We recently rolled out a new feature at Happn.in called the City Feed (or, as we also call it: Talk to Your City). On each city page, in addition to the top current Twitter trends, you now have the ability to send a tweet directly to your city. You also have the ability to recommend tweets that other people have sent to the City Feed. Those tweets and users that are recommended more often will be displayed more prominently, which gives each city the collective ability to decide on the content that is shown in their feed.
This new feature is just one part of a larger roll-out that includes our upcoming iPhone application and Twitter’s recent geo-location announcement. The importance of this feature can best be explained by the difference between broadcasting and reception.
Broadcasting and Reception
Broadcasting is “to tell (something) to many people”. It’s mostly used in reference to Radio and Television – two communication devices that allow one signal to be sent to many people at once. In his book Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky calls this type of communication, “one-to-many”: “I talk, and talk, and talk, and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out” (pg. 87).
Tools like Twitter and Blogger, however, change broadcasting from a one-to-many relationship into a many-to-many relationship. If you have a connection to the internet, you can not only receive signals from lots of sources, you can send them as well. You are a broadcaster.
All of that is good and smart and interesting. Using Twitter, we all have the ability to send and receive information. The problem we’ve experienced recently, however, is that while Twitter has become a good way for people to receive relevant information (trends, hashtags, searches), it’s not nearly as effective a way to send information. Twitter is still a pretty poor broadcast machine. Currently, when you send out a tweet, you are sending it out to no one in particular. You may have a couple hundred followers, but the chances are that those followers have no real cohesion among themselves. A tweet sent to your followers is a little like shouting out to everyone who is on the bus with you – there is some similarity to all of you (you are all on a bus); but the similarity is random and tenuous. The connection between you and your followers is indirect.
When you receive your tweets, however, they all seem to come directly from each individual person you follow. When you look at your Twitter stream, you see all the little messages with user names and profile pictures; it looks like these people are talking to you. The connection between you and the people you follow is more direct.
Combined, you can see why Twitter overwhelmingly feels like a good place to receive information, but a bad way to send it. Each of your tweets is sent to no one in particular, while you are inundated by messages from specific individuals.
The only cases where this isn’t true, of course, is when you have a way of sending a tweet to a cohesive group. In those cases, you send information to a group you know is looking for it. Famous people are able to do this out-of-the-box with Twitter. Their followers are a cohesive group already. When they tweet, they know to whom they are tweeting; and the people who follow them do so actively. But that’s just using Twitter like it was a radio station – just another example of one-to-many communication.
Some groups form through the use of hashtags. A bunch of Twitterers all at the same event, for instance, might all use the same hashtag to send their tweet specifically to the group at that event. And those same people can then search for that hashtag to see all the tweets being broadcast to that event. In that case, the group is cohesive and is also many-to-many. But it’s also ephemeral. After the event is done, the use of the hashtag ceases as does the group.
The Importance of Broadcasting to a Group
The problem with a communication tool more suited to reception than broadcasting is that it’s not sustainable; eventually, you’ve got a lot of people listening and no one talking. In order to become sustainable, Twitter needs tools that make it a better broadcast machine for many-to-many communication. One way to do that is to give people more opportunities to broadcast their tweets to a cohesive group. You become a more effective broadcaster when you know to whom you are tweeting. Location provides an obvious way to do this. With Happn.in’s new City Feed, you can not only receive information from a particular city; you can send information to that city as well. Communication works better when you are talking to a particular group rather than to a group of no one in particular.