by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting
Note: This is the first in a series of 3 twitter articles:
- Twitter 1: What is Twitter good for?
- Twitter 2: What are Twitter’s problems?
- Twitter 3: How could Twitter be improved?
1. Twitter Overview
If you have been living in a cave for a few years you may not have heard about the Twitter phenomenon. The service was developed in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. Twitter was inspired by cell phone text messaging which had already gained enormous popularity among teens. The idea was to send short message service (SMS) text messages via the Internet for free (a big win for the parents of text-addicted teens). Although there is no technical reason to adhere to the 140 character limit for text messages, Twitter limits message length to maintain the feel of texting. The original Twitter prototype was developed in about 2 weeks and from a usability perspective, it shows.
In the past 18 months Twitter use has grown explosively attracting approximately 1 million users who post about 3 million messages a day. The original teen users have largely been lost in a crowd of doctors, CEO’s, teachers and scientists. The key question “Is Twitter a passing fad (the digital equivalent of the pet rock) or a technology that is becoming a fixture of our technocivilization?” has yet to be answered.
2. What is Twitter good for?
The original intent of the Twitter design was to create an online infrastructure to support teen texting. I left my teen years behind four decades ago but I imagine the great issues of teendom haven’t changed (boys, girls, who likes/dislikes who, and various answers to the perennial “Wazzup?”). As the user population has evolved so have the applications. In the recent contretemps following the Iranian presidential election, protesters used Twitter to keep the world informed of their struggle after the government ejected most professional journalists.
In my personal observation of Twitter traffic over the past two years (as well as several suggestions by Patricia Anderson at the University of Michigan) there are 8 areas in which Twitter has proved useful: social grooming (explained below), contact with the flock, news gathering, marketing, opinion sampling, topic-based research, crisis response, and ask-your-peers information gathering.
Social Grooming: Many higher primates (chimpanzees, gorillas, telemarketers) live in tribal groups. Group affiliation and status are maintained through grooming behavior in which one primate will pick parasites out of the fur of another tribal member. Since humans are embarrassingly short of fur our species has invented social chatter to take the place of primate grooming. This is close to the original intent of Twitter. The content of the messages is largely irrelevant – it is the contact and its acknowledgment that serve the essential social processes.
Contact with the Flock: Our political leaders (at all levels) tend to live busy lives. Nevertheless the average citizen has little contact with the people we elect. The sophisticated technology users on the Obama team began a quiet revolution in the way our leaders interact with their various flocks. Social networking sites have played a major role in this new outreach. A number of national figures (Senator McCain, Secretary Clinton and of course, the White House) have used Twitter to share a kind of public diary of their activities (Senator McCain’s postings are by far the most interesting–it has been fascinating to see how much minutiae a national leader must deal with). I suspect that Tweets between our leaders and their constituents tend to be one-directional because technology has yet to find a way to facilitate a meaningful dialog involving hundreds of thousands of people.
News Gathering: The news business has seen a lot of change in recent years. Cable news channels, the struggle of print media, the blurring line between entertainment and news, the politicization of news, the importance of news aggregators (such as the Drudge Report) and the rise of the blogging community have opened the door to all kinds of news gathering innovation. One of these is the use of “citizen reporters.” In a world of “sound bite news” Twitter is the perfect medium. Short, on-the-scene observations from ordinary people have proved a compelling supplement to professional reporting. In addition, more and more celebrities have begun to tweet. These 140 character glimpses into the lives of the rich, the beautiful and the famous are closely monitored by news organizations in the hope of being the first to report on breaking news.
Marketing: The vast and growing population of Twitter users is a very tempting target for marketers. It is very easy to subscribe to a user as a “follower.” Twitter etiquette encourages users to return the favor. This opens the door for the “follower account” to send unsuspecting users an endless stream of “Twam” (my term for Twitter spam). It is not clear whether Twamming generates much revenue. As a usability and medical systems consultant I aggregate news items of interest to my prospective clients and post them on my website. I then Twam my Twitter followers with the news item headline and the address of my website. The technique certainly drives up traffic to my site but I am not convinced that it is generating any useful business. The jury is still out.
Opinion Sampling: If you have a decent number of followers (at least 100) then you can usually post a question and get a useful answer. You must, of course, actually find the Tweets containing replies from a much larger flow of Tweets on other topics (Twitter provides a messaging capability but it is common for people to reply to questions with Tweets of their own). I have used Twitter to find new academic reference material for my research and to get quick, “straw vote” reactions to design ideas. It would be fairly easy to enhance Twitter to provide polling and sampling utilities. It is easy to imagine politicians soliciting feedback this way and news organizations using real time Twitter polls to engage with their audiences.
Topic-Based Research: Hashtags are used to tag Twitter postings as relevant to one or more topics. For example, in my postings on Electronic Medical Record systems I tag the post with #emr. Other Twitter users can search for recent posts on any given hashtag (a directory of hashtags can be found at: http://hashtags.org/). Twitter’s search function (currently found in the right margin of a Twitter screen) can be used to follow all posts containing a given hashtag. For example, searching on #emr will bring up all posts containing this tag displayed in chronological order. The list of postings can be used to find users with similar interests who can then be followed on Twitter. This is inarguably the most powerful way to network on Twitter. The network you create can serve as a powerful research resource. Remember that there is no rule against creating multiple Twitter identities. It is often useful to devote a particular identity to a specific interest.
Crisis Response: There are two kinds of crisis for which Twitter has proved useful. One is the “violent event” category (hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks). Even supposing that the technical infrastructure that supports Twitter (Internet servers, cell phone towers, etc.) remain intact, the kind of reporting possible through Twitter is more suited to news gathering than it is to coordinating relief efforts.
There is however, a different kind of crisis for which Twitter can be very useful. Poisoned peanuts, poisoned pet food, and products with manufacturing defects all represent crises to companies and even entire industries. Twitter is the ultimate vox populi (voice of the people). Corporate crises tend to surface on Twitter long before they make the news. Major corporations should monitor hashtags associated with their name and the names of their products as a matter of routine.
Once a crisis response has been initiated Twitter can also offer a useful window on how the public is responding. Of course, Twitter is one tool out of many but it is one that risk management executives should take seriously.
Ask-Your-Peers Information Gathering: Once your list of followers is big enough Twitter is a pretty good resource for “neighbors chatting over the fence” interactions. My daughter has a dog that seems to have only a couple of functioning neurons. The intellectually challenged pooch has a thing for skunks. My daughter was at her wit’s end trying to deodorize her pet. I posted a quick question on Twitter and within a few moments I had lots of things to try (one of them even worked). As long as your questions are appropriate for your follower demographics Twitter can serve as a kind of real time Wikipedia.
3. Summary
In my examination of the ways that Twitter is used, I found 8 major areas of application:
- Social Grooming
- Contact with the Flock
- News Gathering
- Marketing
- Opinion Sampling
- Topic-Based Research
- Crisis Response
- Ask-Your-Peers Information Gathering
The list is surprisingly long and it is a tribute to human ingenuity. This is particularly true when we consider Twitter’s many limitations. These will be covered in my next article, “What are Twitter’s problems?”

