we humans like being altruistic

I would amend this statement to “we humans have a need to be relevant” – relevant to other humans. altruism is a bi-product of this.

i use twitter to serve as a journal of my life and my relationships as well as my social bookmarking tool (esp when i'm on my mobile device).

Add teleconferences and weekly status reports to your list.

Great post.
I would add at least one characteristic that is IMHO *key* to the importance of Twitter :
the “namespace” is integrated.
By that, I mean that you can “refer” to people by a unique 'handle' (their @name), which has its own features (unicity, notification, soon Twitter connect, etc.)
We grow accustomed to this… but do we fully realize that Facebook (and most other discussion tools) lack this very basic tenet of conversation ? (e.g. when I mention someone in a Facebook status, it is not 'tokenized' ; or let me mention @oprah here, she will likely never know).
See my point ?
@Roald

I think this discussion in a sense, begins at the wrong place, assessing twitter as an innovation, and accepting its surface value proposition at face value.

Social media in a sense aren't a competing set of technologies in an “attention” market, but a co-evolving ecosystem (autopoeisis as it is known). So the right first question, IMO, is “What IS Twitter within the complete co-evolving ecosystem?”

I found that treating it as the “Last page of Web 2.0″ leads to some interesting thoughts on what Twitter actually is. My rather involved (and somewhat metaphysical… there is a yin-yang relationship with Google search involved) is in this piece on the Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Really nice post. I think a lot of people are trying to understanding what is different about Twitter and this is a great reference, thanks (and thanks to your students!)

#13 Networking
#14 Sharing links (distinct from breaking news)

You have hyperlinked as an attribute on the top list but I think sharing links deserves to go on the bottom list too. Once a tweet has a link it becomes something different. It uses Twitter as a pipe to advertise/promote/recommend/share/spread some other piece of content that we used to do with email just about any other type of sharing or advertising or referral.

#15 Does live-tweeting count as broadcasting live events or as meeting notes if it's something more mundane?

It feels a little weak but I'm not sure it's the same as breaking news because an event could have niche appeal and live-tweeting it is a continuous activity for the duration (and could also be collaborative with hashtags) as opposed to pushing out one headline or photo of something breaking.

I think I have a problem with the GM story. “Real time feedback” is something that’s been touted in the GM story as well as in the New York Times, but I think it only works for celebrity cases — it’s not scalable.

There seems to be a limit of followers that one person can reasonably have. Some people top out in the 100s, others in the 200s or even 300s, but very few follow more people than that (unless they follow everybody who follows them, but I think the assumption that they’re not *actually* reading all the people they follow is fair).

You, however, have about 3,000 followers. 16 responses is a 0.5% hit rate. If I tweet a random question with the same success, my expected value is less than one response from my ~150 followers. Even assuming that following 200 people is reasonable (for me, it’s not), the average Twitterer couldn’t expect more than about one response per question. Certainly not enough for crowd-sourcing and often resulting in no response at all.

I think Twitter’s got value, but I believe real-time feedback from your followers is just for the celebs.

Great observation about Twitter’s ability to get answers to questions when you need them. I think in that regard it emphasises that aspect of human nature.

I’m with philipbaker on his #13 suggestion of networking – I think Twitter allows us to establish those all important weak ties

I’d also add back channel to the list (I can’t see it around, possibly I’ve missed something). Where we used to whisper our thoughts about a presentation to the person next to us as a mode of reflection, we now do it for our networks to see and starting dialogue around it. I guess that’s pretty similar to philipbaker’s live tweeting, just a bit more depth.

Professor … the real change for business is not via Twitter, but micro-blogging in private corporate networks using tools such as Yammer. I’ve been amazed with the positive utility of internal micro-blogging. One eliminates the noise, and finds razor sharp business focus.

Andrew, this is an excellent article. We always did these things and now we’re doing the same with twitter in an integrated interface, with the addition of a concept called micro-blogging.

Since enterprise 2.0, benefits of using a set of technologies are only obtained by using them in a manner that brings benefit. Like collaborative learning in workplaces would bring value and profits if people use it the right way after realizing its role clearly. So maybe use cases of twitter just need to evolve and we need to find the best ways to integrate technologies to give us solutions that will benefit our organization. It will probably benefit to have more localized models based on the needs of an organization. Just my thoughts and this gives me a lot of food for thought right now.

Thanks for sharing this.

Sreya

I agree with SteveD503 – I have about 200 followers and I have yet to get anyone I do not personally know to answer a general question I pose to Twitter.

#17: Social Agent

For a powerful example of “Twitter’s not a substitute for anything we used to do. It’s a combination of about 17 things we used to do,” look at Pistachio + Tipjoy + twestival.com + charity : water.

On the altruistic point, I thought this story by David Pogue was similar to the one about your rental car, and also to SteveD503′s point:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/if-you-tweet-it-they-will-come/#more-911

As Twitter continues to grow, I think it will be interesting to see whether these stories become more or less common. There’s something very deliberate about responding to Tweets in situations like this. If you’re on Twitter as a mass marketer, you’re likely following so many people that a single tweet asking for help may get lost in the mix. But if you’re using the service to truly follow people that interest you, it does make it easier to be a good neighbor because it lower the barriers to entry into a new community… one that may have previously been closed to you — whether that’s because it was geographically too distant or you didn’t actually go to HBS and take MIA…

You’ve missed a couple of points here I think. (Not a criticism, this is a Business blog and staying on topic is generally a good idea.) But not everything is about utility or ‘value’. I really use twitter because its fun! I can and do get utility from twitter – some of it ‘

Your list of things we used to do gets far more interesting if we broaden to to more than activities that involve technology or work? What about chat over the back fence? Talk to someone on the bus? Have a cup of tea with a neighbor? Flirt with a cute girl/boy? Phone your Mum?

The ‘characteristics’ you identify are spot on. The real question is what kind of social space do they create and how does it affect the way people relate to each other. For example how much ‘safer’ is Twitter than email, facebook, or talking to the guy next to you on the bus? Is ‘rejection’ (a natural part of human social dynamics) less painful on Twitter? Are you less subject to being judged by others when everything is in concise little bits. Is familiarity more or less likely to lead to friendship when it grows out of lots of little interactions where no one interaction decides the matter, and isn’t the point anyway like it is in a job interview or on a date? They say people form their impressions of others in the first 30 seconds – does Twitter circumvent that and give people a chance to interact with those they would normally dismiss?

Personally I think one of the real big ‘differences’ with Twitter is that it really is a place where people can ‘talk to strangers’ and that’s just OK. And there is a tacit social contract on Twitter that its OK to eavesdrop.

Twitter’s success is really to do with the social importance of trivia, the fact that we actually evolved to live in societies without strangers but we actually live in societies where nearly everyone is, and mostly because its fun.

My wife's comcast email went down a few weekends ago.

Instead of searching using Google or checking cnn, I did a Twitter search on comcast and immediately found out what was going on and general status.

One of the issues in all of the social media constructs, including Twitter, is how we decide on intermediary trust. Historically we would look to intermediaries such as the New York Times or major networks, then we moved to CNN, then to places like the Daily Kos and Drudge Report, and more recently to Wikipedia, and Twitter (perhaps in particular those we follow?).

When trolling the Twitter stream it is interesting to try and figure out what we trust and what we don't, and why.

Whether or not I'd “walk away” depends heavily what the next frictionless medium is out there. Twitter's low barrier to entry drove a lot of adoption and gave me access to a wide range of ideas, and then tools like TweetDeck let me manage the influx of information effectively. I'd give up Twitter only if something came along that met both needs — and somehow, FriendFeed isn't working for me yet.

Crimson Hexagon is doing some interesting mining of the Twitter data to see where opinion is falling out on specific issues (Michael Phelps is a good example). I'm with the NYT on this — the ability to pull insights from all the Tweets is the next big thing.

@perryhewitt

Twitter is big brother's pilot program. And I'm sad to say that I'm utterly addicted to it.

As usual, enjoyed reading your latest thoughts. I was particularly interested in your final thought; “not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality.” This is a recurring theme in commentary re the internet. Whereas the more utopian inclined suggest that this is the start of a whole new way of human behavior (I wish but don’t think I will see that revolution in my lifetime) I think the more interesting question is to ask under what conditions does this behavior occur. I think “frictionless” is key, i.e. the cost of altrusim must be lower than the perceived advantage (is it still altrusim at that point?). I think cultural values can affect the perception of benefit (try throwing trash on the street in Zurich or Singapore). In his book, How to Change The World (Oxford University Press), David Bornstein points to the lower transaction costs of social organization one of the main reasons for the massive increase (check the statistics in the introduction – unbelievable) in citizen organizations over the last 10 years. Once we have identified the conditions necessary for “scalable altrusim” then I think we have something really powerful – where can we aim this weapon? How do we use it to solve major issues facing the human race – health (pandemic management comes to mind – any more?), education, corruption, violence? These thoughts get me very excited.

Hey, Andy. One of the things that ought to be on your list of 17 things is “Flexing our egos.” I’ve discovered that for a great many people, whether they admit it or not (or realize it or not), Twitter is an avenue for them to massage their egos by showing how informative or knowledgeable they can be. It’s the same with any cocktail hour conversation, you get the set of people who feel they have to show how knowledgeable they are on a topic and keep pumping the info, often multiple times. I see a lot of multiple posts from people that provide only incremental advances on a particular topic, and of course there are those who just post a whole lot in one day (talk about “what else did you used to do”; how do these people find time to get other things done?) And then there are those people who jump on Twitter early in the morning and stay on it well into the evening, as if leaving Twitter somehow messages to others that you’re not dedicated, cool, or knowledgeable. So just by dint of the time they spend on it, I feel there’s a bit of ego massaging going on. And of course, you get a lot of people who talk incessently about Twitter itself (not referring to you (!), and besides, you have to, your a professor of Web 2.0 technologies!), which to me is like talking at a cocktail reception about your car or your condo or whatever is the coolest “thing” at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I like Twitter (it took some convincing) and I’ve learned a lot from tweeters, but I’ve definitely noticed what seems to be ego flexing, or at least attention grabbing, going on.
As far as staying or walking away, I agree with a colleague of mine who says that Twitter itself may suffer the “fad” fate, but this kind of asynchronous open community social networking is here to stay and evolve for the better. Twitter’s downfall for me will be that I just don’t have the time to read, or even sift through, all the tweets.

Great insight about the 0.5% hit rate. That's a pretty standard click-thru on banner ads, too. I wonder if it's a golden ratio of the internet: “1 out of 200 people will respond to any call to action”.

I like the notion that a prime source of Twitter's value is trivia. It struck me that the origin of the term “trivia” is relevant: In Rome, where three roads met, a number of signs would be posted sharing information. Some info was relevant, some wasn't. You'd scan the info, takeaway what was meaningful to you, and move on.

Seems similar to how many people use Twitter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivia#Etymology

How interesting that something so seemingly simple can yield relative complexity upon analysis. Great post and helps me further crystallise my thoughts on Twitter.

I'm definitely in the “continue” camp btw.

Nah. I have a twitter account set to private with about 160 followers and someone whom I’ve never met and previously didn’t know personally is now loaning me his turntables for my party (and has been added to the roster of DJs) after I asked the twitterverse where I could rent or borrow 1s & 2s. That’s just an example. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from relative strangers and met new people through twitter.

How interesting that something so seemingly simple can be so complex once one starts to dig. Great post which helped further crystallise my thoughts on Twitter.
Btw, I’m definitely in the “continue camp”.

Andrew – This is a great analysis and I'm thrilled that HBS is grappling with this phenomenon in real time (Twitter's mainstream popularity is really only 4-6 months old). My personal suggestion of another one to add to your list is that Twitter is a mechanism to mini-blog. I blog every few weeks when I have a meaty topic, but I enjoy using Twitter to share quick bursts of opinions. I confess to being a Twitter skeptic at first, but am now a convert.

I was very surprised to see the low rate of micro-blogging in my 2008 Global Intranet Strategies survey. I have just done a post referring to your post here, Andrew, where I feel you make a strong case (whether you intended to or not) for intranet managers to get their heads around micro-blogging.
I consider your post here to be a “must read” for all intranet managers: http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2009/04/a-must-read-for-intranet-managers-twitter-17-things.html

This is a great post, and I like that it draws the focus toward the ways twitter enables people to do what they would be doing anyway. People don’t fundamentally change, but they do make different choices based on how well a solution enables them to achieve their original goals.

To me, the question is not whether Twitter will die down, but whether there are other options to easily connect with others. The students who felt that they would walk away after the class was over probably have enough seemless, relevant relationships in their lives. I would be interested to know if this is true. In essence, do they have a better way to achieve their original goals?

Hmmm, i find that Twitter gives out a signal to the world about your own presence in what really is quite a simple, frictionless way. Then everything else comes along with it like the power to contribute, connect, be informed and a kind of easily reviewable log of your own life as well – but with reference not just to time and event but to vis-a-vis set of people as well.

Great piece as always, Prof!

Hi Andrew, I find Twitter allows me to access people who are considered thought leaders in thier field (like yourself), that I would not normally have met personally, nor have access to in other ways. I find people are less likely to accept Facebook 'Friends' or LinkedIn 'Connections' from complete strangers. (At least this is what I do).

#18 Twitter Spam (unfortunate consequence of ease of access)

@steven_cornish

Good analysis and summary, Andrew. Thanks for sharing it with us.

I spoke at length today with a friend who just joined Twitter, mainly because as a small business owner, he kept hearing it “would be good for business.” He said to me, “I still don't get what it's all about.” I told him that I considered Twitter to be a technology vehicle for any individual's interests. If you're a teenager obsessed with rumors and gossip, that's what you'll use Twitter for. If you're passionate about environmental legislation, that's what you'll use Twitter for. If you're focused on the market for wireless technologies, that's what you'll use Twitter for.

Essentially no different than the telephone, Internet or email.

Practically speaking, as the head of a company that develops and manages conferences, events and exhibitions, I find Twitter extremely helpful for communicating with a team of individuals working together to execute a complex event. It can save hours if used well. And we continue to discover more about Twitter and its broad range of applications.

I wouldn't have been able to follow your article if I had not taken the plunge and decided to start twittering about a week ago. I have 32 followers. Perplexing, actually.
My purpose in joining on was to wrap my head around the phenomenon, not get left behind ( as I seem to have been with the whole facebook thing which is the life line of my 26, 25 2nd 24 year olds) and — honestly …3rd reason to twitter… to create traffic in the direction of a book I am about to release.
Most interesting to note is that I discovered ( someone explain if they can?) that unlike all of my other twitter followers/followees , I have direct message capability to both Barack Obama and Stephen Harper. How did that happen? Am I missing an option feature – can everyone establish direct messaging with everyone? I am certain I am not that special.
Anyway, my book is about lead exposure ( Called Lead Babies – http://www.nomoreleadbabies.com) and since Obama is all about the lead issue – and harper needs to be — works for me.
As for the future of twitter … I think it has mostly commercial appeal in the long run. I hope I can learn how to leash its full power to drive traffic to my site. I think the a percentage of users will dabble in the abstract messaging aspect – but the majority will be commercially motivated.
Your story about your rental car is great though! Doesn't mean that people with a purpose other than connecting socially, won't take a moment to also be altruistic.
Nice article. Thanks.
Sandra Cottingham, Vancouver, Canada

….and in the six days since Oprah had 620,439 followers! Great blog post! I don't Twitter will fade out.. I don't think its fully mainstream here in the UK at least so there is still huge place for growth!

I refer to your interesting post and related it to Twibe groups in my blog http://bit.ly/Aquei.
It would be interesting to hear what you (and your class) think about Twibe groups and how they impact (enrich?) Twitter.

I´m shocked to see how fast this social groups can grow and the importance that people gives to such way of communicating. Great topic.

CASUS TELEFON

TELEFON D?NLEME

D?NLEME C?HAZI

It is amazing how quickly social media is changing everything. I'm a (relatively) young 26 year old and I am feeling left behind with twitter!

I am part of the 50% who will remain on Twitter until something better comes along. As of right now, I can communicate with friends/strangers, get product updates, post pictures, and even go on a “flash drive hunt” around LA (markhoppus of Blink 182) all from one page. This by far trumps the multi-clicking necessary on Facebook and Myspace. Let's face it, with the number of great sites popping up increases every day, who has the time for more than one click on any site?

Great post. I especially found it interesting. For this matter, once I discussed with one of my friends, not only about the content you talked about, but also to how to improve and develop, but no results. So I am deeply moved by what you said today.

A bit late… Really nice post! My ideas for your list: expertise network and selling products.

Did you know that more than 50% of twitter users newer twitted? That 70% have no followers. It's more a toy and I think that in two or three years nobody will care about twittering.

D.G.

Twitter is more like just *another* thing to do. It will eventually find its place amongst all the others 'things to do'.
Fundamentally, I think it does nothing differently but it's a shorter and faster version of everything else. It's blogging for the texters. It ADD inducing. How much shorter can our attention span get?
I can't tweet yet while walking around in my forest (no coverage whatsoever!) and I kind of like it that way. There will be a revolution, but it won't be twitter – it will be back to nature, people meeting people again and having conversations. Remember those?

I think one of the biggest contributing factors to how long a person uses Twitter is their personality. A simple example is that a person who is likely to “stick to something” is likely to use Twitter longer than someone who is more likely to “move on” as something doesn't seem to serve them. There is also a characteristic of how “connected” one needs to be to feel comfortable. Some people crave instantaneous feedback from others to know they're “not alone”, and some are solitary by nature and actually enjoy a sense of isolation. Another factor is how much benefit a person perceives from using Twitter. Your car ingnition example is a very obvious one, but ones personality will dictate what value Twitter has to them, based on the relationship they have with the people they follow or are following.

Personally, I joined twitter and was posting about 1 tweet a day for about a week or two. After that, I checked it once or twice, and it's now been a few months since I've logged on. (I'm the type that “moves on”.) I will probably become more active on twitter once I get my new cell phone with social networking capability.

I think one of the biggest contributing factors to how long a person uses Twitter is their personality. A simple example is that a person who is likely to “stick to something” is likely to use Twitter longer than someone who is more likely to “move on” as something doesn't seem to serve them. There is also a characteristic of how “connected” one needs to be to feel comfortable. Some people crave instantaneous feedback from others to know they're “not alone”, and some are solitary by nature and actually enjoy a sense of isolation. Another factor is how much benefit a person perceives from using Twitter. Your car ingnition example is a very obvious one, but ones personality will dictate what value Twitter has to them, based on the relationship they have with the people they follow or are following.

Personally, I joined twitter and was posting about 1 tweet a day for about a week or two. After that, I checked it once or twice, and it's now been a few months since I've logged on. (I'm the type that “moves on”.) I will probably become more active on twitter once I get my new cell phone with social networking capability.

When Twitter first appeared I didn´t take it serious and thought ‘yet another trend I don´t like’ but after twitter grows and grows I think it is used by so many different people that it will stay on focus for a long time. A exploding user amount like at twitter is a little bit scaring. But the concept of following everybody and everything seems to work.
By the way: Nice article, I will FOLLOW your site

Great post, great comments below. I’m curious if you have updated thoughts more than a yesr later, having seen Twitter’s help in revolutions like Egypt’s?

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