April

My little camera-hog

Friday, April 11, 2008 10:08 AM (permalink)

The Thing About Twitter

Friday, April 11, 2008 9:20 AM (permalink)

I have seen a lot of articles crop up recently about the importance/power/necessity of Twitter as a social media tool, communications platform and even "zeitgeist" monitor. As a part of our recent study on media and social networking, I actually threw Twitter in just to get a sense of how big it really was. I am undecided about whether or not to report the actual number, but let's just say it was, in statistical terms, almost nobody. One of the problems with looking at the host of web polls and pages of comments people write about Twitter is that it is easy to think that, because everyone you know uses Twitter, that everyone uses Twitter. But, from my perspective--the big fat middle of the American bell curve--no one does. That doesn't mean it won't grow, obviously, and certainly more Twitter users are added around the globe every day--its current size is not my point.

This is not the "problem" with Twitter. I use Twitter every day, and I wish the folks who make it well. The problem is that I have seen a lot of "prominent" Twitterers devote themselves almost exclusively to the platform as a means of spreading their messages, thoughts, and (I hate this word) memes, and also to digest the same from others as a means of tapping into some greater pool of received insight. The prevailing wisdom is that you can follow lots of people (almost certainly in every case more people than you _actually_ know in real life), "dip into the stream" and get a sense of what is going on in the "twittersphere" at any one time.

Except this is demonstrably not true. I read with a certain amount of incredulity the accounts of frequent twitterers who follow--and are followed--by thousands of people who really believe that they can read a bunch of tweets and get any kind of sense for what is going on in the world, or even in some subset of it. What I see even in the limited amount of "following" that I do is about 60% personal (what I had for breakfast, what terminal I am sitting at, what cool toy I am unwrapping right now, etc.), 35% shilling/link posting/promoting and 5% "news." Except that news isn't news, it is simply the only news content on Twitter, and a lot of it I can get on other sources (RSS) without having to wade through the dross and read it at my convenience.

Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with people you actually know--to tell them you will be late, or that you just bumped into Kanye West, or you just ate some bad shellfish. To rely on it for more than that--to make something greater of it--is to believe that you can truly follow thousands--even hundreds--of people and really know or understand anything. 140 characters is a fine constraint, and one that precludes the transmission of understanding, insight or even news. The critical fallacy of the frequent Twitterer is that following thousands of people actually teaches you something or provides access to a truth that you didn't already have. But Twitter makes one damn thing at a time into every damn thing at once. If you really believe you can synthesize the onslaught of Tweets in any given hour into some sense of "zeitgiest," truth or fact, you are sadly mistaken. I am a synthesist by trade--it takes time, thoughtfulness, multiple platforms and sources, and a willingness to reserve judgement. No one reserves judgement on Twitter.

The net result of this is that I see a lot of articles out there claiming that Twitter is an essential tool for business, for social media, for customer service, etc. Twitter is at the moment an echo chamber of "a-list" bloggers and "meme spreaders," with a gigantic signal to noise ratio. In order to ingest enough signal to make it worth using as a knowledge tool, you would have to ingest millions of tons of dreck in the process--and that will only get worse as Twitter becomes more widespread, not better. I am in the sampling business, and what you get when you dip into the Twitter stream at any one time is a sample of convenience, one composed of a small subset of a small subset of a small subset, and even then you are only getting a few dozen or possibly a few hundred distinct voices. This is not by any means representative of even Twitter users, let alone the tech world (and certainly not Americans). You would have to aggregate every tweet on a topic for days/weeks and categorize/code them appropriately to get anything more than the viewpoint of who tweeted last, and loudest.

Information transmission is something I study all the time, and the big difference between "learning" in the blogosphere and learning on Twitter is a function of cognitive style and "recency." If I incorporate material from the Internet (blogs, wikis, etc) into some kind of synthesis, I am directing the cognitive flow of the process. I learn something, ascertain what I now need to know next, and go get that thing. I am able to assign importance, relevance and order to the bits of information I am aggregating, and all of this gets factored into a more careful analysis. Twitter makes that sort of cognitive style impossible and instead replaces it with "the river." If you dip into the river, and all of a sudden get 100 tweets in a row that some brand, product or service is bad ("epic fail!") or great ("FTW!") you cannot help but be swayed by this--that is the recency effect, and why two shark attacks in a single summer will prompt a host of "Shark Attacks On The Rise!" headlines. And because of the "convincing" onslaught of tweets, you are led to believe that you have somehow glimpsed a truth.

Those that would disagree with me (and I welcome that--do pop me a note) would say that Twitter is an essential (or at least important) "early warning" tool of what is coming, what is to be in the future. Again, my business is the top of the bell curve. One thing I can tell you about that bell curve is that progression along it is not inevitable, predictable or even desirable, and the people who choose not to adopt are not always "slow" or late--sometimes they are right. Often, the fact that there are "early adopters" does not portend that there will ever be "late adopters." Often, those who are ahead of the curve are actually on a different curve, one that never will lead to mainstream adoption. So it is hard to treat the messages I get from Twitter as any kind of harbinger of what will come in the future, when so much of it never does. Early adopters are in many cases orphaned as the technologies they adopt fail or are replaced or otherwise never cross the chasm into mainstream adoption. So, Twittersphere, don't be fooled into thinking that you are simply at the forefront of an inevitable change. As I frequently remind my (by now exasperated) friends and family, the folks who can't understand why Bon Jovi sells millions of records, are really folks who don't understand millions of people.

Finally, what happens if Twitter does cross that chasm? What if tens of millions of Americans start using Twitter? Will that signal-to-noise ratio get better, or worse? I'd like to end with one simple suggestion to make Twitter better, and keep it from imploding if and when it hits that dreaded, noisy threshold of consumer adoption: make it so you have to be approved to follow someone. With that one simple change, the rush to win the followers arms race would end, Twitter circles would be much closer approximations of real social circles, and the center would hold.

So, Twitter: fantastic "keep-in-touch" plaform, poor communication/learning platform. And now I'm going to post a link to this article on Twitter.

A Research Bonanza

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 9:18 AM (permalink)

Loads of data being presented over the next two weeks. First, if you are interested in the changing digital platforms for audio, I am co-presenting the 2008 edition of The Infinite Dial: Radio's Digital Future with Pierre Bouvard, the President of Sales and Marketing for Arbitron. The webinar is free and you can sign up here. So far we have over 1200 people signed up, so the "Q&A" should be a hoot.

Next, a subject close to my heart--the state of web design for radio stations and other Internet audio players. I will be giving a short (but punchy!) talk at the Radio And Internet Newsletter (RAIN) Las Vegas Summit. If you are going to be in Vegas for the NAB, do drop in (sign up at the RAIN site). It should be a great day, keynoted by Joe Kennedy and Tom Conrad from Pandora.

For you podcasting aficionados, I have some great new data to premiere as part of the Association for Downloadable Media's forum at ad:tech in San Francisco. This forum, called "Get The Download", will feature some great presentations from the board and members of the ADM and will feature success stories, case studies, and of course a big ole' bucket of Edison numbers at 9 AM (what better way to wake up?").

Finally, if you can't make it to SF next week, I will be presenting a much longer version of our new Podcasting data at Podcamp NYC on April 25, after which I will have the whole report online. Lots of news, stats and insight on the current state of podcast consumption coming up, so I hope you can check it out!