How One Single Character Changed My Perception of Twitter
I used to hate Twitter. Until a little thing called twittervision came along. Twittervision completely changed my perspective of Twitter,and it did so when I began to see the once character that has, for as long as I can remember, been a beacon of digital communication and interaction. Over and over, as the Twitter map jumped back and forth from London to Chicago, Sao Paulo to Lyon, I saw the same little symbol in hundreds and hundreds of posts: I saw the @. And that little @, repeated over and over again, completely changed what I think of Twitter.
That @ symbol implies conversation-one Twitter post replying to another post, virtually in real time. After seeing so many @, coming from all over the world, it hit me- Twitter is more than a status update a la Facebook or AIM. Because it has found such heavy adoption among bloggers, Twitter is more akin to a chat room. A global chat room where everything is visible, and every participant is more than an anonymous screen name- every participant in a Twitter conversation is a person, with a location, a life, a group of friends, and probably a blog. Unlike an anonymous AOL chat room, where you are talking to strangers, with Twitter you are talking to (potential) friends. Much like a conversation between bloggers carried on through repeated reciprocal comments and links is so much more intimate than an anonymous thread in a newsgroup, a Twitter conversation is much better at connecting people than a random AIM chat. And connect people it does- Twitter is chatting, taken at last to the social of Web 2.0.
If Twitter were smart, they would capitalize on this, and build some sort of threading for Twitter conversations. This retooling of Twitter for conversation is a perfect example of a crowd taking an existing technology and making it their own. Embrace the direction users take your technology, and you have a winner on your hands.
Go ahead, search for “@”, and see how many conversations are going on now between bloggers all over the world, in real time.
Of course, there will still be plenty of people sending out a Twitter update every time their cat pees(don’t believe me? go ahead, click the link). But at the same time, Twitter is taking great strides towards enabling the international no-boundaries conversation that we have started here in the blogosphere.
Oh, and will I get a twitter account? Probably not. I don’t like short blurbs. I prefer less frequent, longer, more in-depth posts, but to each his own. (Real reason: I don’t have enough fans).
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salut:
my name is Pierro and im from germany, thats wy my english is all others than good, anyway . . . a will start a small question about twitter.
wy dont i can find me myself ?
my site is http://twitter.com/pierro
but when im serch : pierro
i get a mystic message ->
“…and the zeitgeist looks away…”
But alas, neomeme, we can not find you on twitter.
http://twitter.com/dtnyc383
pierro: “…and the zeitgeist looks away…” means that nothing was found for that term. The search only indexes publically viewable posts. Because your Twitter is set to only give updates to friends, the search cannot index your page.
DT: See the last few sentences of my post
howdy - thank you for your feedback.
but; thats right:
nice; you understand me
“your Twitter is set to only give updates to friends”
can i change this - or is this a standart option ?
greetings
I have no idea how to change it, as I don’t use twitter. But I’m sure it’s somewhere in the options- it can definitely be changed, as others’ profiles are public.
i will see - have nice time !
@pierro — click “Settings” in the twitter navigation at the top of the page. toward the bottom of the page there is a checkbox next to “Protect my updates” — uncheck this if you want your tweets to go out to the world.
http://twitter.com/quepol
Hillary - thanks; i found it, and i think it works.
im now PUPLIC
What if a machine were programmed to glean intelligence from these twitter posts and you could ask questions and submit your own ideas. Each person would communicate with the cloud and the cloud would communicate back. Threading would occur naturally. I could say, “When and where is the next Vikings game?”, and the cloud would reply based on information from all other posts.
Sam, that would be really cool. It would be fun to investigate the aggregate “wisdom of the crowd” from Twitter posts.
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