Or, how size gets in the way
Twitter began life as a tool—you could only use it through their website—but has become more recently something akin to the phone lines: a communication infrastructure on which other tools are built. On its own, the first telephone was a tool, but it is the world-wide phone infrastructure that is the useful part. While it’s too early to say whether Twitter will become as important as the phone system, it is clear that it has grown so quickly and fast not because their website (their tool) is so great; it has grown because it has enhanced communication. Just like the telephone system greatly enhanced one-to-one communication, Twitter has greatly enhanced, in Clay Shirky’s words, the “many-to-many” communication: many people in conversation with many others. (For more on this sea-change in communication technology and practice, we heartily recommend Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody)
But while Twitter has enhanced this type of communication, in its current state, Twitter is also mostly useless (and I say mostly in the same way Miracle Max calls Wesley “mostly dead” in the The Princes Bride). To be useful, communication infrastructures need to have a good balance of tools (i.e. the actual telephones, the yellow pages, 411, etc.) and number of participants. You could have all the great tools in the world, for instance, but if no one else actually used the telephone system, it would be useless. And conversely, as in Twitter’s case, you could have a lot of people using the system, but without tools like the Yellow Pages or Directory Assistance or answering machines, the system becomes impossible to navigate. Think about a phone system where you couldn’t find anyone’s numbers. The dial tone would get pretty annoying pretty fast. This is where Twitter finds itself as its service grows. As more and more information is being pumped across Twitter, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get relevant or useful information. The larger it gets, the less useful it is. (Twitter has of course made some attempts to make itself more useful upon signup, and we’ll discuss those attempts below.)
The value of Twitter, as we are told over and over, is that it allows people to easily share and receive real-time information with lots of other people simultaneously. When a large earthquake hit the Chinese Sichuan province in 2008, for instance, people affected by the quake were able to get information and updates out as the quake was happening (see Shirky’s recent TED@State talk for a further exploration of this). This meant that the BBC received reports of the quake first from Twitter; and similarly, so did you or I if we were on Twitter. But what happens as more and more of that real-time information enters the infrastructure is that our ability to access it starts to depend on sheer numbers. Which is to say: Twitter is useful, but only for things that are large in number. In other words, for things already done pretty well by mass media. For everything else, it’s only potentially useful.
Twitter is really useful for famous stuff
As we see it Twitter is currently useful for three things:
- Famous people broadcasting their fame (i.e. Ashton Kutcher and his 2 million or whatever followers)
- Propagating topics that are already popular (i.e. Trending Topics)
- Outputting information from events that have mass participation from folks with an interest in broadcasting that event (i.e. the current revolution in Iran)
The common denominator for all the above is that they depend on numbers to work. Twitter is probably very useful for a celebrity—they have large numbers willing to listen. Similarly, Trending Topics are like famous phrases and as such can be easily pulled out of the Twitter stream. And for social movements like the one in Iran, you have a lot of people all very interested in getting and sharing information and so Twitter has proven central to that movement.
These are all, of course, totally legitimate and good uses of Twitter; and we don’t mean to diminish the importance that Twitter’s infrastructure has played in Iran or during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. But to become truly, sustainably useful, Twitter needs tools that organize and filter its information based on criteria other than size. Ultimately, we are not all celebrities or participants in large social movements, at least not all the time. Just like the Yellow Pages took the potential usefulness within the phone system and made it real, we need tools that build on all the potential usefulness within Twitter. And with so many people using it, that potential is vast.
Importantly, it is not up to Twitter to build these tools—they have a large enough job just maintaining their infrastructure. If Twitter continues, it will do so because they strengthen their API and developers start building more tools equivalent to what Directory Assistance or the Yellow Pages are to the telephone system. The Yellow Pages were created in 1886 Chicago by Reuben H. Donnelly (see the Wikipedia R.H Donnely entry). Donnelly didn’t work for the phone company, but still made the phone system infinitely more useful by categorizing what was then just a list of names of people and businesses with telephones into a list categorized by services offered. We need similar tools for Twitter.
It’s not about size, it’s how you use it (AND: sorry for that joke)
There have been early attempts at making these kinds of tools for Twitter (of which Happn.in is a part). Each filters and ask questions of Twitter’s data. But importantly, there are two groups of tools. There are those that evaluate Twitter through numbers (and so remain useful mostly for stuff with large numbers):
- We Follow – A service that categorizes popular users by tag
- What the Trend – User-generated services that explains why certain topics are trending on Twitter
And then those use Twitter differently – that ask for information based on things other than numbers. We will give brief descriptions of these services, but we encourage you to check them out for yourself to really get a sense (feel free to add additional services in the comments):
- Twitter Job Search – allows users to search for job listings posted on Twitter
- Boston Tweet – Gives users in Boston a way to focus their updates to Boston residents
- Almost At – A way to focus in on Tweets from a specific event
- Topsy – A search engine powered by Tweets.
None of these latter services are perfect, and neither is our service Happn.in (which lets people know what people are twittering about in their area); but they are giving us a glimpse of how useful Twitter can be when we stop focusing our attention on numbers (How many followers do you have!) and start seeing Twitter as an infrastructure for useful communication and information.
