esjewett.com

Well, it's come to this. Every blog must go through a little self-centered Twitter theorizing during its journey toward fame and immortality. And it always helps to start off with a little story, right? So the story:

I was engaged in this conversation with @twhirl, who I'm pretty sure is one guy posing as a computer program. Speaks German too, I think. @twhirl also makes an application called . . . wait for it . . . Twhirl. Twhirl is a Twitter client. The conversation was about a feature request. And all of that is neither here nor there.

What is here and there is that the conversation occurred in real time. We were both engaged in it over the course of about a half-hour. But it only consisted of maybe 500 words total. Further, each of us probably spent a grand total of 30 seconds on the actual conversation and neither of us spent any time specifically waiting for a response. Lastly, I started the conversation sitting at my computer, followed a response on my phone, responded while sitting at my computer, then finished it up via SMS sitting on a city bus. Twitter was what made this all work.

To suss that out a bit, Twitter is . . .

Multi-modal

It works well on various interfaces, including the vanilla web interface, standalone widgets, SMS, and Plaxo. This is partly due to functionality built by Twitter (the company) and partly due to the API enabling third-party development.

At least as important as the fact Twitter works on various interfaces is the fact that it allows seamless switching between interfaces while in mid-conversation. It may take a bit of setup to get it just how you want it, but when it starts working it's rather astounding.

Personally, my modes are the phone (with tracking of my screen name so that I can take conversations offline), Twhirl (on the PC), and Twitterific (on the Mac). I occasionally use the web, but not terribly often.

Semi-asynchronous

An asynchronous conversation is one in which an immediate response is not required, or even expected. A face-to-face conversation is about as synchronous as it gets. It's considered rude to ignore the person you're talking to for even a few seconds. Meanwhile, a conversation carried out via snail-mail is about as asynchronous as it gets.

Twitter enables a specific level of asynchronous conversation different than anything else I've ever seen. It also enables a range of synchronicity (I maintain that's a word even if my spellcheck doesn't) that I've also never seen. It can be nearly as fast as IM and then range all the way along the spectrum to a wait of days between responses (assuming the participants remember what they're talking about). It's pretty functional at all of these levels, which is an achievement.

But Twitter has also created a new sweet-spot at the 3-to-5-minutes-between-volleys level of conversation. When you're in a conversation on Twitter, it's a conversation in slow motion where the amount of attention required can range from zero to full-on engagement. It's up to you.

Which brings me to the point that Twitter is

Robust across all attention ranges

By this I mean that a positive Twitter experience doesn't require a certain amount of attention. By removing the expectation of having to "catch up", it removes the pressure to pay attention all the time. It's not like email where I know that if I stop reading for a day I'm going to be relatively swamped. Twitter just fades into the background when you're working on something more interesting because there are no consequences for ignoring it.

The result is that Twitter is not nearly as much of a time-sink as it seems it might be. It strikes me that Twitter may actually be elevating time that would otherwise have been spent staring at desks and cubicle walls more-so than it is cannibalizing time that would have been spent on productive engagement with other tasks. Just a thought.

On the other hand, Twitter is more than capable of supporting full attention. Just follow 100 prolific and interesting Twitters and try to keep up with the conversation and relevant links that fly past you at up to 20/minute. At peak times, it's nearly impossible.

The more I think about it, the more I think these three areas are key to Twitter's utility and the unique type of communities that can arise in it and through it.

So there you have it. The obligatory Twitter blog. I'll try to make sure that never happens again.

(By the by, I'm esjewett on Twitter, and everywhere else.)

Laura Fitton's post on tools she'd like to see for Twitter got me thinking about a related problem in aligning attention and interest, so I'd like to add to her list. The problem: It's hard, though not impossible, to align the attention a given blog/tweet/IM/email demands to the interest we have in it.

As an example, take myself and three of interests that I occasionally mention on Twitter.

The set of people that are actually interested in all three of these things is pretty minimal, and that's just a sampling of three things I mention on a regular basis.

Twitter's approach to this issue is to minimize the attention that everything receives. That seems to work pretty well for Twitter. Other systems (I'm looking at you Email) tend to maximize the attention that every message receives. Some systems make an attempt to match attention to interest and I'd like to see more of that type of work either as built-in features or as add-ons facilitated by an API.

We're starting to see some movement in this area among collaboration and knowledge management vendors. There are also tentative steps from social sites like Ma.gnolia.

Let's also remember that this is personal. The relative importance of any given piece of information is different for you than it is for me. So this approach is especially important in our personal communications software, be that software a feed reader, an email client, or an service like Twitter.