Ross Mayfield On Twitter

I completely agree with Ross: Twitter is going nuts.

[from Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Twitter Tips the Tuna]

On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna. By that I mean it started peaking. Adoption amongst the people I know seemed to double immediately, an apparent tipping point. It hasn't jumped the shark, and probably won't until Steven Colbert covers this messaging of the mundane. As Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user.

Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, "what are you doing?" A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence -- and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.

Twitter has rapidly become the Third Place of choice for at least the technoids of the world: the place that is neither work nor home, and where weak social capital is exchanged for a sense for belonging. The bar on the corner, the cafe near work, the general store's cracker barrel.

Or maybe I should say the Third Flow, since it isn't a place, a destination: it is a stream of social gestures that we use to make anyplace we are a Third Place.

We are made human by our connections with other humans, and the small gestures that make us believe that we matter, matter. The wave to someone across the foyer in the office building, a pat on a friend's shoulder as you head out to lunch, or maybe just the awareness that Joe has come to work. Our sense of self is composed of ten thousand small ties to others, and that is what is making Twitter so hypotically organic to my life: it is playing on a small need that is underserved in our nomadic, online, and partitioned world. The need to wink, wave, or pass a one liner on the way to the bathroom, or to share a small insight. slight, or fight with one's neighbors.

Keeping human scale is going to be a challenge. I am planning to stay below 200 or so sources, so I don't run into the "party's too big" effect. I want a village, not a faceless metropolis.

tags: twitter, ross+mayfield, social+presence, mobile, flow, third+places

Comments

[Jim Long]

I think your post quite insightful, but for goodness sake are we beginning to over-think this thing? It has some usefulness, is sometimes fun, and at times can really bring folks together. Use it in a way that is meaningful to you.
I got a kick out of this line: "and where weak social capital is exchanged for a sense for belonging." hell, i must have REALLY weak capital cuz i only got
24 peopl paying attention to my world but they're all really cool (except for a couple who added me and then vanished). A 24, that's not even a village...more like the block you live on.

My favorite is the people who get all excited when John Edwards adds them. He's a political candidate and we're all potential voters for Chrissake! Hell, he added me!

[Edward]

Human scale is what you make of it, I suppose. I'm going to do my best to generate a density of co-twitterers within a close enough geographic span to where I typically hang out (Ann Arbor) so that when someone mentions lunch there's some likelihood of it being a lunch I can go to.

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

Celebrity by Proximity

[DWM]

So, when someone invents the ability to SMS a group of friends you can create (a distribution list to use an old analogy), what becomes of Twitter?. Sure there are plenty of people out there without lives that feel like they are someone when they blast the whole world with a twitter message, but I think the real value of twitter is what Edward describes...a group of your close friends and associates. Seems simple enough to replace twitter with the ability to text message a group of people.