How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

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Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression

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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

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

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Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books

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With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most

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

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hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds

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Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness"

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"ambient awareness"

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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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Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

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there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years

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that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed

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the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought

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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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The Open Conversation

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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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daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education

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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.

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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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At first, all these tweets came from inside the room

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But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu

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

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

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When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued

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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

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And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web

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The Super-Fresh Web

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it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive

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Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.

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The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple

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Users publish tweets — those 140-character messages — from a computer or mobile device

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The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones

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As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers

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If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education

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user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page

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The average Twitter profile

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mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed

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a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities

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In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable

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anything that lives behind a UR

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But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong

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We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors

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via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation

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employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL

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This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.

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From Toasters to Microwaves

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Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching

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Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority

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That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web

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Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google

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John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web

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If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.

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Because Twitter's co-founders — Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey — are such a central-casting vision of start-up savvy

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much of the media interest in Twitter has focused on the company

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the much more significant point about the Twitter platform: the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.

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This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself.

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The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag" — #hackedu or #inauguration — was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol)

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The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year

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Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event — political debates or Lost episodes — has become a central part of the Twitter experience.

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One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties

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A service called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas, tracking references to flu and fever

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Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor.

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the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade.

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every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years:

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the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow

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News and opinion.

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a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network

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your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily

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The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It's as if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising.

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As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search

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looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google

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if you're looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.

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End-User Innovation

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Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood

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Social Operating System of the Internet

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Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers

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But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers

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ecosystem of new applications

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a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged

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A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast

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The history of the Web followed a similar pattern

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how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be

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Not all these developments will be entirely positive

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But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up

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Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity

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you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date

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Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives

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But there are hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value in these innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use.

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The speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation

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When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s

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America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii

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But what actually happened to American innovation during that period?

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if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years

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We tend to put the emphasis on the first kind of value creation because there are a small number of inventors who earn giant paydays from their mousetraps and thus become celebrities.

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MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one "end-user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs.

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Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter

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Think about the community invention of the @ reply

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It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium

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All of these adoptions create new kinds of value in the wider economy, and none of them actually originated at Twitter HQ

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You don't need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform.

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This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon

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application developers are releasing their latest builds

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we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

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

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