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.)

Occasionally I'm impressed that the right people are on Twitter at the right time to participate in a conversation, argument, or quip of mutual interest. These little meetings of the mind turn out to be very much in the moment, held together by mutual attention. Afterwards, the individual messages float apart and exist on their own, interspersed with bits of other conversations and status updates, disconnected from the original context. There is, to my knowledge, no place where any given conversation on Twitter can be replayed.

One of those evanescent conversations took place on Twitter today, but I've gone to the trouble to recreate it again after the fact. Hopefully I captured enough relevant bits to convey the gist.

(Read from the bottom up, click for larger version of the image. I'm @esjewett on Twitter.)

I see the sentiments expressed by @mkrigsman pop up quite often, and normally I'm not bothered by it. But I'm impressed by Michael Krigsman's level-headed analysis at his blog, so I felt the need to jump in and make a nuisance of myself.

My concern, as expressed on Twitter, is that we often (especially on the internet) attribute business decisions to some sort of ill-intent. This is especially true for decisions made by Microsoft, and increasingly Apple. Sometimes we go so far as to brand a company evil. This is a bit much in most situations. It's a questionable characterization when companies turn over private information to unjust regimes, but it's a little silly when we're talking about the delivery of iPod firmware updates. (Of course, silliness happens all the time on Twitter, and I suspect @mkrigsman was purposefully being a bit sensationalist to stimulate conversation. Mission accomplished!)

Frankly, on close examination it appears that most untoward behavior on the part of large organizations is the result of ineptitude rather than ill-intent. Most companies just can't get everything (or even most things) right. Even those that excel in a particular area, like Apple in user experience, are bound to miss every once in a while.

As always, we should try to give a charitable interpretation of actions. But where that fails, Hanlon's razor applies:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I usually like where Michael ends up his analyses, and this case was no different. We do indeed live in a complicated world.