Why I Tweet.

Twitter seems to have been gaining a lot of traction in recent times. Originally a side project of Evan Williams, who begat Blogger as a side project of something else lost in time, it was a solution in search of a wider purpose. But what is it, and what itch does it scratch?

It’s seamlessly tied into everyone’s unwitting bigger brother, Facebook, talks to and from your phone by SMS, has a burgeoning ecosystem of third-party tools jumping into the open API it provides, and is so Current that Number 10 has jumped on the bandwagon, ahead of friends I’d expected less of. Some people are using it in interesting ways; soma.fm use it to broadcast their playlists in an agnostic manner, bypassing the problems associated with embedding metadata into audio feeds in different formats for different platforms – cutting a Gordian knot using a lightweight side channel. Others use it to collect and monitor friends and associates, organise teams and groups, or let everyone know what they’re up to.

So, what exactly is it?

It’s not really a ‘personal’ platform. Several examples above show it being used by institutions rather than individuals.

We need to look back to Evan’s earlier project, Blogger, to contextualise what Twitter is for. Blogger was originally a tool allowing single authors a web-based interface to their hosted writing. It managed chronology and organised information by date, but most importantly, made it public, and made it permanent and thus linkable (at least theoretically, testing and lazy authors aside). The Blog became the broadcast tool for those online; instead of managing mailing lists, or enormous groups mails, the writer posted to one central location, and readers (optionally) could visit that site, or subscribe to that feed – a much more manageable solution all round.

Twitter is an extension of Blogger, in many ways; it’s text based, it’s for broadcast communication, and is powered by an open API. However, it’s an inherently democratic tool; whereas Blogger forges a one-to-many relationship between Blog author and their readers, Twitter (and it’s managed subscriber/publisher model) demands equality between publisher and reader. You can’t fully play twitter until you create your account (carving out your URL at their domain, perhaps leading to later speculation and valuation of twitter account name? Will this become the DNS namespace gold rush we still suffer from?) and let people know who you’re subscribing to. And, by extension, who subscribes to you. It’s facebook without the cruft, showing only what you’ve explicitly expressed interest in.

The other noticeable feature of twitter is brevity. Tweets offer a similar payload weight as SMS, smaller even; 140 bytes compared to SMS’s 160. This forces a pithy, jargon-driven tone, not as lax as the U R SUX of the txting world, but definitely compressed, non-redundant word use. TinyURL is heavily (and automagically) used, allowing URLs longer than the message payload would allow to be posted. A lexicon of it’s own is emerging; as well as tweets, timelines, and tweeple, people are annotating posts with #eventnames and @direct-messaging. The at-sign convention is interesting; adopted by users to direct tweets back at other twitterers to maintain an ongoing conversation, it was anointed by the Twitter developers and integrated back into their command system and public timeline visualisation. Combining this with features such as TinyURL links has created a useful glue for third-party feed/stream aggregators such as friendfeed to unify conversations across differing online services, such as blogs, flickr and youtube feeds, and other systems exposing user data.

There’s even a command system. It’s possible to issue meta-tweets, instructions to the system for managing your account, using some of the twitter interfaces. Twitter itself refers to this as ‘Twitter Lingo‘ and allows you to subscribe (and un-) to people, send direct messages, and manage twitter’s interaction with your client devices. It feels very IRC-like, and only marginally less cryptic.

The easiest way I can summarise it is to say twitter is to instant messaging as blogger was to email, which is a slightly abstract take on it; the real value is how it is used for content, and what people are pushing through it. It’s still early days for this microcontent phenomenon; whether it’s used to solicit clicks, dinner, or political action, provide content for third party data analysis, or exist to state the medium <i>is</i> the message (with 114 characters left), the wide diversity of applications and approaches indicates a healthy birth, encouraging a spate of experimentation, open development and collaboration.