Twitter starts with a deceptively simple concept “What are you doing now?” Answer on your phone, IM or right here on the web!”
According to Twitter’s own blurb, “Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool.”
Twitter considers itself “the medium between your friends and yourself; we just relay the information.” All you have to do to tap into this viral social network is send a text message from your mobile phone, type a message from the Twitter site, or send an instant message from AIM, Jabber or Google Talk.
In a world of information overload - see Moore’s Law and decreasing attention spans, we’ve now moved from newspaper articles, to blogs, SMS text messages, ICQ and IM (Instant Messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text) to 154 character chunks of boiled down Twitter headlines. Supporters like Steve Rubel, describe Twitter’s value to an information overloaded life as:
“Despite it’s lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It’s brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my “followers” (as they call it).”
Also on the upside, I can see how Twitter might be used to quickly mobilise support for a campaign, which is how US Presidential hopeful, Senator John Edwards, uses Twitter to communicate with his legions of supporters.
A typical entry from Senator Edwards:
“Three cities today and back home in Chapel Hill tonight. 10:44 AM March 16, 2007 from web”
It was Tony Blair who coined the “Big Conversation” , a self-validating bubble of focus groups during the run-up to the 2004 general election, and it can only be a short time before Prime Ministerial wannabe, David “Dave” Cameron gets in on the act with Twitter, if he hasn’t already.
A sprinkling of breaking headlines from Twitter-world this morning:
Jochiewajij: I don’t have a twat, therefore i twit. less than 20 seconds ago from web
KenV: Rise and shine! Drinking coffee and checking email…then hitting the Merritt for the drive to work. less than 10 seconds ago from web
Or more usefully:
bbcengland A debt-hit hospital trust says it still needs to cut 220 posts in order to meet its £16m saving target. http://tinyurl.com/273xg8 half a minute ago from web
From NMK’s Ian Delaney via Steve Bridger, what we’re looking at here is the fragmentation of social media.
So, you’re now asking “How might a voluntary sector organisation use Twitter?” Possible uses might be to micro-blog news headlines as per the BBC England story above. Or you might use Twitter to let service users know via their mobile phone that tomorrow’s coach trip to the beach has been cancelled.
Kathy Sierra has a take I identify with:
“Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.”
How did it come to this and whatever happened to face to face? My own personal take is that Twitter hooks users with a surface level feeling of connectivity, fostering an always on, always connected, 24/7 mentality - what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. Is this healthy?
“….in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.“
One wag described Twitter as “like the Seinfeld of the internet — a website about nothing.” Seinfeld was better than that, it was about pre-Internet, pre-millnnial narcissism and self-absorption.
Does any of this really matter and is Twitter the user interface for narcissism? As usual, Nick Carr says it better:
“The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. “
In other words, our virtual friends in our virtual world give us real life validation.
Shakespeare would’ve been rubbish at Twitter. Let’s close with the Twitterisation of Hamlet’s third soliloquy (3.1.64-98):
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Be all my sins remember’d.
(114 characters)
ESRC: ICT, social capital and voluntary action 
Over the last few posts I’ve been talking about blogs, flickr, etc and how the voluntary sector might use this so-called Web 2.0 technology to get its message out to funders, supporters, people using its services and beyond.
