Updated update: Welcome blog carnivalers: look for me and other local nerds in a story about Twitter in the AJC Living section early in the week of April 1.

So the first thing at the top of my Google Reader list over coffee this morning was a post by a self-titled Web Strategist that sings the praises of Twitter and relays the suggestion of another technophile that Twitter has eclipsed Dodgeball, ’cause Twitter is the more excellent and cool.

If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, these are both internet services with a particular focus on text messages from mobile phones that allow you to update all your friends on your current status by sending an SMS to a short code; that status update gets stored in your history on the website and redistributed to all your friends who have notifications turned on. Example: this evening I will probably send “@Vortex” to 36343 (DODGE), and the whopping three people I know on Dodgeball will get a message informing them of my whereabouts in case they want to pop by; on top of that, if any of my friends, or friends-of-friends, are within 10 blocks (a measurement that’s probably harder to enforce in Atlanta than Dodgeball’s primary market of NYC), I’ll get a notice back of who’s near me. (Dodgeball does not understand that I like to drink alone.) If you get alerted that your friend is at the Highlander but don’t know where that is, you can text “Highlander?” to DODGE and get an address sent back. If you check Dodgeball’s website when you get home, you can see which users are regular frequenters of your favorite venues (stalk, stalk, stalk). And you can also use Dodgeball for non-locational announcements, such as “! anyone want to see Zodiac tonight?” to stir interest among your friends.

You can do some of that with Twitter, too, but there isn’t quite the focus on locational content. Twitter doesn’t seem to care where you are; if I text that I’m at the Vortex to Twitter, it’s up to my friends to figure out where that is, and Twitter isn’t keeping track of who’s hanging out there on a regular basis. Twitter’s use is mostly of the “shout” variety: you can update your status (”bored at work;” “excited about this nerdy seminar at 10am;” “wondering WTF twitter is for;” “going to O’Charley’s for generic beer and food”) regardless of its utility and pester the bejeezus out of your friends with these informative tidbits.


This makes me scratch my head long and hard about why this web strategist refers to Twitter as “less invasive” and “disruptive” than old-school instant messaging, which he has eschewed for Twitter. Looking at the published archives of Twitter exchanges of the few people I know on there (or just the raging torrent of public updates on Twitter’s front page), it seems they are engaging in quite a bit of rambling conversation that would disrupt the crap out of my day, particularly if I have to thumb the response back on SMS — though it is also possible to interface with Twitter through an AIM or Gtalk client and keyboard, and if you want to indulge your stalkers you can paste a Widget (left, and often broken) into your blog sidebar so visitors know the last random brainfart that crossed your keypad. (You can also whip up your own sidebar widget (right) to display your Dodgeball feed, though, recipe by Widget Blog.)

At the technophile-friendly SXSW media conference, Twitter has created a very fancy custom group page, so anytime you walk by a plasma screen at the conference you can see who’s heading out for a burrito or still vomiting from last night’s tequila (and texting about it); but while the ability to create group conduits for updates like this might come in really handy for social activist organizations, the hoi polloi have to mashup their own with Yahoo Pipes. (Heh heh, “Pipes.”) Mostly, though, it just strikes me that the bulk of the information passing around on Twitter isn’t all that useful. Interesting among your friends if you’re all chatterboxes, sure, but I prefer to just get down to business: where’s the beer at, and how do I get there?

Twitter also adds a layer of complexity in connecting with your friends in the first place, lacking any kind of Search function that would let me put in my friends’ names or just browse for people near my ZIP code like Dodgeball does. I only became aware of the few people I know that use Twitter by guessing their most likely usernames (say, their blog handles or Flickr profiles), and then looking at their friends and so on. My only other option is to give Twitter the email address of people I want to “invite,” and I already know that my more non-technical group of friends hates the crap out of that. Only one of them bit into the Dodgeball offer.

However, it looks like the web geeks are right: Twitter is more the buzz right now, though I have no idea why. It’s amazing what a little critical mass and crowdthink can do to overrule functional utility. Does somebody want to try to convince me otherwise? I’ll be “@Vortex.”

Update 3/11/07 12:00pm

Holy cow does this continue to be the Dumbest Thing Evar1! I noticed a bunch of the public Twitter updates began with “@username,” and I assumed, naively, that this is how direct messages sent from one user to another (using the text convention “d username bla bla bla”) showed up on the recipient’s twitter page (publicly) while being transmitted to only their cellphone (privately). Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is crap. I am confronted yet again over my morning coffee with Twittery goodness, this time from Mashable, who points me to wikipreneur Ross Mayfield:

Anil Dash was spot-on to highlight “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect.” A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone. Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation. Further, when you see an to someone who isn’t in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined. This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption.

Oh my GOD do I have to get out of this business before I actually even get into it, because I’m clearly not drinking the Kool-Aid. This mutation of blather is a sign of success? I guess it is if you’re the marketer, for whom no publicity is bad publicity, and all you care about is how quickly a network might grow that can carry a message that can make you a tenth of a penny each time it annoys someone. But this kind of message bleed harkens back to the party line days of early Ma Bell telephony, when you might’ve picked up the phone to call Auntie Clara but found that you’re listening to Bo and Jimbob talk about the latest gangrened cow testicle. This morning my only Twitter friend messaged to one and all, “@shelbinator… Twitter working any better for you?” Perhaps this will stimulate curiosity among her more amazingly bored friends about this tech-inept shelbinator character and earn me some contacts I’m not sure I need, but for the rest I imagine this is just the next step in the evolution of the Chronic ReplyAll-er Person (CRAP). We’ve all gotten sucked into the crossfire of a ReplyAll discussion that only ends when someone gets fed up enough to ReplyAll “Stop hitting ReplyAll!” Now we can do it by text! Fortunately, Twitter gives us the option to selectively ignore whomever we went, begging the question why we added the chatty bastards in the first place or even signed up for Twitter.

Internationally recognized authority on social tools Stowe Boyd backs over the answer, I think:

We are made human by our connections with other humans, and the small gestures that make us believe that we matter, matter. The wave to someone across the foyer in the office building, a pat on a friend’s shoulder as you head out to lunch, or maybe just the awareness that Joe has come to work. Our sense of self is composed of ten thousand small ties to others, and that is what is making Twitter so hypotically organic to my life: it is playing on a small need that is underserved in our nomadic, online, and partitioned world. The need to wink, wave, or pass a one liner on the way to the bathroom, or to share a small insight, slight, or fight with one’s neighbors.

Except I’m far less romantic about the “maintaining human connections” vision and think it’s far, far more about making us believe that we matter, MATTER! I matter! Hey everyone, I’m on the crapper! Don’t you care??? Care that I am on the crapper, say it, say it now!!! [send]



Read more filed under Netroots