Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.
No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.
Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.
What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?
The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.
This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)
Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.
FeedBurner’s subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.
So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a handful of followers they know.
Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).
Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.
Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”
Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.
Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly). But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.
“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling.
Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.
Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?
Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.
The answer is feedback loops. But that opens up another discussion. If you’d like to read more, I have a separate post on my website, in which I elaborate on how to design for Audience.
Gregor Hochmuth is the founder of zoo-m.com Interactive, where he created Mento, LaterLoop and other services. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where he worked as an analyst for Hasso Plattner Ventures and has written about German startups on TechCrunch.
Very interesting post
I still enjoy Plurk more.
Agreed. I think twitter is a very easy to use concept, but have yet to try it out. http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Get rid of this damn spammy troll already
(though I have to give him points for inventive laziness; instead of constantly checking for a new post and then being first he just replies to the first post. genius)
huh?
i still have no twitter account because just like rest of social network its is junks
wikipedia is best social network for me
why ?
i dont have to sign up
A good point (somewhere in there). I think the simpler explanation is that people just don’t like signing up for yet another website. Call it “registration inertia.”
Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago.
A long time ago being…a couple of months?
Many people said Twitter was coming to an end, “it crashes too much” or “it’s not friendfeed”, some said that history tends to repeat itself and that the same thing that happened with Friendster/MySpace/Facebook, will happen to Twitter/Friendfeed/Plurk.
But people stuck with it (for some reason) and if they fix their network issues – that I think are mostly due to third-party applications that piggyback their system – they’ll be fine.
At the end of the day,it’s the audience only that decides everybody’s fate..And yes,in case of twitter,it is indeed the power of audience
Nice tautology you got there.
Good article. For me you mentioned most of the reasons why I have remained loyal to Twitter. @dmgerbino
i think everyone is taking twitter (and for that matter facebook) way too seriously. It’s simply a cool app that appeals to some people. It’s hardly curing cancer or raising productivity in the third world. I like it and all, but still, why so serious….
All of that was just a set up for a “why so serious” joke. He he
Twitter won’t fail because it’s backed with tens of millions of dollars, US presidential politics, TechCrunch, and it’s got millions of users.
Identi.ca fell flat on it’s face as I reported here because they DON’T have any of those things. Software is nothing without financial might. Might makes right in Silicon Valley and the world for that matter.
http://tinyurl....m/identicaFAILS
The only way for smaller outfits to get might is to use the Patent system which was our lead article today.
Twitter hasn’t failed primarily because alot of people enjoy small talk.
The power of audience is an amazing thing. I feel, however, that Plurk is more tuned for audience. Not only can you see everyone’s posts that you follow in one neat, and AJAX driven time line, but you can also reply to them on a real-time basis. This brings the audience closer together and provides a sense of community to all.
Back a couple months ago I was on Twitter and while I had a decent amount of followers no one would every reply to any of my tweets. Its not that I wasn’t interesting, its just that there is no real conversation platform there. In the words of Mr. KDFrawg “Twitter is for announcements, Plurk for conversation!” Twitter has mostly been for the people who own businesses or websites to announce their new blog post or product while trying to keep the sense of community. This just doesn’t work. If you want a real sense of community and lots of feedback then Plurk is the place to be.
I have learned more while on Plurk than I have in the entire time I have been on the internet. This new service is bound to have an explosion of new users in the near future, and I suggest that if you want to use this to your advantage that you go sign-up and check it out for yourself.
Signing up is easy and yes you can go straight to their site but if you felt that my comments have persuaded you to join, then please signup through this link so I can get invite credit and a shiny new star.
http://plurk.co...4821421&s=1
Thanks for listening to my rant and remember no matter where you are doing your networking be sure and have a good time doing it.
-Thoughtwrong
You’ve caught a good point. Twitter is hardly used for “What are you doing?” anymore.
Nice article Michael,
Twitter has succeeded thus far, because it has lots of users, it’s simple to use and requires little effort. It is also providing a service people actually need – unlike 99.9% of ‘tech start-ups!
The reason most other start-ups fail is because the are answering a question that NO ONE is asking!
Thanks for the article Michael,
Jim
http://www.thetechnewsblog.com
Sorry, Jim – this is not Michael’s article…
Therefore it is really great!!!
Great clarity of thought! Gregor’s blog holds even more insights on the matter. We are currently designing a journal type communication system for SmibsNet so you can imagine that my thoughts are spinning around those issues for a while now. Thank you for providing a valuable outside perspective.
This is one of the first Twitter columns/blog entries I’ve come across which hasn’t been obsessed about the application’s technical flaws. People who use Twitter are keenly aware of its limitations, so it’s interesting to see an analysis of why it is so attractive.
My case: Today marks my 3 month anniversary with Twitter and I have over 400 people who follow me and over 600 people I follow, none of whom I knew four months ago and probably 2 dozen of whom I’ve now met in person. Twitter expands your network beyond your friends to the friends of your friends. For me, working in the field of education, it is invaluable exposure to the working lives of people in very different fields than my own (technology/marketing/stay at home parents).
There is a truism in Sociology that the strength of a network lies in its weak ties. That is, it is not those closest to you (intimate friends & family) that determine the reach of your social network but how many acquaintances, friends of the family, business colleague, neighbors, etc. you have that determine the length & breadth of ones social network. Twitter definitely is a network of primarily weak ties but they tend to get stronger, not weaker, over time as people arrange Tweet-Ups & rendezvous at conferences.
Twitter is not ideal for a sustained conversation–Friend Feed & blogs are a better forum–but it is a great tool for staying in touch with a large circle of friends, new & old, and sharing news whether that is a breaking news story, who won an Olympic event, or a link to a blog article that you want to share. I’ve found nothing that works as instantaneously and as effectively as Twitter.
I just reread my post and realize that I sound like a commercial! But I’m just an enthusiastic user…it’s just exposed me to some wonderful people.
…how does your 400+ followers, or the 600+ help you to become more effective as an educator? let’s say you post to twitter 2x/day and you repsond to other twitterers 2x/day. have you caculated the time spent, not only on the intial post but the constant followup that it entails?
I would say our education system is broken enough without our educators wasting their time throughout the day posting pithy messages to the masses of twitter sheep.
Before you judge how I spend my free time, maybe you can share what you do when you’re not at work and I can ask how that (watching TV, playing computer games, surfing the net) adds to your work productivity.
Twitter hasn’t failed, it’s the audience!
Leave me alone with this smalltalk. My 700 newsfeeds are enough for me. Most information has to mature before it’s ready for consumption. I don’t need hectic, short tweeds.
700 feeds, I hope you don’t use Netvibes!
It reads a bit like a college essay, but very well organized. Good job!
Very interesting post. I have never looked at social networks through the lens of the audience like that. It will be interesting to see if/how facebook can implement such “feedback” loops without alienating the masses. People who enjoy friendfeed and twitter due to its “well-defined audience” are only a small minority of facebook users in genera… Read Morel. How can these feedback loops be subtly integrated into facebook without complicating the user experience let alone the the very definition of a social network…It will be fun to see how this evolves.
The meat here is the comparison between blogs and twitter. For those of us who aren’t even C-lister bloggers, twitter is a chance to write for a real audience that will respond back. And, as pointed out, many people will use twitter who wouldn’t even think of doing a blog, no matter how easy Tumblr et al. make it.
Gregor Hochmuth – the newer, shinier, slightly more cogent (but ultimately still pointless) version of Steve Gillmor! Michael must be proud.
JK, not too bad a post — nowhere near as pointless as Gillmor’s blather.
Nice article, Gregor! Twitter is all about community or as you say, the audience. That is where its power resides and why we keep coming back, regardless of past outages and issues.
I can’t get past the core argument’s flaws.
I don’t know the vast majority of my twitter followers, or what they’re like. Does anyone? Search/replace “twitter” in this post w/ “blog” or “friendfeed” or any SNS and it will probably make just as strong (er.. weak) an argument for another service being “concrete audience” focused.
More “successful” than twitter based solely on this “well-defined audience” criterion: e-mail, listservs, IM, dodgeball, telephones, USPS, tin cans attached with a string… This metric is misleading.
‘people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages’
And the crux of this statement begs the question what are the psychological underpinnings that compel people to engage with others in such a way…
I would guess that a primary motivator is the recognition/validation of one’s own existence that twitter affords, which tends to be more important among young people(eg, high shool/college/post graduates and socially isolated).
Another motivator might be the ‘craigslist effect’ where you post a question in the hope getting feedback from others. In this case, the type of feedback one is trying to get with twitter, is not so much for utility, but rather to engage on some level with other human beings, albeit at a superficial level.
So your initial thesis that it’s all about the audience is somewhat true but the uderlying question should be really what drives the growth of that audience?
tl;dr: OMG i LOVE twitter!!111oneoneeleventycos(2pi)
Very nice post, though suspiciously similar to The Newsbreak Times’ reporting on Twitter two days ago: http://www.news...mes.com/article
You are a complete liar, and there is no article whatsoever even remotely similar (not even one that discusses twitter).
Short-term hopes of pageviews will kill long-term chance for success. you can’t be trusted.
I think this article misses a point slightly. It says:
”
While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom.
”
Now, while that may be true of the news feed, users can instead look at the “Status Updates” page which gives ALL of their friends most recent status updates. Similarly, “Recently Updated” gives all of the user’s friends’ recent profile updates (privacy settings permitting).
The point about not knowing your audience on Facebook seems odd as well. Facebook profile updates are largely only seen by your known circle of friends, whereas tweets are often read by unknown people on the net.
Twitter isn’t the first platform to allow one to define an audience and message it, instant or otherwise (email, IM, group SMS). So why does it work?
I think the answer lies in the context of the tweet. If I sent an SMS to 50 of my friends saying what I’m doing right now, there is an implied social obligation to respond. My message would be misinterpreted as an invitation to join me or a prompt to start a conversation. To not reply is to ignore my message.
A tweet on the other hand, is forwarded in a context where the recipient is not required to respond. This lack of obligation means that tweets can fly around among friends in a light and fluid manner without having us all spending our day thumbing out reponses to the messages we receive.
Pretty simple idea, but that (to me) is why twitter works.
Don’t think anyone mentioned this yet, but that “Twitter” link goes to the wrong destination guys… to the facebook ads jpg.
Twitter will fail though for the same reason, the audience will move. It is the same reason you have abandoned malls in the middle of big cities, they built a mall down the street and the crowed go there. Twitter is just a flavor of the month.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but one can’t argue that the genre of platform they created (or mad popular at least) will continue to thrive.
Support for SMS and a really open API (originally), allowed it to thrive and many other services were built on top of it.
Right, once you have an idea out there and a platform to implement it, then the barriers to entry are reduced to near zero.
The ONLY thing that twitter has is some eyes and hearts right now, but this is a VERY fragile situation, it they piss off their customers twitter will disappear in a cloud of vapor ware.
Consider AOL, once a leader and innovator on the internet, they pissed off their customers and destroyed their brand image. What do you think when someone says they use AOL now?
May I say those who love Twitter mostly love fast foods? and like quick thinking rather than deep thinking?
“Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.”
You just made this up because you’re a Twitter fan, didn’t you? There is no basis for this statment whatsoever. Everyone from cats to geriatrics have started blogs – only nerds use Twitter.
Did you make this up for blogger?
Anyway, if you can point to any data source of demographic about twitter or blog, I would greatly appreciate that, as I did ask the following:
“May I say those who love Twitter mostly love fast foods? and like quick thinking rather than deep thinking?”
People do have blogs, but the problem they are trying to focus on is, that most of the people, do not have readers.There is no sense of community developed around the idea of blogging so far. So even if you blog about the most amazing topics, unless you do SEO and update your blog regularly, you don’t get enough audience. On the contrary, if you have a few people following you in twitter, and you tweet once a week, they still get your message – without any SEO:)
A community for bloggers is definitely lacking, and a lot of content never shows up in google or even technorati.
Um, there is no reason for Twitter to exist so why it is so popular completely baffles me. It’s glorified IM but yet it calls itself something different. It’s sometimes called “microblogging” but it’s completely useless compared to a blog.
I just have no idea why this is arounjd, other than it’s “something new”…ughhh….
I have a cronjob to post a random quote scrape from the website to my twitter account via it’s API. I haven’t been to the site for months now, neither do I care about what get posted there, and yeah I’m still an “active” user and occasionally get followers out of nowhere.
And you think that’s typical? Or you just learned about cronjobs? WTF? Nice way to treat your followers. Scum bag.
does anyone have a credible number quoting how many actual twitter users exist???
all this talk of ‘not failed’ is subject to numerical feedback no?
Twitter hasn’t failed for the same reason myspace, as long as it sorta works most of the time (unlike early friendster): existing social network is not easily portable.
Why is the twitter word on top linking to facebook-thumbs-up-down image?
and yea, twitter users somehow dont seem to be giving up though we seem to have forgotton the power of IM we once had and the uptime n all that. Tch!
Re: Facebook’s algorithmic filtering …
This is a VERY good point.
Creating a sophisticated computer algorithm might be an interesting technical challenge but these energies would be better spent IMHO on the development of filtering tools options for users that enable them to make their own filtering decisions both in regards to (1) what they wish to see incoming and (2) who they wish to direct outgoing items to.
Now,FriendFeed is a lucky devil. Why? It contains the most interesting tech discussions.
A so interesting post that i translated to french .
Really clever analyse. thanks. keep on!
Twitter will be around for a very long time and will continue to be the micro-blogging service of choice. Why? Wide spread user-adoption. FriendFeed, Plurk, Identi.ca…all of them dont have the audience.
http://www.twitter.com/khawe
I really like this article– it is obviously very well thought out and on a topic that I find interesting. Thanks!
Your discussion of the activity stream was really interesting to me – I have two friends who’ve had quite tragic things happen to them, and then have written notes to keep everybody updated – the public space was kind of a practical way to have a really personal conversation with a lot of friends at the same time – and perhaps an easier way to share quite a raw message. It’s all about having a personal and connected audience.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here. I was also baffled by the success of Twitter so I did some research on how people use it and posted the findings on my blog “Why We Tweet – What value does Twitter bring on personal and business front”
http://sachendr...business-front/
It is very easy to analyze how a service became a success after it has become a success, but I am sure that before twitter was found, the founders didn’t think of all these things and didn’t expect it to be such a huge rage. It is all about how your product catches up and being at the right place at the right time which some people call as luck
Aside from a chosen few, there is no audience, just people who enjoy talking about themselves, perpetually broadcasting their life as if it matters.
You only become a follower (aka the audience) in hope to build your own audience.¸
Twitter is definitely a lot like blogging in that regard.
interesting observations. let’s not forget the format of 140 chars and SMS texting. it opened a usage gap and could explain why twitter is so US centric. paradoxically expanding the oblivion of presence twitter is a scavenger app eating a bit of everyones time. it has a potential to become an intermediary layer to create junktures out of moments and turn single experiences into collective ones. in the past: status updates, idling on irc, updating IM status, livejournal moods, fingering .plan files. inside just jabber plus FOAF. at its endings more or less expressive semantics. in the future: to be able to diffundate into various sectors of life, twitter needs to be able to feed into a diversifying system of services. allowing the interpretation of more expressive semantics in the active/quality sense: ranking, rating, recommending, annotating, dating, linking.. or quantitative/passive: where, when, how much, with who. there are more usecases than “what are you doing/eating/listening/reading right now..” if twitter becomes richer in its syntax, like a command line, and i am able not to talk to people but also to machines, i might be using it more.
Hi Everyone, Welcome to the greatest Tech Blog ever!
Twitter this and twitter that and twitter do and twitter dumb and twitter big and twitter small and twitter jump and twitter traffic and twitter amazing and twitter so cool and twitter fantastic and so like i was saying, this twitter, it’s like worth twittering about.
twitter.
Mr Gregor Hochmuth
Thanks.
You just have killed the Carelibro (facebook in spanish)
Gracias
This is a great article loaded with genius. Am bookmarking to read while im not multi-tasking.
Twitter? What the heck is Twitter?
JT
http://www.Fireme.To/udi
Twitter is not a success it has yet to gain any true mainstream momentum , im not saying it wont happen but because of its failing its given its competitors a chance.
and what would happen if MySpace added sms to their bulletins, they already give you the ability to post a bulletin via their im client. most people i know have more myspace friends so it could easily become the mainstream twitter with its already mainstream userbase.
You sure are right in the difficulty of moving that audience is a big factor in other twitter-clones failing. Can’t think of how to go out bit by bit again adding personalities worth following. In a way, twitter continues to reap the benefits of being the first service, too. Did somebody else mention the beauty of an instantaneous communication loop also is a big part of the appeal.
Best.
alain
http://www.mor.ph
Part of the issue is not so much whether you can garner an audience or not, but on Twitter or any other social media site for that matter – what value can you add to other people?
Technology has sure brought us a long way. I think the verdict is still out on which social sites are the best. Everything is being put to the test these days and people are still exploring ideas. Whatever the solution is; it is bound to come in due time.