Adaptive Path Blog

The Twitter Effect

Originally uploaded by odannyboy.
If anyone ever asks for an example of interaction design changing behavior, I will simply point them to Twitter.

I signed up for Twitter about six months ago, but frankly never used it. The whole idea of people sending me lots of small text messages about the minutia of their daily lives seemed, well, pointless and annoying. It’s also painfully addicting, in a very narcissistic way. The picture above was a fairly typical sight at SXSW, with people breaking off face-to-face conversations to make and read Twitter posts. That’s The Bad.

The Good is that at SXSW, in crowded environments with a large group of mobile people trying to coordinate over a small city, it really proved invaluable. It alerted me to parties, dinner gatherings, pool swims, good conference sessions, etc. It was the perfect lightweight tool to keep you clued in to what was happening.

The Ugly I just discovered yesterday, and it finally forced me to turn Twitter off again. My friend Sean figured out how to send his Twitter posts to his blog. So now, not only am I getting his Twitter posts on my phone filling up my inbox, they are also now filling up my RSS reader. That’s pretty ugly.

In my (limited) world view, unless I have a deep connection with you that I want to maintain all the time (and for me, this is a very small number of people), I don’t need to know everything about your life. I only want to know major thoughts and events (at most) that you have taken a reasonable amount of time to write down. That’s why I subscribe to your blog. I want to know your filtered life.

This is not to bash Sean or Twitter, which as I’ve noted above, is a useful tool in certain circumstances. But it’s missing some crucial controls that would make it less addictive and attention-draining, like nuanced groups the ability to switch individuals on and off. But they are on to something — this idea of lightweight status. One can easily see a service like Plazes that would automatically SMS friends when I move to a different location.

Side note: Why did Twitter take off, when Upoc, which has basically done the same thing for the last 6 years, never really did? One reason I can think of is that Upoc might be, well, too sophisticated and overly designed. You can do a lot more with Upoc than you can with Twitter. But Upoc never seemed to be (although it is) the powerful, raw tool that Twitter is. Twitter’s fawning press must be really annoying to them.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Communication, Interaction Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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