Twitter hype punctured by study...
Rick Moynihan
I was wondering what opinions this list might have on this recent
study into twitter:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8089508.stm
Here are some points I found interesting:
- "Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content"
(IMHO 90% of this content is dross ... a few good links, and maybe a
few relevant tweets - even when following people you know)
- "Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service
more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network"
I'm sure this isn't too surprising to those of you who tweet...
Personally I've always felt twitter had more utility as a measure of
someone's presence, or a tool for citizen journalism... All else
seems secondary, and implemented as crude kludges and conventions;
which significantly increase the barriers to entry.
Will Wave do better? The Google Wave client seemed to lean towards
the power-user rather than the general user... Will wave be distilable
into a simple dumbed down client interface that your gran could use,
or do waves carry too much complexity?
Your thoughts encouraged!
R.
Jamie Fraser
* Essentially IM conversations between two people, broadcast to everyone (why they think the world wants to see this is beyond me. Firing up tweetdeck and seeing screens and screens of @ really makes me want to turn it off again)
* Stuff that might be interesting to a select few (i.e. some personal info pertinent to a few subscribers)
* Stuff that probably isn't interesting to anyone (what they had for lunch)
* Of course, the above two points, when broadcast by a "celebrity", may well prove interesting to some, but that is more a reflection on the subscribers than twitter itself.
I think part of the problem with Twitter is the fact that you don't need to think about it. You can post ANYTHING that will fit within 140chars. Imagine, if you will, if your favourite blogger updated 15 times a day with "just had a coffee", "just rebooting" etc. Would you still be as keen to see that in your RSS reader? I think people have come to accept that Twitter is full of crap on the understanding that they will find occasional useful information in there.
Maybe the bar for entry with Twitter is too low; by that I mean the usual though processes involved in writing a blog article or an email are bypassed. Wave might raise the bar in this sense - I suspect we'll see less crap generated via wave than we do with Twitter. I hope so anyway.
Paul Sergeant
John Turner
> Jamie makes some very interesting points in response to Rick's post about
> Twitter. I think he is right that comment has become too cheap (no, I
> didn't mean cheep). This problem goes far beyond Twitter: It's endemic in
> the the Blogosphere and MSM. For me, one of the really interesting things
> about Wave is the potential to encourage consideration of structure - in
> both thought and presentation of argument. The adoption of structure might
> also lead to a degree of self filtering.
> Paul
I thought Jamie's points were somewhat invalidated by the problem
being endemic. 99% of the content anywhere on the internet is crap,
Twitter isn't much different.
I don't think Wave will do much to change this and wherever you get
text editors, you get ugly and unholy messes.
My hopes for Waves are that they'll be good enough to finally lure a
load of my friends away from irc, that it'll lure in other friends
from instant messaging services and that it'll just be really solid
platform for collaboration, discussion and pointless chat.
As for Wave being targetted towards power users, the interface seemed
to me to be a bit like a simplified version of Google Docs in essence,
I think they're doing as much as they can to make it simple to use.
Jamie Fraser
I see Wave encompassing bits of IRC/Email/Blogs; all things which can undoubtably contain rubbish, but all things with mechanisms for feedback. Of course Twitter allows @ replies, but have you ever sent an @ reply to someone to tell them that what they were posting was shite? Me neither! You'd probably just ignore them or unsubscribe, which doesn't work.
My main hope for Wave would be that people use it for real communication (whether that be technical discussion, celebrity news or private chatting between friends), rather than random disposable snippets of nothingness. With feedback mechanisms in place, we might see people learning how to use these tools in a more suitable manner.
John Turner
> Part of the Twitter problem is that it encourages you to post without
> stopping and thinking why you are posting. Indeed, the main page of Twitter
> says "What are you doing?" Rather than "Why not post something
> interesting?". It is fire and forget. Wave encourages collaboration, which
> might bring with it some kind of self moderation. I.e. if an author posts
> nonsense using Wave, they'll see feedback (or lack of it) which might direct
> them in a more appropriate manner, whereas the twitter(er) will give no
> second thought to what they've just posted.
>
> I see Wave encompassing bits of IRC/Email/Blogs; all things which can
> undoubtably contain rubbish, but all things with mechanisms for feedback. Of
> course Twitter allows @ replies, but have you ever sent an @ reply to
> someone to tell them that what they were posting was shite? Me neither!
> You'd probably just ignore them or unsubscribe, which doesn't work.
So, you're saying that lack of feedback on a blog prompts people to
improve, while lack of comment on Twitter doesn't? It's the same
mechanic. I wouldn't comment on a blog that is meaningless to me
because it is just a list of things someone I don't know is doing. I
would comment on a blog if it says something that I disagree with, if
it's a discussion I could usefully participate in.
Sure, Twitter is encouraging people to be less formal and to just say
what they're doing. A lot of people use it that way and that's fine.
It's interesting to me to read that from a few people. The people I
follow tend to post a mix of banal stuff they're doing, some technical
stuff, a fair bit of cultural commentary and a lot of links.
> My main hope for Wave would be that people use it for real communication
> (whether that be technical discussion, celebrity news or private chatting
> between friends), rather than random disposable snippets of nothingness.
> With feedback mechanisms in place, we might see people learning how to use
> these tools in a more suitable manner.
Chat between friends is largely random disposable snippets of
nothingness. Wave will be used for meaningless communication, it's
fine, it's even good that it will be. The day to day usage of Wave
for meaningless communications would mean people will be engaged with
it, comfortable with it as a medium and actually able to use it to
have the meaningful discussions.
I don't really believe that Wave will magically fix people being
idiots on the internet. It might move some of it back to private
communications, but that doesn't really matter anyway. The boring
semi-personal conversations of people being out there, semi-published
on Twitter doesn't mean you have to read them.
Jamie Fraser
So, you're saying that lack of feedback on a blog prompts people to
improve, while lack of comment on Twitter doesn't? It's the same
mechanic. I wouldn't comment on a blog that is meaningless to me
because it is just a list of things someone I don't know is doing. I
would comment on a blog if it says something that I disagree with, if
it's a discussion I could usefully participate in.
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. If someone was writing blog entries, and their subscriber counts (say, feedburner for example) show no subscribers, and there are no commenters, they might be inclined to give up or change their approach. Twitter users, in my experience, keep posting the same rubbish. There is no direct feedback mechanism. When I first started using Twitter, I was subscribed to a LOT of people - I found that it was near impossible to get any real value from the service. Eventually I cut down to only a few follows; still, when I logged on, I'd be confronted with lots of @ replies that I had no interest in (obviously this has been reduced due to the Twitter settings changes last month), but it was a heck of a lot of work for not much perceived value. I get infinitely more use from my RSS reader and a nice selection of blogs than I ever will from Twitter, in my opinion that is because there is real thought that goes into blogs AND that they are targetted. If I'm subscribing to a technical user on Twitter, I don't care to see their personal @ conversations with friends, nor do I want to know about their personal lives.
Chat between friends is largely random disposable snippets of
nothingness. Wave will be used for meaningless communication, it's
fine, it's even good that it will be. The day to day usage of Wave
for meaningless communications would mean people will be engaged with
it, comfortable with it as a medium and actually able to use it to
have the meaningful discussions.
Absolutely. Nothing wrong with that at all. My point being - there will be Waves just for this. Your own private Wave with you and your friends. Not a one-size-fits-all-tell-the-world-anything-you-like medium like we have just now. However, discussion between friends and "I just had a ham sandwich" are two rather polar examples of nothingness - one has value to someone, the other has value to nobody. By compartmentalising discussion into separate waves, we increase the value of the waves we participate in, because they will be targeted.
I don't really believe that Wave will magically fix people being
idiots on the internet. It might move some of it back to private
communications, but that doesn't really matter anyway. The boring
semi-personal conversations of people being out there, semi-published
on Twitter doesn't mean you have to read them.
Idiots will always be present! However, they'll most likely be on their own idiot-wave and I won't have to read what they had for lunch. Of course, I don't have to follow people on Twitter, but if you can point me to some people who consistently post good information on Twitter, I'd be keen to follow them. Of course, there is also the problem that if I "miss" an interesting tweet, I either need to trawl their history to find it (on the assumption that it exists) or I just miss it. Neither is ideal. It should be as easy as possible to find good stuff whilst avoiding the bad.
Brian Boswell
On Jun 9, 2:22 pm, John Turner <norg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't really believe that Wave will magically fix people being
> idiots on the internet. It might move some of it back to private
> communications, but that doesn't really matter anyway. The boring
> semi-personal conversations of people being out there, semi-published
> on Twitter doesn't mean you have to read them.
that are fully integrated into the platform which can constrain and
filter to allow for more structure at both input and output; while at
the same time being able engage in more 'vanilla' chats on the same
platform. We can act like idiots and savants in the same space.
The affordances of Twitter strongly favour broadcast of disconnected
microcontent, it can hardly surprise anyone that the resultant
acitivity is a mob of individuals shouting inanities. I'm sure there
are a few pockets of conversation, and some utility in rapid
dissemination of breaking real-time info, but I think the whole notion
of broadcast IM (which twitter undoubtedly is) needs a bit more
thought and/or time to evolve.
Brian.
Rick Moynihan
>
> On Jun 9, 2:22 pm, John Turner <norg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't really believe that Wave will magically fix people being
>> idiots on the internet. It might move some of it back to private
>> communications, but that doesn't really matter anyway. The boring
>> semi-personal conversations of people being out there, semi-published
>> on Twitter doesn't mean you have to read them.
Sadly it does though. You'll typically follow someone because you
believe there will be a signal within their tweets of some value to
you. Twitter presents no real way for recipients to filter signal
from noise, nor does it allow publishers to more effectively structure
tweets... Thus it only has the crudest method of filtering which is
to not follow.
Twitter's UI is largely geared around making things easy for the
publisher ... Not requiring the publisher to think before they tweet
undoubtedly encourages tweeting, as the publisher only has a simple
binary decision to make; "to tweet or not to tweet". This lack of
overhead at publishing has value as it means people can tweet without
disrupting the flow of the task with which they are principally
engaged. The trade off is that by having fewer barriers to publishing
there is more burden on the recipient in seperating signal and noise,
and also significantly more noise.
> You're right, of course, but with wave we can build tools and plugins
> that are fully integrated into the platform which can constrain and
> filter to allow for more structure at both input and output; while at
> the same time being able engage in more 'vanilla' chats on the same
> platform. We can act like idiots and savants in the same space.
As Brian says, there is hope (even for Twitter) that tools can help us
find relevance in this avalanche of noise and information. Wave feels
like it will be a very different technology to twitter. It looks to
me like it strikes a good balance of complexity between the publisher
and the recipient... In some cases further blurring the distinction
between them.
Obviously on Wave there will still be noise, trolls, griefers,
flamewars and anti-social ways to disrupt communication, but it seems
to offer some relatively effective ways to combat these. Furthermore
the interactive, real time, nature of collaborating on a wave seems
like it will allow less experienced users the chance to see
experienced wave users at work. This would hopefully mean that less
experienced users learn best practice communication styles more
quickly and are a lesser burden on the rest of the community.
R.
John Turner
Twitter isn't perfect, by a long way. The signal-to-noise isn't
great, but can be kept in check enough for it to still be useful, or
at least interesting. It's a window into all the random disconnected
thoughts that people have that they might not want to spend the time
formalising, with all the inherent mess. I personally quite like that
it's there but dislike the technology behind it.
Mostly, I'm just wishing this conversation/thread was a Wave, it's a
good example of the kind of thing that would be wonderfully simplified
by having in-lined comments.
Brian Boswell
Interesting too that a natural inline comment mode is probably going
to be twitter sized 90% of the time.
Roll on the day where we can follow muli-party conversations instead
of just solitary tweets.