Ask YC: Do you believe in Twitter philosophy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139207

11 31 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently it's been questioned on RWW that Twitter is still for Geeky people and not for rest of the world. It's hard for someone new to convince why he would share what he is doing with the rest of the world.

What about you? Do you believe in Twitter philosophy? Is it only for geeks? Or can it be taken to mainstream people?

If yes, what ideas do you think that can be build around that philosophy to provide value proposition rather than just "status updating"?

Do you think we need to derive signal from Twitter?

iamdave3• 18 years ago

I'm part of the crowd that still doesn't understand the efficiency of twitter in any environment other than average use. If you want to equate twitter's parallel with geek society because it's hard for geeks to get their non geek friends to use it, by all means make that the bottom line of your argument.

For me, I don't think it's an issue of who's a geek and who's not, it's more "who's going to leave their AIM or ICQ protocols to use something on the web that does the exact same thing?".

curi2• 18 years ago

no it's worse. i can paste longer text in AIM

akkartik4• 18 years ago

Consider for a moment that longer text is not necessarily better. The size limitation is by no means an implementation detail - it was designed in.

Longer text is better for some writers - they don't have to work to fit in their message. But it's better for all readers - they can come read their twitters knowing no single entry will swamp it.

mdemare• 18 years ago

But Twitter is public. Isn't that the main difference with IM?

iamdave3• 18 years ago

Not everyone who realizes twitter is public cares to read the public feed. Just because the mountain is there doesn't mean you have to climb it.

turker• 18 years ago

I think the main difference with IM is that Twitter does not necessarily require a reply.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I'm part of the crowd that still doesn't understand the efficiency of twitter in any environment other than average use ..."

twitter scales more at the edges.

Forget mode, protocols, technology. I can be mobile with a phone, send a message not only to another phone but as data that can be further processed by machine or other people.

akkartik4• 18 years ago

When you see the one textbox on the twitter page, the 140-character limit, one's first reaction is to think twitter is something trivial. Resist this tempting line of thought. Twitter isn't trivial. It is status messages, yes, just like IM. However:

a) Past statuses get archived. Each of them gets a permalink. You get RSS on them. There's a huge difference between just seeing what someone's doing right now, and being able to see a concise summary of their day or days laid out before you.

b) You can access it via mobile phones.

c) It is a social network. You can discover interesting people by clicking around.

d) You can follow others. This one is so huge I'm certain I still haven't grasped all of its implications. Twitter is a social network built on a single simple one-way connection, and already there's more value flowing through it than through facebook.

When I go to facebook I get spammed and poked and bitten and humped and god knows what else. Facebook is made for senders. When I go to twitter I can get a sense of what my close friends and family are up to, no matter where on earth they are, so that when I do open up my IM window to chat with them I don't have to start with the tedious "how was your day?" I have prebuilt objects to begin a conversation with. Twitter is built for recipients.

brk• 18 years ago

New technologies and ideas like Twitter have a habit of appearing completely useless at first, and then suddenly catching on. I remember the first time I saw the ICQ "pager" on the internet in the mid 90's. My thought was "WTF is this stupid thing good for?", now (like most people) I have multiple IM accounts and do a good bit of my daily communications via IM.

I was having a conversation this weekend with my wife about Twitter. She is way more technical than the "average" wife, but doesn't really "socialize" online much (her IM client has only me as a contact). Anyway, I was trying to explain Twitter to her, and some of my summary points were:

1) Twitter is the evolution beyond IM, which was the evolution beyond email. 2) Twitter is (likely) best suited for 1-way status updates (I'm at X, doing Y) to close groups of friends vs. "micro-blogging" which seems (to me) like "micro-attention-whoring" most of the time. 3) Twitter is useful when you don't need or want a response, just a way to keep friends/family in the loop about things where the value decays over time (ie: you wouldn't post your vacation summary via Twitter, but you might mention that you landed safely at the airport) 4) Twitter took a new approach, trying to embrace some of the Web2.0 methods, where it's NOT a closed client-server system as IM is. Instead it seems more like a framework that is waiting for the true killer app to be built around it (or, some might say a solution looking for a problem).

iamdave3• 18 years ago

I think this is the best explanation of the value of Twitter I've ever seen.

adityakothadiya2• 18 years ago

very thoughtful explanation. tht's exactly is my point - i think it's great start as a platform, which can be leveraged to build killer apps around it. it's true that it's not easy for someone to understand it's benefits on the first look, but with proper explanation of its applications, they might understand its value.

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

I enjoy twitter, but don't see the mainstream bothering with it.

tonyvt2005• 18 years ago

I wonder if it is catching on better outside the US? I know text-messaging took a little longer to go mainstream here versus internationally.

axod2• 18 years ago

I have no idea who it is for. I'd rather be doing stuff than telling everyone about what I'm doing.

hhm• 18 years ago

I don't care about Twitter's original idea, and I think most interesting people doesn't either. Twitter is better used like a tool to keep in touch with colleagues and people, and to know other people in the field. In Buenos Aires, this kind of communication through Twitter has recently originated a huge new group of local start up entrepreneurs. So I guess it can be useful if it's well used.

jamesbritt• 18 years ago

A friend of mine convinced me to look into Twitter by suggesting some interesting practical uses. Mostly I think of it as message queue I can play with to drive applications.

I don't really get the self-absorbed stream-of-minutia thing.

One of the goofiest messages I saw was something along the lines of, "I'm at a bar with a hot chick, having a drink."

I'm sure that went well.

greendestiny2• 18 years ago

It's for communication. Pretty much a fundamental need for the human animal.

axod2• 18 years ago

Email, IM, IRC are for communication.

Twitter seems to be more for "Announcing" rather than communicating.

Maybe I'm just not well connected enough, but I really doubt anyone in the world cares what I'm currently doing day to day. The people that do care, I communicate with via more appropriate methods.

dood• 18 years ago

Twitter has an interesting problem: they sell it as service to tell people "what are you doing", explicitly pushing the "hyper-connected" angle. This was great for early adopters, but normal people don't care about the idea of being "hyper-connected" and being informed every time their friends fart.

Funnily enough though, normal people will care about what Twitter really is: a general-purpose platform-agnostic publish-and-subscribe messaging system. Or as mainstream users will initially see it: a simple way to text & IM all your friends in one go.

If Twitter wants to grow big in the mainstream, I think they would do well to completely change their public sales pitch to focus on this. Once this is sucessfully communicated to the average user it will become huge, and people will quickly and instinctively grasp the usefulness of platform agnostic pub/sub.

optimal• 18 years ago

Really? I think it's more like a mini-MySpace: tell the world what you're up to (in excruciating detail). If so I'd expect it to catch on with the same demographic.

Husafan• 18 years ago

If my mother wants to know what I am doing, she will call me.

People who do not spend most of their time in front of a computer will call their friends directly, rather than checking Twitter.

Only the stereotypical geek sees an advantage in non-personal communication about personal matters.

akkartik4• 18 years ago

I watched Noah Glass respond to this at a panel with, "I want to know what my mother is up to. But that doesn't mean I want to talk to her right now."

That sentence is phrased for maximum humour, but with a kernel of deep insight:

a) If your mom was in the same room as you you would talk far more often with her than you do now. The easier you make something the more frequently it will happen. The more context y'all share about each other the more often y'all will talk to each other. And it's super hard to share context when you're far away from -- and out of sync with -- each other.

b) When you're face to face a lot of time you say things to each other where the only response is a grunt. That doesn't seem to be appropriate in IM or over the phone. The result: we're more careful what we say over the phone or IM. But if you can stop self-selecting what seems worth talking about you can find far more interesting conversation.

c) Just like not everything deserves a response, not everything deserves a response right now. If I know what is going on with my mother I'll have better conversation when I do talk to her. And it's better to lay the groundwork for it now, before we start talking.

d) We've had online communication for 10 years now, and it hasn't really cannibalized real-world interactions for the vast majority of us. What it has done is enriched and complemented them. In this case, twitter doesn't replace conversation, but it allows me to sidestep the tedious initial "how was your day, dear?" segways and head straight for the most juicy objects of conversation from somebody's timeline.

Conversation happens off twitter, but benefits from being rooted in it. This isn't purely synchronous IM or phone, nor is it purely asynchronous email. It's just a more organic way to manage conversation.

adityakothadiya2• 18 years ago

all are great points. this definitely defends the twitter philosophy in more convincing way.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

Twitter alone won't have much value today or tomorrow. but pair it with fireeagle and you can build a nice location enabled digital timeline.

_albert_• 18 years ago

Or pair it with twitxr.com and you can build a nice location enabled photo moblog that broadcast it all together to all other social networks you may use

paul• 18 years ago

I remember thinking that SMS seemed kind of dumb. If I have a cell phone, and the person I'm messaging has a cell phone, why wouldn't I just make a phone call? Now I probably SMS more than I call...

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

I think microblogging as a concept has some merit. Everyone forms thoughts differently and for some, Twitter just works.

I think when social aggregations catch on more people will be more free to choose whatever medium of expression they choose and be assured that they are communicating with the people they want to communicate with.In fact, I really see a need for the "Sharers" if you will to be able to create their own outbound social feeds that aggregate the many forms of self-expression a single person may want to partake in.

Ask YC: Do you believe in Twitter philosophy?

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