On the 8th of May, I was drawn to chatter about a new hangout for Indian tweeters: #indiatwits at irc.freenode.org. I decided to give it a shot and see what the fuss was all about. Things just snowballed from there (get the whole time line over at the wiki), and I spent a whole week with minimal Twitter activity; like one-to-two tweets a day minimal. In that time, I learnt a few things which interested me.
My view vs. Their view
When I asked that question out on Twitter, the reply I got was “for lifestreaming”. At first I thought that I used it for the same purpose, but as it turned out, I don’t. My usage of Twitter is to “think out loud”, to put it in the simplest terms. Whenever a thought strikes me that makes me think about how others perceive the same thing, I tweet it. May that be a news article, or a service feature. I (usually) get replies from people which either reinforces the thought, or gives me new angles to understand it better. Either way, it’s a positive interaction.
People use Twitter as an IM service (which is what the IRC channel was initially supposed to cut out), and even more use it as a tracker of their daily activity (“I’m going to bed”). Very few use it to actually enhance their ideas and thoughts. Twitter is perceived as the 2.0 version of IRC, a room full of people who are always listening and one return key away from a conversation. Hence, the moment we (about 7-8 regulars) switched to #indiatwits, our Twitter activity went down because we had our outlet — it didn’t matter it wasn’t Twitter, because that’s what Twitter is for us. Unconventional uses of services always make the creators happy, because it’s being used in ways they never thought it would. But this is one case where I think the founders will hope people use it only for conventional means. The heavy use is what cripples their servers. The service architecture was built to be used in a certain way, and is unfortunately a little too rigid to cushion itself against quakes.
Twitter isn’t new
Like I said, Twitter is the Web 2.0 version of IRC. Internet Relay Chat was the geekfest of the early Internet. I still can’t put a finger on the “why”, but the whole scriptable nature of the protocol left the creative opportunities limitless. The first thing I did after joining the channel was write a bot to handle administration. The geek/programmer in me immediately took over.
The same is how I see Twitter: A platform for endless creativity. It is amazing how much you can do with 140 character messages1, and how much scope it opens up in front of you. You just have to allow yourself to see it. You can write “bots” to perform special functions based on what you tweet, or integrate other services controlled by tweets (or direct messages if it’s private). Do you see where I’m going with this?
I hailed Twitter as the “new way to communicate” and stay in touch. Obviously I was wrong (with memory of my IRC days long gone), and seeing it in this new light again opens up a lot of avenues that I’d like to check out. But that’s only for a programmer. The normal person will still use Twitter for conversation, lifestreaming, or whatever they’ve been using it for all this time. It’s amazing how something that’s so old, can still change the way you look at the web and its possibilities.
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It should be pretty clear by now seeing the umpteen sites all popping up that augment Twitter with various features — from context to search. ↩
3 Comments
I so totally agree .. i use twitter to think out loud too and get the views of all the guys who are always listening.
Twitter is new for many people, simply because they are not geeks. IRC is unknown; you yourself mention the reason. It is the geekfest of Web 1.0 (duh!). That means only geeks are present. I never used an IRC before #indiatwits, because I honestly didn’t like the idea of a public chatroom. (Obviously enough, I have never used public chatrooms of Y! Messenger either). I was curious about the protocol, because of my interest in computer networking in general. But recently I had the idea that something like IRC might be good, because there are only geeks there and we will see some good brainstorming/debates.
Some bots are there in twitter, like the MyTwitter IM contact. They just need to open it up to us hackers.
@Mrinal: Now now … I’m sure girls are listening too :) If you see the people I follow, they’re all exceptional in their fields. I follow them because they tweet what they think too, and most of the time, their thoughts are interesting and something I want to look more into.
@Deepak: I was a little disappointed #indiatwits went down, but that’s probably because of the “geek” nature of the turnout. Not that we didn’t have some very interesting chatter in there, but we all have work and jobs and can’t really give time to something like that. Twitter is more unobtrusive that way, as in it stays out of your way if you want it to, and you can return without feeling that you’ve lost out on all the conversation.
Regarding Twitter Bots; It feels like scraping and archiving are ideas done to death. I still can’t see an elite use of a bot in Twitter, something that make us sit back and say, “Woah, I so didn’t think of that!”
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