving Twitter a whirl. But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, most people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks:

"Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention."