Thoughts on Twitter

I've been thinking about why Twitter is successful. And why some other services that attempted to compete with Twitter by offering "improved" features, like Jaiku, were not. Twitter had the first mover advantage. In the last month or so the buzz about Twitter has spread to average people through use on cable television networks and by cases where people reported on news events through Twitter by cell phone. Those are well and good, but there are other reasons for Twitter's success.

One is the simplicity of its presentation. The real estate devoted to profile and "friends" or user to user relationships is compact. The profile is brief and concise. The friends (following) and followers are represented by badge-like elements showing the number of following and follower users, with the numbers linked to listings. The followers are displayed as compactly as possible, represented by tiny icons arranged in rows and columns. The various kinds of posts are filtered by clicking a navigation menu item in the sidebar.

Twitter reverses the idea of a profile. The content is the profile and the profile becomes background to the content. When someone visits a person's Twitter page, they want to read the latest posts. The user goes straight to the posts. Most sites make you go to a profile and then to the content. If they like the content and want to know something more about who is posting, they can look at the little profile box containing the name and brief bio or click the link to visit their website. This difference contributes significantly to the usability and attractiveness of the site compared to other social networking sites. Twitter is a tool, not a "Swiss army knife" like Facebook, so it can take this approach. It should be a lesson to any designer or developer, even of more complex, layered sites.

The typical jumble of posts in the Twitter message stream explains why the developers of competing sites saw room for improvement. When replies enter into the message stream, it becomes a single-threaded discussion. It seems reasonable to let users reply directly to a message, creating a threaded discussion. Twitter might look similar to Facebook's Wall, where certain posts may have comments posted to them, creating a limited kind of threaded discussion. I believe this misunderstands how people use Twitter and why they use it. If Twitter users were looking for a simple, online threaded discussion forum, there are plenty of free microforum services to be found.

I believe Twitter users do not want a threaded discussion because they value the immediacy of tweets. There may be a way to capture conversations going between cell phone users in an intuitive and simple way, but I'm not sure what that is. Activity posts, like "What is Steve doing now?" are unlikely to elicit conversation, but as I've seen on Facebook, they sometimes do burst into conversation. I believe friends use the posting of completely uninteresting and unimportant information about their activities as a way to touch base, through a brief conversation. It's like talking about the weather. It may be possible, if the interface is sufficiently transparent, to support threaded discussions. Facebook does a good job implementing the thread as a collapsible series of posts below the post.

One thing in passing, it is clever how Twitter enables linking to other user's Twitter pages through a Wiki-like notation for Twitter-name on replies (using the @ symbol, @twittername). It helps solidify the username as not just a name used for authentication, but as a symbol representing a person. In a way, wikis have had this from the beginning, since it was traditional to create a page using your own name, which could be linked to in "talk page" discussions, and the like.