A recent post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems), makes some interesting observations and raises questions about the direction of Twitter based on the way Twitter staff use it:
We’ve examined the posting and following habits of people on the company’s staff and found that Twitter team members don’t follow very many other people, they aren’t following many of the top developers in their own community and they don’t even Tweet very much.
Marshall suggests — to perhaps over-simplify his thoughtful post — that these behaviors may not lead to decisions about Twitter functionality or the company’s business model that serve the interests of the greater Twitter community, or at least the community of dedicated Twitter users. He cites the recent blackeye over unilateral and unannounced changes to replies functionality (generally referred to as #fixreplies on Twitter) as one example of how different patterns of use might lead to design decisions that run counter to the wishes of the Twittosphere.
He also posted a response by Ev Williams, Twitter CEO, to an earlier draft of his post. Ev says, among other things, the following:
As you know, there are lots of different ways to use Twitter. Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. But the fact is, having more followers does not give you more time in the day (as much as I’d like to sell that). At a certain point, you’re not actually reading any more tweets by following more people — you’re just dipping into the stream somewhat randomly and missing a whole lot of what people say.That’s fine, but I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.
I follow almost 1,000 accounts. Among these, yes, there are celebrities (because I’m interested in how they’re using Twitter as well as what some of them have to say). There are Twitter developers. (You mentioned a few I don’t follow — there are several that I do.) I try to follow all Twitter employees, some potential employees, industry leaders, friends, family, and other people I care about, people (or organizations) who make me smarter, or people who make me laugh. It’s hard to know if this is the *right* set of accounts to follow. And I’m constantly curating my list. (In fact, I’m now following @atebits since you pointed it out. Account discovery is something we need to work a lot on.)
1,000 feels to me currently to be about the right number — but I still miss a lot. And other people (like Biz and other folks in the company) are comfortable with a much smaller number because they don’t want to miss as much.
Also, keep in mind that a following list does not reveal, necessarily, what one is paying attention to. Hundreds of people give me feedback by mentioning @ev — which I check many times a day. I also have saved searches for “twitter” and other related terms.
I agree with Ev that the asymmetric follow model has benefits, and the kneejerk ‘follow everyone back’ etiquette is unworkable and unscalable, especially for those with more than a few hundred followers. However, nearly everything else he says doesn’t add up for me.
Ev is right that we have inherent limits to the number of Tweets we can read (or the amount of time we want to spend in Twitter), and it is hard to know who to pay attention to, in Twitter and in the greater world. But following people is a primary mode of remaining connected with people on Twitter since this leads to their tweets appearing in front of you in a natural way. I mean, after all, that is the thing that makes it a streaming application: that is the core difference between Twitter and other communication tools.
While we can use Twitter to directly message someone — either publicly with @username or privately with d username — this shares more in common with email and instant messaging than the open stream of updates. It may well be that Ev’s mode of use relies more on @ and d messaging than following, and this may be true for the other Twitter staff: they see it more as a communication tool and less of a community.
The comment that Biz and other staffers follow a relatively small number of people — and not the leading external developers working on Twitter applications — because they don’t want to miss things seems completely backwards. Isn’t it obvious that you will miss what these other folks are saying if you don’t follow them? Unless the presumption is that someone will direct important things to your attention, explicitly, with an @ or d. Like email.
My take is that Ev and the Twitter staff are not using Twitter the way that I do, and the way that many other dedicated users do. I will call their style of use the Right Hand Path: its a tool to communicate with a small collection of co-workers, real-world and business contacts. The Left Hand Path, on the other hand, experiences Twitter as a large, sprawling and multidimensional social system, predicated on the open, asymmetric follower model and shaping a culture growing within it.
If they weren’t so central to the future of Twitter-as-a-tool I would say the Twitter guys (and The Right Hand Pathlings as a whole) don’t get Twitter.
Of course, the cultural relativism of our time will lean to agree with Ev, that there are a million different ways to use Twitter, and none of them is right. I agree in the small — meaning that no one should be compelled to use Twitter in a way that doesn’t make sense to them — but I disagree profoundly in the large, simply because I perceive that certain ways of using Twitter provide benefits that are difficult or maybe even impossible to gain elsewhere. This is partly due to functionality, but increasingly it is due to the community that has developed on the Twitter bedrock, and the culture emerging there.
And therein lies the root of a serious question, one significantly more problematic than the question of product direction that Marshall raises, although his concern overlaps with mine: as Twitter has become the bedrock underlying a growing and dynamic neighborhood of the web, how will it be governed?
From one point of view, Twitter is an application owned and operated by Ev and his colleagues, and our use of the app is controlled by the terms of the service agreement we all checked ‘OK’ to. From this point of view, they are free to do whatever they want, and we have the freedom to take a hike if we don’t like it. Or gripe, or write a petition. But otherwise we have little recourse if in fact Twitter Inc. decides to screw up replies (the #fixreplies mess has *not* been resolved yet, by the way), or makes other changes to functionality that degrades our experience.
It may seem that we have no grounds for any sort of complaint. After all, it can be argued that we aren’t paying anything, just freeloading on their largess, and they have borne all the costs.
On the other hand, their astronomical valuations — what they are using to pull in hefty amounts of paid-in capital from investors — is directly related to our participation. Without us using Twitter, by the millions, Twitter would just be a bunch of software cogs in a cardboard box. It is our animation that makes Twitter worth a billion dollars, not just the cleverness of the developers and the openess of their APIs.
To a great extent, Twitter is ours, like the air we breathe.
So, how will Twitter be governed? As a tool owned by a company that is owned by the inventors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalienable rights?
The entertainment business tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are artifacts produced by our culture, which we share with the artists, and the controls that the entertainment business thought they had — copyright and DRM — have failed with the digital and web revolution.
So, here we have the same revolution, come home again. Twitter’s world — its conventions, meaning and use — is our artifact: we have built it, 140 characters at a time, just as the Twitter developers have been building the platform underneath our feet. But it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes.
It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.
This post originally appeared at Stowe Boyd’s /Message.
I am completely and utterly baffled by the mindset of people who automatically follow back anyone who follows them. I am interested in a portion of the web, not the whole web. And I am interested in what some people say, not what all people say. Every time you follow someone who doesn't tweet about things that interest you, you add noise to your stream. I can only imagine that the streams of people who follow everyone back blindly must be pure noise. Every unthoughtful follow-back degrades your experience of Twitter.
When I look at the following/followees ratio of a lot of accounts, it becomes apparent that a LOT of people are following other back automatically, without checking first to see whether the person is worthy of being followed back. I find this amazing.
I think what the Twitter employees mean when they say that they'll miss stuff if they follow too many people is that you can only consume so much in a day, and you start missing posts by people who actually do interest you if you follow too many. Personally, I think things start getting difficult when you follow more than 300 people (I've broken that limit and kind of regret it.)
Less is more!
Scot, I completely agree. I need to slim down the 1,500+ folks I'm following to a more reasonable #, but haven't figured out a method yet. Still torn between the two paths Stowe outlined.