Oct 31, 2008 Posted by Herko on Oct 31, 2008 in All things Web, Personal notes | 0 comments

The sense and nonsense of Twitter

You prob­a­bly know about Twit­ter, the so-called microblog­ging net­work. If you haven’t heard about it, don’t worry, you’re not miss­ing some­thing vital –I think. But I’m defi­nately not sure, and that is basi­cally what this post is about.

I joined Twit­ter on july 18 2008, so at the writ­ing of this post, I’ve tweeted for 3 months. I joined because I wanted to try out the pop­u­lar Twit­terific app for my iPhone 3G. I started fol­low­ing a few peo­ple I know of, as I had no idea which ones of my friends were a mem­ber of Twit­ter. I fol­lowed the tweets made by peo­ple like Molly Holtzschlag, Dan Ceder­holm, Jef­frey Zeld­man, Jeremy Keith, Veerle Pieters, Dan Rubin, Derek Feath­er­stone. Peo­ple who I have never met, but whose work I admire.

Why do these peo­ple tweet?

Then their tweets started com­ing in. I quickly found that they didn’t just tweet about their pro­fes­sional thoughts and actions, like they do on their pub­lic weblogs and in arti­cles like on A List Apart. They tweeted about per­sonal stuff like what they’re eat­ing and where, and even with whom. And their ill­nesses, hopes, dreams, desires, frus­tra­tions –very per­sonal stuff by and large.

I joined in myself, fol­low­ing their exam­ple. I tweet about my itin­er­ary, about my frus­tra­tions, about my loca­tion and experiences.

But I have no clue why I do this. Or why those peo­ple I con­sider to be sort of my heroes do this. But we all do, and it feels good.

What is privacy?

What bugs me is that I don’t know why these peo­ple, who –as lead­ing minds of the web com­mu­nity have a very clear grasp of the inter­net– would so will­ingly give up part of their pri­vacy with no appar­ent social or other gain. It’s defi­nately not exhi­bi­tion­ism, and they also don’t do it to get more friends or expand their social net­works –they’re prob­a­bly at the top of that pyra­mid already.
Is it then that they sub­con­ciously grasp that the notion of a pri­vate life is rad­i­cally chang­ing in todays net­worked and information-rich soci­ety? With pro­files, net­works, arti­cles, accounts, events, images and sounds spread every­where, detail­ing expe­ri­ence, knowl­edge, desires, inter­ests, habits and friends, what does pri­vacy really mean?

I sus­pect that there is a shift in the privacy-mindset, from access to pri­vate per­sonal infor­ma­tion, to con­trol over per­sonal infor­ma­tion. The fact that Tweeps con­trol what they tweet about –but by doing this in the pub­lic domain, not con­trol­ling who has access to this infor­ma­tion– pro­vides enough of a feel­ing of secu­rity that makes up for the loss of per­cieved pri­vacy. Fol­low­ing this assump­tion, this also means that twit­ter­ing about per­sonal events is not for everyone.

This still doesn’t answer why they –or I myself for that mat­ter– use Twit­ter. There are some prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits, but not all my tweets are geared towards those pur­poses. Let met explain a bit thru an anecdote.

Anec­dote

The past 3 days I attended the Inter­na­tional Seman­tic Web Con­fer­ence 2008 in Karl­sruhe, Ger­many (more posts about that will fol­low!) I went all alone, to a con­fer­ence about a sub­ject I know very lit­tle about, with a very sci­en­tific pro­gramme. In short, I felt lost even before I arrived.
There­fore, I reg­is­tered at the ISWC2008 crowd­vine net­work, hop­ing to find some peo­ple who were will­ing to help me chart through these unknown waters. But none of the other mem­bers were famil­iar to me –except a few of the gurus like Frank van Harme­len.
A pro­fes­sional assess­ment I did a year ago con­cluded that I’m not suited for what they called cold acqui­si­tion. Mak­ing first con­tact, so to speak. So I knew this would be a chal­lenge for me. And then I found that the crowd­vine site has a Twit­ter sec­tion. You could find which mem­bers had added their Twit­ter ID in their pro­file. Think­ing this would be a good exper­i­ment, I clicked on ‘fol­low’ for every­one I saw.
The days before the con­fer­ence slowly filled with tweets from peo­ple I had never met, but hoped to meet soon. And I eas­ily made First Con­tact (I can be charm­ing if I want ). So I made some new online friends, hop­ing I could con­vert them to real life aquain­t­ences at least. And that they’d help me get my bear­ings dur­ing the conference.

The first day of the con­fer­ence started off as I expected: I knew no-one in a place where every­one seemed to know every­one else. Yes, the seman­tic web com­mu­nity is close-knit. Dur­ing the whole morn­ing I was unable to make First Con­tact. Then, dur­ing the after­noon ses­sion, I found that one of my Twit­ter friends was in the same room, and I let him know I was there too. After the ses­sion we met up, and he intro­duced me to some other peo­ple, and that got the ball rolling. In the end I met many many peo­ple, and the con­fer­ence was a big succes.

But it wouldn’t have been if I didn’t have done the Twit­ter experiment.

Ok, that sounds sad, I know. But it did help me make con­tact to get the ball rolling. Espe­cially in a semi-closed com­mu­nity on a sub­ject that is very new to me (there’s not much I can do for them), this worked very well!

One of the main rea­sons is that by using Twit­ter the First Con­tact wasn’t about the seman­tic web, but more personal.

So, I don’t have a com­plete ver­dict yet, but in the mean­time, Twit­ter is addictive!

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