by Jim Bradford, MediCHI Consulting
Note: This is the second 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. What are Twitter’s problems?
I don’t know who invented the screwdriver but I can easily imagine his or her frustration. Here we have an elegantly simple tool for driving screws. The name says it all. There is no need for a user guide, or online help, or night courses at the local community college. You just buy a screwdriver and a bag of screws and you’re set!
Unfortunately the human race is endlessly inventive. We use screwdrivers to pry open paint cans, to depress those annoyingly recessed valves in pneumatic tires, and occasionally as a weapon during those regrettable domestic disputes that occur while trying to assemble Wal-Mart furniture.
Twitter was built to emulate the text messaging capability of mobile phones. However, over the past few years the Twitter user community has invented all kinds of new ways to use this simple tool. Unlike screwdrivers software systems can grow and evolve. I believe that the time has come for Twitter to do so. This section outlines a few of the major problems that are holding Twitter back.
“Flow By”: You may remember the famous opening scene of the first Star Wars trilogy that features a few lines of text scrolling off into hyperspace. Imagine that the text was scrolling at twice the Star Wars speed. Imagine the tense concentration you would need to keep up. Now double the scrolling speed again and you will have produced an information processing task roughly equivalent to following the Twitter updates from a couple hundred people. The more people you follow the worse it gets. I call this the “flow by” problem. It is nearly impossible to keep up with the stream of consciousness postings of dozens of people–it simply flows by too quickly. This is of little consequence if the postings concern the dyspeptic ordeals of the family cat but it is a major deficiency if you are using Twitter to debate a political issue or monitor an evolving corporate crisis. Twitter needs to develop tools for keeping track of dialogs, multilogs, and focused discussion.
Dilution: Unless you are very selective in your choice of people to follow you are likely to receive a great deal of trivia about other people’s lives. I call this process, in which informative Tweets are buried in trivia, “dilution.” For example, I collected the following gems from one of my Twitter accounts during a 10 minute period on a Saturday afternoon:
Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
How to Download Music Off You Tube.
Do NOT Pay For White Teeth!
Florida looking good in their second pre-season game against Troy.
Hearing my brother & niece argue about her taking a bath.
When I recall that my primary interest is the design and evaluation of user interfaces for healthcare I.T., these Twitter gems start to look a lot like cubic zirconia.
Is My Targeted Audience Reading Me? If my purpose in sending short segments of text to perfect strangers is to communicate, then it is important that my followers read my Tweets and I read theirs. The “flow by” and “dilution” problems make this hard to do. It is impossible to know who has read a Tweet and fairly difficult to track the responses. This is where the Twitter “text message” model breaks down. Text messages are most often 1-to-1. Dialogs flow naturally out of 1-to-1 interactions. It would be easy to contrast the Twitter dynamic by saying it is many-to-many but it is actually worse than that. Your “many” (consisting of your followers) is not the same as my “many.” Human communication needs a social environment in which there is a reasonable expectation that all parties receive the messages that form the basis of human interaction. In this respect Twitter reminds me of one of those European art films in which all the characters are talking and nobody is listening.
Hard to Hold a Serious Conversation: The fans of Twitter might argue that the service was never intended to be a discussion list. I’ll concede the point but even though microblogging wasn’t meant to serve as a discussion list its postings often create the desire to discuss. In Twitter there is no capacity to hold a sidebar discussion. I believe that within the Twitter community there is an unmet need for some clever amalgam of microblog + chat room + discussion list. It’s a safe prediction that in the highly entrepreneurial environment of social media, if Twitter doesn’t invent a way to combine microblogging and discussion then someone else will.
The Rise of Twam: Our capitalist economy finds its most uncouth expression in the phenomenon of Internet spam. At first examination it might seem that Twitter has a natural immunity to Twam (Twitter spam). Each user explicitly selects those accounts that he or she will “follow.” Unfortunately a social etiquette has evolved within the Twitter community that encourages you to follow those users who have opted to follow you. This reciprocity has opened the door to Twam. In the past year or so a substantial percentage of Tweets are created by software programs known as “bots” (“bot” is short for “robot”–a program that imitates the behavior of humans in chat environments such as the venerable IRC, “Internet Relay Chat”–one of the earliest social media systems). Within the Twitter community these bot-driven accounts are known as “zombies.” Recent studies have suggested that up to a quarter of all postings on Twitter comes from zombies ["Twitter Zombies: 24% of Tweets Created by Bots", http://mashable.com/2009/08/06/twitter-bots/ ]. So far the Twitter support team has been losing the intellectual arms race with the Twammers but rumblings within the community suggest that people are becoming more selective in choosing who they will “follow back.”
Nice to Meet You: For a service that is categorized as a “social media” Twitter is surprisingly bad at building relationships between people. For reasons outlined earlier in this article, it is hard to react and respond to specific postings and have others react and respond to yours. Of the several metaphors that can be used to describe the Tweeting experience one that emphasizes Twitter’s failures as a social medium is that it is like giving a speech to a group of people who are themselves in the process of giving speeches. Everyone is in the process of sending out “one to many” communications. The most frequent result is that people talk past each other and this is antithetic to forming meaningful (or even casual) relationships.
2. Summary
In my examination of Twitter’s shortcomings I found 6 major deficiencies:
- Flow By
- Dilution
- Cannot discover if messages have been read
- Hard to hold a conversation
- Twam
- Poor at creating and building relationships
The next article in this series will offer some suggestions for improving Twitter (including a focus on some of the underlying user interface issues).
Great post Jim. I agree with you in that Twitter has *several* downfalls. I think it is an experiment in social communication, and, like you suggest in “nice to meet you” I think more tweeting than reading goes on over at Twitterland. I personally prefer to stay out but it is certainly an interesting medium that, to me, has it’s original roots somwhere in the Gutenberg press days. Cheers!
I agree with you on a few of these points, but I think you overlook some 3rd party apps that solve these particular issues. Dilution and Flow By (also called synchronous communication) were solved by the guys at TweetDeck. they felt the same way you did, and created an app that solves that problem. Now I see only the tweets of the people I want to see and never watch the main Twitter timeline. And crazily the 150 or so people that I do converse with regularly are people I only know on Twitter.
If you compared Twitter to a radio station, rather than a social site like Facebook I think you’d have many positive things to say. For instance, if you autofollow only people who have used your keyword (using Twollo for instance) and they follow you back, you have a much more targeted audience than a radio station does. Plus, unlike radio you’re actually able to converse with those in the audience who want to make contact. Everything else about Twitter is then like broadcasting on radio.
The part about “social media” is still true. Imagine if people in their cars listening to the radio could quickly ask a question about your ad? Imagine if your existing customers, upon hearing your ad, could cheerfully send it out to all their friends while sitting in traffic. That would basically be a recommendation – or the power of social media.
I don’t think Twitter is the be-all, end-all – but if your looking to build a brand, drive traffic and meet people in your target market – Twitter is much better than radio.