How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME - About

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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

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it makes a terrible first impression

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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

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Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying,

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It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

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Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com.

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threat that blogging posed to our attention span

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What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood?

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And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

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And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth.

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Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

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The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines.

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technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness":

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And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

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ambient awareness

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y following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routine

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ambient awareness

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"ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines.

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"ambient awareness"

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We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

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The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly.

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The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly

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But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

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the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

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In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education

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Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants.

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Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools.

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Hacking Education

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Hacking Education

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future of schools

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the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

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But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

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that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters

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the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter.

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t the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen

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In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke,

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#hackedu

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In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets.

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#hackedu

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A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference.

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Twittersphere

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adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration

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we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

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we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement.

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It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange.

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public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange.

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement

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a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange

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It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchang

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Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange.

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Injecting Twitter

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fundamentally changed the rules of engagement

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Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

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gave the event an afterlife on the Web

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This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring.

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How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - TIME

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