Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name - Yet ?

Props to Kara Swisher for prompting me to open Ecto and work on a blog post, something I have not done in a long long time (almost 5 months since this announcement of my Seesmic investment). I won't even apologize to my 122K RSS subscribers (what ?) because I am not feeling apologetic at all. I have moved on from blogging - feeling the obligation of developing 500 word pieces that took sometimes a couple of hours to assemble - to bits of 140 characters, and rarely videos, I post every now and then and I suspect that a lot of my “audience” - entrepreneurs, VCs, established Internet companies and other constituents have pretty much followed me to twitter. Disclosure: I did not invest in Twitter but a lot of my friends have.

Kara makes the point in her post that Twitter is not very well known outside of Silicon Valley - yet and asks when we'll see a mainstream adoption. This is true and I suspect very similar to Flickr's initial ramp 4 years ago. In comparison Facebook was broadly known and used in her sample audience, but I would argue that anyone actively using Facebook status messages might be counted in the Twitter “use case”: easy to publish micro bits of information, including pointers/notifications to other pieces media.
This micro-chunking of the information - the arbitrary limitation to a few tens or hundreds of characters in a world of Gigabit networks - drops the time commitment barrier to a couple of minutes tops. Most people can't commit large chunks of time to read/write/comment on blogs, but everyone has a couple minutes to spare a few times a day... not too far away from a phone or a computer.
Offering broad access on the web, on the phone, one message at a time or through applications, in real time (even if you are not pushing it like Scoble does) or in batch mode, allows time (and CPA ?) challenged users to get a quick return on the attention investment they choose to make at any point during the day.

Would we spend more time face to face in order to catch up on our day to day ? No, lack of time. Is it sad that we proxy a conversation with a 140-character max status update? No, because a tweet might lead to a conversation that would not have happened in a first place. You can't speak to me, I won't read you, but do notify me - sort of thing. Do I need to ask myself if I am a writer or a journalist before twittering ? NO. And that's why we'll see eventually millions of users of these simple communication tools starting to publish bits about their lives, even though they will never have a blog or use an RSS reader.

Note that I am making the case for a broad adoption of micro-blogging, or whatever that “super easy posting of a personal status update” is called. As to whether Twitter, Facebook or another yet-to-come service will be the “winner” in the space, who knows. But the broader audience, and the broader need, will be there. As to how you turn this into a business, and make money? There are enough smart people in and around these services, and enough usage, that something will eventually be figured out IMHO.

And if you marry that with the iPhone platform, it gets even more interesting. But that's another story... in 5 months or so.

Photo Credit: PinarOzger. Don't ask me why I felt that this picture of Tim O'Reilly bowing to Dave McClure was relevant to the story, but it did ;).

Comments

[Ivan Pope]

I follow you on Twitter - that'show I came here. Not sure Twitters is a replacement for Blogging though. Can't say I had any idea of your view on anything recently until reading this ... Twitter is lazy compared to Blogging I think. Maybe better for the Twitterer, but not for the reader ...

[Jeff Clavier]

Hey Ivan. Point well taken, and I don't think I am claiming that Twitter is replacing blogging as a mechanism for elaborating on an idea. It is complementing it as a notification mechanism (as you found out about that post), and it is a way to maintain a level of conversation in lieu of blogging. Today is really the first time I felt compelled to write "for real".

[qthrul]

The thing is, very few people in the larger adoption scheme are maintaining a blog that is an active broadcast of one to many (at least not intended).

I think you are spot on that Twitter is more about "a tweet might lead to a conversation"

I'm more in the camp using Twitter as a more accessible method for publishing back to wards an aggregated post via Twitter Tools for WordPress and LoudTwitter for LiveJournal.

I also do this with del.icio.us now that it supports a batch publish per day of links added.

Hence, the description of your post which is now:

Summary: The "blog" is contrived, hard, and asynchronous. Twitter is accessible, easy, and intimate.

That will hit my WordPress sometime tonight.

[Rolf Schewe]

The first line tells you all you need to know. I stopped once I got to "Washington D.C.". For crying out loud, who was she asking, the lobbyists on K Street? Maybe the President.

If D.C. was a representative sample of how our society behaves we are screwed.

Yeah, let's take a sample of American society from inside the Washington bubble.

By the way, last time I checked I was in Staten Island, not Silicon Valley.

[Dave Ambrose]

I'm digging the pic. :)

[Zoli Erdos]

Wow, Jeff, great to see you back to blogging!
:-)

[dave mcclure]

not sure why the picture of tim & me made the post, but perhaps since i twittered the link to the pic on friday it wouldn't have been included otherwise ;)

(ps - we're still accepting caption suggestions on that photo)

- dave

[Jeff Clavier]

Zoli> Don't start :). I am definitely not back to blogging like I used to.

Dave> As I told you I picked that picture to illustrate the post a bit randomly - though I really like it - though it feels to me that it illustrates well that second coming of Social Media.

[PXLated]

I agree that tweeting isn't much of a time sink but following is. I have the few minutes a day to tweet, I don't have the hours to follow.

[Perry Mizota]

Good post, Jeff. I generally agree with your comments. However, I believe that in order for Twitter - or micro-blogging - to become mainstream, there needs to be more clearly defined purpose. I explain in more detail at http://abovethenoise.blogspot.com/2008/04/to-go-mainstream-twitter-must-have-more.html

[Garth Hall]

We're using twitter in a variety of ways. While our twitter already 'broadcasts' to our facebook page and blog, we've also begun using twitter for news sound bites. We took the badge code of one of our filmmakers, Pete Chatmon and posted it on our site so that while he was at the Tribeca Film Festival he could send reports back to us.  He's been doing this since last Thursday and his reports are streaming into our Front Page where he is the FILMCOMMUNITY "Featured Filmmaker" [http://www.filmcommunity.com ]. In the midst of all this, Pete won the Tribeca prize for best narrative for his screenplay and we received the news firsthand.

Inspired by this experience we'll be posting regular "twitter" (micro-blog) reports from the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. We're also going to create on our site a "Twitter Wall" of badges from all our members in Cannes so that their live updates will come streaming in from all over the Festival and appear as a "wall" of news.

(FILMCOMMUNITY.COM is the social network for the film industry worldwide)

[Robert Cadena]

This post gave me an idea to relegate my blog to just another element of my online social identity. So I whipped up a script that aggregates some social streams and turned my personal home page into my online social identity stream aggregator: http://www.machine501.com/

I could have used FriendFeed but I have my own ideas about presentation and wanted to give others control too.

[Neil Vineberg]

If life comes down to 140 character posts, then aren't we missing something? A song needs a melody and a chorus, not just a bunch of riffs. There is something magical about compositional development.

Yes, Twitter is the collective 24/7 song of infinite instruments. A chorus of unique and spontaneous voices. And I love it.

In terms of mass market adoption, however, Twitter needs its players to be fully present, and the medium perhaps demands of its players the endurance of a long distance runner combined with the energy of a sprinter. And outside the 24/7 musings of Bay Area tech heads and the 'name' bloggers who need to be first with the latest news, show me a mainstream American public that wants to be broadcasting all day and night. So jury's out on mass market.

And .... don't give up on the longer posts, even if they take longer to write.

[Nollind Whachell]

One isn't any better than the other (blogging vs twittering), they each have their own strengths and are appropriate in their own ways.

If anything, what Twitter did is make it socially acceptable to just provide small "situational awareness" updates instead of lengthy posts or even articles. Yet all of these content formats can and I think should be used together. Here's an example.

Think of a scientist who is researching something. He may have a small notebook that he sticks in his pocket to jot down small thoughts that come to him during the day. Then later at home, he expands upon these collection of notes into a journal. Then finally over a longer period of time, his journal entries are aggregated into an article.

The thing to note is that at the article stage, the formality of the document become more professional and precise. The notes are loose and can contain snippets of anything, the journal is more structured but still not perfect, until finally the article is created which relays a professional opinion of something (that can hopefully stand up to scrutiny amongst his peers).

Again, one format isn't any better than the other, they instead all work together in their own way at different stages in the evolution of an idea or belief.

[Allan]

To answer your question, I think it is sad that our conversations have become character limited text messages. On the positive side, Twitter users could keep their weak relationships on Twitter. Real close relationships can take place on the cell phone or in person. Interesting post.