Tweet? Tweet!
20 Dec 2007 | Filed Under: Interpipes + Social Networks + Technology
So with a long holiday stretch approaching, the husband out of town and nothing to do except clean the house and deal with 6,000 emails, I did what any sensible woman would do and joined Twitter.
It’s interesting, particularly in the ways its foundations are contrary to a lot of the other wildly popular social networking applications. I really like the terseness (you can only enter 140 characters per message) and the IM interface; I love things that integrate with what I have running already instead of making me use YAFA (Yet Another Feckin Application.) I can see how it would be handy as a social notepad, and lends itself to building, for example, a sidebar blog within another kind of content. (Incidentally, has anyone coined the term sideblarg yet? Because if not, I so call it.)
I also like the openness of it; anyone can click a button to follow your Tweets, and you can likewise follow anyone you’re interested in. It’s very expansive; you can even browse people’s Following lists to pick up other folks you want to follow, too.
This is exactly what I was doing, in fact, when I browsed through to Anil Dash’s Twitter page and hit my wall of Twitter understanding.
1,780 followers? On Twitter? Seriously?
With all due deference to Anil Dash, a lively thinker who throws pearls before swine on a regular basis, it is simply unfathomable to me that 1,780 people care what he had for dinner last night. (It was oxtail soup, in case you were wondering. You read it here first 1,781st.)
Now, the man is a pretty high profile web celebrity with a lot of blogshphere credibility via his work at Six Apart, Movable Type and TypePad, so I can see why people are interested in what he’s saying, what he’s thinking about and what is catching his attention. But having to wade through the inanities of family dinners, canine conversations, concert replays and descriptions of random passing tourists to find out that Anil is thinking about maybe organising a NYC tech conference is a pretty high noise to signal ratio. And I’m somehow doubting that if one day, he magically unlocks the secret of life, the universe and everything and wants to share it with the rest of us, he’ll choose to do so using Twitter.
I mean, it’s not like the guy doesn’t have a quite popular blog.
I am not, by the way, in any way knocking what Anil Dash chooses to Tweet. He’s using Twitter in exactly the right way; the constrained input of Twitter practically begs for the minutia of anyone’s life. And of those 1,780 people following, there are presumably a number who are close enough to him to care about that level of detail in Anil’s life.
It’s the other 1,680 people I’m wondering about.
Anil says:
You’ll either be amused or annoyed, but I’d, uh… actually twittered about this topic myself. The closest thing to an answer I can come up with is a somewhat nuanced answer. I’m more social than most people (I mean face-to-face, not “social networking” social) both personally and as a result of the requirements of my job.
As you mentioned, there’s the ~20 people or so whom I consider close friends or family. I also have another ~150 or so people who are my coworkers. (There is, of course, some overlap in all these groups.)
But in addition, there’s probably 200 people or so whom I know well enough to sit down with and have dinner or a face-to-face meeting or a cup of coffee with in the course of a year. And if you count people I speak to as part of addressing various groups, that’s probably 10,000 or so people in an average year. A good percentage of them come up to say hello after a presentation, and just as a matter of social convention, many of them will add me as a contact on Twitter or LinkedIn or Vox or Facebook or something.
So, you’re seeing an unreasonable behavior as the result of me having a very unusual social life. I don’t disagree that it’s strange, but the other 99.9% of Twitter’s users are using it in a much more sane way. No reason to dismiss them just because I’m crazy. ;)
Thursday, 20 December, 2007, 8:59 pmAnil says:
Oh, and one point I forgot — I never realize all the people who are reading. In my mind, the only people who see my tweets are my wife and my friends, and that’s who I write for.
Thursday, 20 December, 2007, 9:01 pmSabrina says:
In my mind, the only people who see my tweets are my wife and my friends, and that’s who I write for.
Exactly! Which is how I really perceive Twitter working, too. I just find it so interesting that another 1,600+ people are invested enough in you to take hits from the kitchen, the coffee place and the dog. It’s hugely complimentary but in thinking about it today, I suspect it also has a lot to do with perception of alliance and access.
Thursday, 20 December, 2007, 9:47 pm