charmed life

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but I saw a post on how most Twitter users do not use the service, and thought I’d expand some thoughts. The majority of my friends do not Tweet. Nor does my family. They do not care about it. They see “follow us on Twitter” during TV broadcasts and don’t know why they should. Further, they are not getting more interested despite an increasing barrage of the service.  If anything, they are even less intrigued to the mystique that is Twitter than ever before.  Note that some of my screenshots contain vulgar language – nothing compared to Xbox Live banter, but you’ve been warned.

Here’s the “first impression” a user gets by coming to twitter:

 

Independent of all other things, this doesn’t really give any insight as to why people are going crazy about Twitter. If I’ve heard that Oprah and Ashton are tweeting, and my favorite football player, and it’s the latest hottest thing, and all I see is a static page with a bunch of random-seeming terms, I’m not yet compelled.  Further, the major tagline “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world” isn’t exactly right.  If you make a search like “how are things in haiti” you get a very bizarre set of responses that do not inherently answer the question.  Knowing how to search in Twitter is important, yet isn’t taught.  Showing hashtags also overly geeks up the screen, and in a bad way.  To continue this “new user experience”, I clicked on “pregnancy pact” (was curious) and saw the following:

 

This didn’t really explain anything to me, just showed me, well, the exact type of garbage the average person does not want to be reading.  It’s not even gossip/fun, it’s just *weird*.  Sure there’ll be the occasional clever gem, but for the most part, especially with popular topics, it’s becoming a haven for spam or utter drivel.  Also, as an aside, Twitter should not display foul language to users who aren’t logged in – some people still prefer to keep vulgarity elsewhere. It actually gets even worse if you look at trending topics:

Huh?  No thanks.

Now how about the new user experience from the perspective of following someone they were “told” to follow.  The @CNN account shows recent CNN headlines, as it should.  However, this does not exactly “add value” to someone’s life, as finding CNN headlines is relatively easy to do.  How about mega-celebrity @Oprah?

 

Not exactly new and interesting, and definitely not “real-time”. All we’ve learned is she seems to like Avatar, uses capital letters inappropriately, and then includes a bunch of things that look like gobbledygook.  Why? Because once you do get “into” Twitter, you start using acronyms, links, and vocabulary that make texting look downright poetic.  What’s a ow.ly? Who’s RT? It looks foreign and daunting.  It’s as if there’s a huge “insider’s” club, and if you don’t get it, you feel awkward and alienated.

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Despite starting Blogger, Evan Williams rarely blogs. But yesterday, for the first time in several months, he decided to put the digital pen to the digital paper in order to layout his thoughts for Twitter’s new Retweet functionality. It’s a great view into the mindset behind what is already becoming a controversial change.

Why is there so much controversy? The answer is simple — literally. When Twitter began, you could do one thing on it: Send a blurb about what you were doing in 140 characters or less. This led to an immediate outcry from a wide range of people who thought that it was just about the dumbest service in the world. Others saw the potential behind such a simple service, precisely because it was so simple, and history has proven time and time again that sometimes simple ideas can explode into the biggest ones.

As Twitter grew in size, its simplicity remained largely intact. While just about everyone had ideas for what features Twitter should add, Twitter stayed the course in its core simple vision. Instead, it decided to rely on both its user base (@replies, RTs, etc) and third-party developers to add functionality. In fact, at points, Twitter began removing features (auto-refreshing, IMing) because it simply could not scale with so much load on its servers.

While some might view this as a failure to innovate. I would argue that this adherence to simplicity is what brought Twitter to where it is today. We live in an age where feature-bloat reigns supreme. Far too many startups replace the word “better” with “more.” That is to say, rather than perfecting the product they have and maintaining a singular focus on what they want to accomplish, they keep adding new features either because rivals are doing them, or because users are suggesting them. This is rarely a good idea. One great feature beats a dozen half-assed ones any day of the week. Keep it simple, stupid.

That’s why the past several weeks have been so interesting for Twitter. With its scaling problems seemingly now solved and with enough funding in the bank to buy a small European country, Twitter finally gained the flexibility to address a terrifying question: What’s next?

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Great analysis...nice to see a lengthy, well-thought-out post these days.

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings

. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir

, before mowing down his comrades in arms? On American soil? At the home base of the Combat Warrior Stress Reset program? Yes, that’s definitely one for the experts to parse.

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore

, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

When Major Nidal Malik Hasan began his killing spree, commanders immediately put the base into lock-down in accordance with military procedure. Movements in and out were severely restricted, as was the flow of information to the news media. Official statements from army spokesperson Lt. Gen. Robert Cone were the only way for reporters to find out what was happening, while other base personnel focused on treating the wounded, and ensuring the threat had been dealt with. Or at least that’s what the commanders thought was happening. In reality Ms Moore’s was tweeting minute-by-minute reports from inside the hospital where the wounded were being taken for treatment.

Reports like (in no particular order)…

[T]hey just brought a CART full of boxes w/transplant parts in them. Not good not good. #fthood

Ok we just saw a soldier on a stretcher w/2 armed guards walking by He didnt look like he was in great condition.

Maj Malik A Hassan. He shouldn’t have died. He should be in the worst suffering of his life. It’s too fair for him to just die. Bastard!

A FUCKING MAJOR? Are you kidding me? A MAJ! For those of ut hat don’t know, Army MAJ have pretty serious rank. Dick

Someone just started shooting in Commanche 4 which is on post housing. What are these people thinking?!?

The poor guy that got shot in the balls

 

That last twitpic link was particularly amazing: it showed a cameraphone image – of a wounded soldier arriving at the hospital on a gurney – taken by Moore from inside the hospital. Unsurprisingly, Moore’s coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets

alike, something that she actively encouraged by tweeting to friends that they should pass her phone number to the press so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires.

There was just one problem: Moore’s information was bullshit too....

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There are some serious moral issues here but realistically the author is suggesting this is a modern epidemic when in fact the egotism he describes is timeless - just now wearing a technologically modern face.