Secrets and Lies

On multiple blogs throughout the blogosphere documentation turns up about statistics about Twitter, like the average age of users, the gender of users and how many new users Twitter gets every single day. These blogs are never close to the truth, this data the blogs say they have is false and annoying, as other blogs believe and copy this data. Another annoying thing about false data is that some users who claim they know a lot about Twitter are being believed by others and subsequently quoted. I have met some of these users, like @vincente and @ikbendAF and the discussions we had made no sense. Early February 2009 I had a discussion with @vincente about the average age on Twitter and he argued most users were in their 40′s, due to some reaearch he read.[1] But to know the age of a user there has to be some information on the birthday in the bio section of the user profile, or any information on the website of a user. But @vincente based his assumptions also on the users he knows. In June 2009 I had another discussion with @ikbendAF about the average age of Twitter users, she also based her knowledge on blogs and she knows a lot of users in their 30′s. But to know a lot of users personally does not mean other age groups do not exist, or exist less. When information is not widely avaiable people should not speculate about this information as if it is true, they should chose their words more carefully. The only things that can be said about Twitter is about what is beind said on Twitter and the impact it has. An example of the impact Twitter has, shows in the fact that they decided to reschedule their downtime for maintenance due to the Iran elections, halfway June 2009.[2]

Another issue about users like @vincente, @ikbendAF, and also @2525, they distribute information which is not true but other people like to read about it. Once they have been asked to do their story on a certain issue, like the average age on twitter, they are being asked over and over again. In the Dutch media (newspapers like NRC next and television) the same users keep being asked to tell something about Twitter, while stories are not being verified because previous media have had interviews with them.

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[1] <http://twitter.com/vincente/statuses/1183759767>
[2] <http://blog.twitter.com/2009/06/down-time-rescheduled.html>

Applications in June

There are some things I have to say about the websites Hahlo and Twitstat Mobile. I tried both applications early June and both are two-way and difficult to send direct messages with. Direct messages can however be viewed. When I reply to a tweet with Hahlo, the particular tweet does not show what tweet I just replied to. In the timeline all @replies which have been written in another program have a button to show the tweet being replied to. Another annoying thing is that every few hours I have to login again. This application was built for a mobile device. Through their menu it is possible to sent a direct message to another user or even yourself.

Twitstat Mobile was built for a mobile phone too. The timeline shows multiple functions; muting users, showing a conversation between users, showing pictures from TwitPic and MobyPicture, add to favorites, retweet, and reply. There is a whole menu with settings and saved searches. This could be interesting on a mobile phone to use. The function to actually mute users you follow is similar to Twalala. The dialogue function in Twitstat Mobile does not show the conversation between users like Twalala does.

Since I last wrote about Twalala they have developed a new feature; in every @reply there is a new button in the lower right corner of the tweet with ‘Re:’ on it and when selected this shows the conversation between users. Another new feature is the link to the original tweet in a reply made with Twalala, they did not have this feature when I first used it. I tested this before and on June 20th again.

Some more Questions

To get to the next level in my thesis I need to use this blog to ask myself more (detailed) questions, about what experiences of me and other users mean, what could be said about connectivity between users and what are the changes in their communication? What dilemmas are there in following and what does this mean? Why do some users refuse to follow other users and what happens to their connection in real life?

An example of problems with privacy is a user who says on one medium that he or she is busy or has made arrangements with someone, while on another medium (like Twitter) the same user says something different. It is difficult to know who reads a certain tweet and how this will be interpreted. It means that users have to be careful about what they write online and should take other media in consideration. It also means that privacy matters. Some users have a private account and deliberately deny access to certain users, although the users who are being denied access could consider this as an offence because both users have friends in common. The use of Twitter looks so easy as an account is made within a minute but once a user realizes he or she has to be careful what to say. The main question of Twitter ‘what are you doing?’ gets another meaning this way and is not about a certain activity forces the user to think, what can they do online and what should they not do? Friendships can be made on Twitter but also be destroyed because of mis-interpreted words. This is one of the Twitter implications when a user thinks somebody else implies something.

Just to be clear, the stories above are not my own experiences but bits and pieces of stories of people I follow and hear about. Even though an account is set to private, @replies to a private user can still be read through the use of Twitter search or Google. Stories can be verified this way and could add to the image of that private user. Although twitter accounts can be set to private, Twitter is still not a Walled Garden, in the sense that outsiders can still read @replies from other users. Social network sites which are a Walled Garden are more difficult to read without being logged in than Twitter. [...]

Thoughts on Interactivity

Is there a difference between people chatting with each other online or offline? What about chatting on social network sites on one hand, and Twitter on the other hand? There has been a shift in ways people communicate with each other since the invention of the telephone, then the mobile phone and now microblogging. Kate Crawford argues that chatting on the phone was already annoying to outsiders to begin with, although most of these conversations took place in private homes. The use of mobile phones in public spaces was even more annoying, as others who had nothing to do with these conversations overheard them. The content of these conversations were small bits of intimacy and the sharing of everyday trivia.[1] Crawford asks herself what happens to our understanding of intimacy when users share their everyday trivia or insignificant content within public networked space. This question lies in the same line with the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ of Marshall McLuhan, when the use of the medium is more important then the actual content. The content itself might not even be true or confabulated when people lie about their whereabouts, which is getting harder with the iPhone that blogs where it is. Also on Twitter all content is out there for everyone to see in real time, there is an interaction between people, and people and technology. Interactivity could be formulated as “an expression of the extend that, in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later) transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges referred to even earlier transmissions”.[2]

When I start looking at interactivity from a different perspective, I want to analyze what interactivity means on Twitter, what is happening between users when they tweet and reply to each other or if the system and users communicate. Mark Meadows argues that interactivity consists of three principles;

• input/output
• inside/outside
• open/closed

Meadows argues that “input should create output and the output should create input. It’s the interaction cycle’s ability to add information that defines the interaction’s quality”.[3] There should not be much time between the input and the output argues Meadows, the user should have a clear sense of change. I am not only looking at the system here, which can be either the Twitter website or any external application that displays a fresh tweet, but instead interaction from one user to another. When a tweet is posted the user expects this tweet to be shown on the Twitter website or the external application, but the user does not expect an immediate reply from another user.

Furthermore Meadows argues interactivity can be broken down into four steps, which are;

• observation
• exploration
• modification
• reciprocal change

People are being pulled in and have to take into account the world around them, being a virtual environment or not, they need a kind of awareness before they can begin to explore their surroundings. After making an assessment the reader takes action and changes the system. In the last step the system tries to change the reader’s actions.[4] When I take this model back to Twitter the reader is a user who gets aware of the environment of Twitter, through any given user interface. The user makes use of the possibilities of the user interface by writing tweets for example. The user can subsequently change the settings of the used application and the system replies by action accordingly to these settings. One of the action of the system can be displaying multiple tweets by multiple users as the user in this example started to follow lots of other users.  All the information of the followed users together gives an insight in their lives, giving some information of intimacy of their lives. Although there is not much left of any intimacy when this information shows up in a public timeline.

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[1] Crawford, Kate. ‘These Foolish Things. On Intimicy and Insignificance in Mobile Media’. in: Goggin, Larissa Hjorth. Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Taylor & Francis, 2008: 251.

[2] Rafaeli, S. (1988) ‘Interactivity: From New Media to Communication’, in R.P. Hawkins, J.M. Wiemann and S. Pingree (eds) Advancing Communication Science: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Process, pp. 110-34. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. in: Jacobson, Daphne. ‘Verhagen 2.0. De rol van Twitter in het contact met Maxime Verhagen en zijn achterban’. Unpublished paper, 2009.

[3] Meadows, Mark S. Pause & Effect: the Art of Interactive Narrative. New Riders, Indianapolis: 2003: 39.

[4] Meadows, Mark S. Pause & Effect: the Art of Interactive Narrative. New Riders, Indianapolis: 2003: 44.

Funny Example

Last weekend it was raining and I though it was a great day to put together some Ikea boxes and wondered if any other Twitter user came up with the same idea at exact the same moment. When I looked for only the word ‘Ikea’ I only got tweets from the last minutes, so Ikea surely was a hot topic that sunday! When I look for ‘dozen’ (Dutch for boxes) I get tweets with the English word dozen so I had to look for ‘boxes’ and found someone who wrote about Ikea boxes too;

@themurmish Ah, the smell of freshly opened IKEA boxes… 1:43 AM Jun 7th from web

Then I asked if he was cynical about this and he replied he could not wait for the smell to be out of his apartment. Not much later he replied a friend and him were writing a twesis too so we should stay in touch. This information was not on Twitter and I only found him because of Ikea boxes, funny how things go on Twitter.

#FollowFriday

One of the trending topics on Twitter is #followfriday and if you do not know what it is it is not easy to find out. The same goes for more than just this hashtag. The idea behind #followfriday is to promote users you follow and like so your followers can check them out and follow them too. Today I was suggested twice, just like last week;

Not too long after that I got a new follower, although I do not know if my latest follower follows me because of #followfriday I can ask him. I could however consider #followfriday as spam if many users I follow just post lists of usernames, some are really enthousiastic about it. On the other hand, users atart to unfollow people on monday, using #unfollow monday as an excuse.

Replies Today

This morning was a morning full of @replies;

Only on this particular screenshot you can only see half conversations, so what is the added value to an outsider?

In Real Life

Some questions I need to ask myself in order to structure my thesis chapter about my experience with Twitter. I have read the research of Edward Mischaud and consider the questions he asked some selected users in a questionaire. I will ask myself the same questions or similar questions;

How many users I follow do I know in real life?

At this moment I know 59 out of the 99 friends I follow today (June 4th). Four are virtual people (@buurvrouw, @TheMime, @NichtjeChelsey and @juffrouwjannie), two are cats (@stickiepoes and @timmedepim) and one is myself (@twesis). By knowing I mean I have met them in real lige at least once, like a Twitter meeting. Most of them are friends and classmates. The users I do not know are interesting or inspiring  people or organisations or they have something to do with my research subjects

Recommended Applications

Although there are a lot of Twitter applications out there Twitter has a list of favorite applications and warns for other applications, for they could be spam. This Twitterpage links to a list of applications on the Twitter Fan Wiki that I used to write about for my thesis chapter about applications. I wonder why Twitter would have favorite applications and links to a site that any user can modify? Are there two kind of applications, safe and unsafe? Do unsafe applications cause severe spam? Only one application is connected to Twitter, it is called Widget and can be connected to Myspace, Facebook, Typepad or Blogger. So this is more an extension of Twitter than just another application to tweet with.

I have had my share of external Twitter applications lately and I am still thinking about categories for them. I am curious if there are any malicious applications and I would like to test them, although not with my regular Twitter account! A better solution would be looking for stories about these applications. But maybe they have already been banned or blocked from the Twitter API. I should create a list of applications that I already used, the platform they function on and if they are one-way or two-way applications. And There are still some applications I want to use, although this is not necessary for my thesis.

More Coffee Tweet-ups

Last week I finally had an appointment with @ikbendAF who calls herself the (Dutch) Twitter ambassador. Because I call myself a (Dutch) Twitter specialist we had to schedule a meeting one on one for coffee. We first met on the Twestival where a friend of hers got a message that I logged in on Brightkite and then they started looking for me. Not too long after we met again in a bar in the Jordaan and she started talking about the photo book she is writing about Twitter. Here we agreed to meet for coffee and talked about twitter and following and tweet-ups and her book and my thesis. Because of mutual friends we also met at two parties the other week whit other tweeple. Some parties can inadvertently turn into a tweet-up. It is great to meet someone who actually knows a lot about Twitter and excange useful links.

Another tweet-up I planned on January 14th was a special coffee meeting for a few friends for which I used twtvite.com. I just bought a lattemento online, a device that makes devine frothed milk foam. Only two tweeple showed up but is was a nice social experiment. In a few days I will have another coffee meeting about croissants, because lately a lot of users I follow are mentioning them. For this meet-up I didn’t invite friends only so I wait and see who will turn up. I probably have to put more effort in tweet-ups, because I do not get much response so far. Maybe I should just spam my followers more.