“we are creatures that model behavior. in a fixed group, such behavior is reinforced, and norms emerge. in an environment like twitter,”
9:55 AM Apr 2nd from Echofon

“…where the people i am following (and hence possibly modeling) are a) diverse (all from diff groups) and b) not the same as the people”
9:56 AM Apr 2nd from Echofon

“…following me, how can norms of behavior emerge? the problem of the reverse panopticon. need more characters to really get into this.”
9:57 AM Apr 2nd from Echofon

Finally, I’ve gotten around to explaining what it is I was thinking about:

Community consists of mutually-reinforced norms and modes of behavior. Within certain groups (e.g. family, peer groups, professional associations) these norms emerge iteratively and collaboratively (which is not to discount the variable power relations inherent in any such system) as behaviors are modeled and then reproduced until a certain equilibrium is reached — what some might call “community values,” but I mean it in a broader way that it’s commonly used in the public discourse. Taken to an extreme in the online space, this can lead to the incestuous “echo chamber” effect found on so many political forums (on both the left and right), and to specialized argot and in-jokes impenetrable to an outsider (as seen, for example, on the discussion forums on woot.com — WTF are those people talking about?) But more often than not, this is where true communities form (as they model real-life communities where groups have a shared meeting place, and everyone is equally visible to everyone else.) Metafilter is a great example of this sort of community; it has a clear ethos and recognizable “voice,” despite being (largely) democratically-governed and the content entirely user-created.

In a loosely symmetrical system of relationships such as that enabled by Facebook, in which all connections (“friendships”) are mutually confirmed, but each individual belongs to a different (if often largely overlapping) peer group, a nice middle ground is established — since everyone you are “following” is also following you (unless explicitly hidden), there tends to be some semblance of normative equilibrium, without the homogenizing and rarefying effect exhibited in completely closed systems. Different people will have radically different experiences of Facebook, depending on whom they’ve decided to surround themselves with (e.g. professional contacts? Friends? Family?), but these differences tend to be incremental based on the number of “hops” away from each node. Put simply, a friend of mine on FB is going to have a different experience of it than I will, but it will likely be less different than a friend of a friend, and so on.

But in a system like Twitter’s, in which relationships are asymmetrical (and therefore only incidentally reciprocal), the notion of a shared experience and mutually-reinforced mores which form the backbone of “community” goes out the window. While there may be 1000s of people viewing a particular tweet, the context of that tweet is completely different for each of the people viewing. What appears to be community, then, is in fact merely a self-constructed simulacrum of a community, in which the people you appear to surround yourself with are themselves surrounded by a completely different group of people, thereby allowing no actual communal norms to develop, except on the most macro-, system-wide level.

But what about the panopticon? In brief, the panopticon is a prison architecture proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century in which a series of cells extend radially around a central observation node. The prisoners can’t see each other, and can’t see their observer (or precisely when/if they are being observed,) but the observer at the center can see all.

Ignoring the social control purpose this architecture was originally intended for, and most theorists have concentrated on, I’m viewing it more simply as a structure of communication and consumption — of who is viewing, who is being viewed, and what is visible to each. Twitter can be viewed as an infinitely overlapping structure of reverse panopticons, with each participant at the center of his/her own universe, with no visibility outward back to the people who are watching them. There is no “conversation” per se (without a tedious, forensic reconstruction process), as each participant is experiencing and responding to a very different messaging landscape. In such a chaotic landscape, shared norms (a key component of a “community”) cannot emerge. For example, if I follow a bunch of dirty-mouthed comedians (as I do), I might easily get the sense that the ethos of Twitter is wild, profane, and uncompromisingly edgy. But then when I comment in kind, I may well shock the sensibilities of (say) the internet development professionals that follow me. Now multiply this dissonance by the number of individual nodes in the network, and you have a custerfluck of epic proportions, with millions of people shouting together, alone.

Now you might say — “that’s not my experience of Twitter! I feel like a part of a strong community, with a generally shared ethos and many, many mutual interactions.” That’s wonderful, but it also sort of perversely makes my point — due to the asymmetrical architecture inherent in Twitter, every participant’s experience of the product is going to be radically different, dependent on how they’ve structured and maintained their personal network. Surely it’s possible to create sub-networks that consist entirely of symmetrical relationships, with all the members of the group following and being followed by all the other members, but this arrangement is counter to the inherent architecture of the system (unlike a simple community forum, where it is the de facto structure,) and one would need to go to great lengths to accomplish it. Given that, one can no more speak of the “Twitter experience” than they could of the “telephone experience,” or the “pencil experience.”

All of this is not to say that Twitter is not an incredibly interesting and potentially useful tool (like the telephone or the pencil.) Just that it is architected in such a way as to make true community very difficult to achieve, and to promote the existence of Twitter micro-celebrities with thousands of followers that they don’t themselves follow. These celebrity nodes are where shared sensibilities might converge, but the followers aren’t themselves sharing a context — they are all observing and perhaps responding to the center (where an @aplusk or a @hodgman or a @scobleizer might sit,) but are invisible to one another.

Is this a problem? If it is, is there anything to be done about it? I have some ideas, but this has gone on long enough for now. Curious to hear your thoughts, and thanks my indulging my rather rambly, admittedly somewhat pretentious, and not-fully-formed post…

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. … We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Twitter has announced a new “lists” feature, which will grant the ability to users to play curator and create lists of twitter users under an arbitrary (yet presumably relevant) heading. For instance, I might create a “Social TV” list, and feature people like @kenbot, @mikeberkley, and @tomturnbull, and a “Comedy” List with folks like @danharmon, @azizansari, and @scottsimpson. (There, my #followfriday duties are covered for the week.) If you like my taste, you can then follow one of my lists, which I can manage over time, granting the benefits of my (active) oversight to all my (passive) list subscribers. (In that way it’s not unlike a managed mutual fund, but without the fees.) It’s a great move, allowing for a new class of content-creators that never have to issue a single tweet; they can simply contribute by curating. (Any system which is dependent on users generating the content is well-served by creating multiple points of entry for users to be able engage at the level they feel comfortable with — engagement is a slippery slope.) It also provides a simple yet powerful tool for users to increase the signal to noise ratio of their Twitter experience, which is critical, as anyone following more than ~200 people will tell you.

So yes, “lists” are all well and good, but they only address one half of the issue. We are all many. Whether you call them “masks” or “hats” we all have several we shuffle through each day. Not only are we interested in consuming different categories of content, but we are interested in creating content in different categories as well, thereby presenting specific facets of ourselves to the sundry social spaces we each occupy.  To that end, Twitter should implement some notion of “personae”, in recognition of this idea that each of us are (perhaps subtly) different things within different social contexts, and might like to preserve the separation of those spheres in our social media.

At the most basic level, you might want to simply differentiate between “public” and “private,” leaving the public personae open to the world and using it for more professional updates, while protecting the private update stream from unapproved followers and using for much less formal gabbing about your life. Here’s a slightly more complex scenario: You are a magazine editor, a big fan of the NY Knicks, a single father, and a conspiracy buff. For each of those spheres of interest, there is a pool of people who share your interest, and who may be interested in hearing what you have to say on those topics. In fact, people you know from real life from each of those spheres have found you and are now following you on Twitter. But what do you say? For each audience different content is appropriate; trying to be all things to all of your social contexts will lead to a watered-down compromise at best, and complete paralysis at worst.

With a “personae” system, you could create multiple personae and choose which to post under on a per-tweet basis. (Of course, you could always just choose the default of “all.”) Your followers (and list-makers who choose to include you) would actually be adding personae, rather than people, so your Knicks posts could be on a Knicks Fans list, while your posts about Area 51 appear in the conspiracy list. At the same time, your best friend, who is subscribed to all your personae (what a mensch!) sees it all.

Of course you can approximate this functionality now by creating different accounts for each persona, but that seems like a clumsy way to address an issue that affects the vast majority of users.

For any given posting, we have a certain audience in mind, yet inevitably the imagined audience is just a subset of the actual audience. Has this happened to you: Someone responds to something you’ve posted on Twitter or Facebook and you’re stunned: “Whoa, that was not intended for you at all!” Our friends/followers are a diverse group, occupying highly variable levels not only of “closeness” but also of social context, and it’s often easy to forget just how diverse. Or, conversely, have you ever not posted something because it would seem unprofessional, or not funny enough, or would in whatever way undermine the expectations & perceptions of what you consider your ‘primary’ audience? A “personae” system would address both of these issues, freeing up users to express each of their personae as fully and strongly as they see fit, simultaneously honing multiple personal “brands” as it were,  without having to worry about the dilution of the value of their stream for their followers who are only interested in one or another aspect, and summarily improve the quality of content for everyone.

Twitter must not change the basic interaction model they’ve established. No micropayments, no barriers to accumulating large followings, no premium tweets, no subscriptions. And no ads, not yet. (Though I don’t think that one would be a deal-breaker for consumers, ultimately.) It’s a delicate ecosystem, and the number one priority should be its continued growth. That said, there are a few moves Twitter could make that respect this ecosystem, put no barriers in its growth path, and allow it to start generating revenue now:

1. Be Twitter experts: Provide professional/marketing services (including advanced stats and analytics)

Companies are falling over themselves to get onto Twitter, and have NO IDEA where to start. I’m sure Kevin Thau is deluged with requests from Fortune 500 companies who just want to chat, try to figure out how they could “work together.” It’s time to start converting this heat into dollars. Twitter should start an ancillary professional services agency, to which all these requests could get diverted. Want to use Twitter for marketing? Hire Twitter to help you. Sure there are hundreds of “social media experts” out there who would happily take your money, but the EVP of Digital Marketing at Warner Brothers doesn’t have time to sort out the true talents from the sea of hucksters — she wants to go straight to the source, and feel confident that she is working with the foremost Twitter experts in the world: Twitter itself. Plus, only they have direct access to the database — a potential goldmine of brand perception and campaign performance information. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Twitter is the nearest thing to clairvoyance a marketer could have. The insights are raw, real-time, and nearly unmediated. That’s the stuff, and only Twitter’s got it. Now they need to start charging for it.

(Since I drafted this, Kevin Thau has announced that they are indeed pursuing this sort of approach. Excellent!)

2. Open up the vault: Provide access to historical data

Yes, Twitter is the closest thing we have to mind reading, and every single one of those thoughts is being saved, forever. Think about that for a second. As Twitter usage approaches ubiquity (still a long way off, but with 900% growth this year there’s no denying they’re moving in the right direction), their database starts to look like the most remarkable historical and anthropological asset even known to man. Imagine Twitter had existed on September 11, 2001. During the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the U.S. Civil War. Perhaps Historical Tweets was onto something? This is a resource that becomes more valuable each day that passes.

Currently, the search API only allows you to access records up to four months old, and by default prioritizes the newest records. Historical searches are impossible. One can imagine a model whereby Twitter charges for access to this historical archive, ala Lexis/Nexis. Libraries and Universities across the country would be paid subscribers, and this sort of service could demand a healthy premium.

3. Make the secondary market work for you: charge for premium API access

Twitter should not lose sight of the fact that it is not only a consumer-facing service, it is a very powerful open messaging layer and application platform. There is a whole secondary market emerging of clients and web apps built on top of Twitter and the Twitter API. Currently, a developer can request to be “whitelisted,” which raises the API request limit to 20,000 per hour. That’s pretty high — apparently all but the “largest consumers of [the] API” fit under that cap. But Twitter-based apps are still a nascent industry — as Twitter grows, the tide rises, and even the small apps will grow with it. Moreover, if this secondary market is really going to take off, entrepreneurs can’t be worried about their hit applications bumping into that ceiling. Hence, Twitter can keep the 20,000 cap for non-paying clients (remember one of the key philosophies here is to not take anything away that people are already getting — though it could be argued that the 20,000 cap, which was only instituted a couple of weeks ago, represents just such a revocation), and charge for added API requests, much how a CDN might charge per video stream. This way, instead of Twitter suffering as secondary apps achieve scale, and feeling the need to artifically limit them in order to cap that suffering, a mutually beneficial relationship is established: the more successful the secondary market is, the more successful Twitter becomes. Monetize the platform, not just the service.

The Twitter guys are all really smart. I’ve no doubt they’ve already thought of all of these things, and are either working on them, or have come up with good reasons why they shouldn’t. I’ve just been seeing so many really moronic Twitter business model posts (no, I won’t link to any; that would be ungentlemanly) that I felt the need to put in my 2c and hopefully raise the level of discourse. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Well, sort of. Nearby Tweets just uses the location you stated at registration time, but it’s a very cool user-discovery feature nonetheless. I love an app like this — it does one thing, and does it well. It throws a simple user interface on something that was already available in the twitter API (thanks for pointing that out, Carl), and presto: another layer of value/interestingness gets added to the twitter platform.

They just need a way to link to a particular query — I wanted to share my results for tweets from Iraq, but I’m not able to because the query parameters aren’t embedded in the URL. That’s an easy tweak, and I just suggested it to the author, so with any luck he’ll add it in soon.

nearby tweets – instantly find twitterers nearby (or anywhere for that matter).

Updated 2 minutes later:

Brian Cray, the author of the app, responded to my suggestion:

Great idea Tony! For now, you can do http://nearbytweets.com/search/keyword – for example: http://nearbytweets.com/search/iraq — that being said, I don’t have a URL shortcut for locations yet, though that is in the works. ;)

I love this app — can’t wait to see how it evolves! Local is the next big wave of social media, there is no doubt. The race is on between Twitter and Facebook — who’ll crack the location-awareness nut first? My money is on Twitter — their open model will bring an army of independent developers and entrepreneurs to bear again the opportunity, whilst Facebook’s pseudo-open model (in which third-party apps have been relegated to a marginalized ghetto) will require that their own engineers to come up with the killer LAA* (location-aware app.) Not bloody likely.

* We need a better name/acronym for these. Any ideas?