James M. Titus isn't human, but he played one on Twitter

Organized by the Boston-based Web Ecology Project, the experiment called for three teams to program social-bots Twitter accounts that coule mimic human conversation. They selected 500 real users (I presume they had a way of confirming that), most of which shared an affinity for cats. Accounts like @JamesMTitus relied on a database of generic responses, focusing on the most responsive people in the target community. In the second week, additional bots were added to allow teams to try to thwart the efforts of other bots to be perceived as human.

Although the Evil applications are readily apparent—in February, Anonymous hackers revealed government interest in infiltrating online groups—Tim Hwang also sees the potential for great good. A new version of this social experiment called “The Narrows” will attempt to construct a community where one does not yet exist, leading to the hope of using bots as connective mechanisms to help shape large online communities.

This immediately reminded me of a couple other projects related to fakery on Twitter.

Truthy

Truthy (@ truthyatindiana) is an Indiana University research project about detecting astroturfing and other misinformation around political topics. While it takes a little practice to understand the meaning of the network visuals—the site now offers a nice visual guide that explains some of the common patterns, with specific examples—the work has produced some new insights about political use of Twitter, as well as statistically confirming other assumptions.

One of the most relevant to my perpetually delayed dissertation is the analysis of the #gop hashtag, which clearly shows a polarized group.

Truthy mapped the network of activity around #gop on Twitter

An example of a grassroots meme, the #gop hashtag is widely used on Twitter, but in two very distinct ways. One cluster reflects use by conservatives, and the other contains liberal critics. People will retweet others in the same community. When they do mention those in the other community, it is typically expressed as a disagreement. This might support known patterns within political forums online, where members engage with opposing views while reinforcing information flow from their peers.

Cyc AI

The other is Cyc (@cyc_ai), a non-profit organization to manage and grow an ontology of general knowledge that can allow computers to reason like humans. The Cyc systems leverage natural language interface, detailed background information, and deep inference to create conversational knowledge. Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation built the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA) to answer clinicians’ ad-hoc queries. Cyc, which began back in 1984, is using Twitter to help train it’s information. Recently, the tactics have changed to use a variety of inquisitive wordings to prompt confirmation of data.

Cyc is using Twitter to help train its algorithms

The Twitter account claims to allow you to send a direct message and get an answer, but that hasn’t worked for me yet. The Cyc project isn’t without criticism, not the least of which is scalability and responsiveness to cultural shifts in meaning.

The musical duo of Kevyn Smith and Jeremy Johnson recently paid tribute to @BronxZooCobra, the joke Twitter account tweeting on behalf of a missing snake in a New York zoo (since found). A tweet from April 5—Enough! Tonight I’m busting out. Just like that new A&E show, call me “Breakout King Cobra.” Nothing can stop me!—turned into a half-minute song. That was the rabbit hole that led to a few hundred other tweeted songs, or “sweets.”

My WeSingYourTweets Playlist

The process is a “social experiment” that is both a creative spark and a way to use their talents to highlight interesting content they find on Twitter. Attention to their work got a boost when they sweeted the Real Housewives of Atlanta last November. The following month, NPR interviewed them about their project and asked them to do a sweetment of the top retweets of 2010. Well into 2011, they are still recording short-form songs.

Earlier this week, there was a great little interview with the musicians in Turnstyle that includes the following tidbits:

• Writing sweets is quicker than writing lyrics, because the narrative is fixed
• The melodic potential of a tweet is a key factor.
• They generate about 60 sweets a week, through a couple night’s work.
• They will keep doing sweets until it isn’t fun anymore. It’s fun now.

The project has already had a few thematic endeavors, including holidays (Halloween and Christmas) and the State of the Union, and plans to visit Twitter archives to tweet first posts from other people. In between sweets, the songwriters play for a band called Dave Hates Chico.

I wonder what it would take to get sweets for my favorite favorite tweets. Maybe they need to make a new sub-genre for overheards.

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

I came across a few interesting videos this week, ranging in topics. Here they are:

Outside In

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

More at GeekDad

Salman Khan

More at TED

The History of Twitter

Funny or Die’s take on the origins of Twitter (NSFW, thanks to Soulja Boy):

More at WebProNews

Sheehey’s Dunk

Greg Pattillo

More at PROJECT Trio

On Tuesday, the local internet spontaneously combusted with a promising new use for Twitter: Cheerleader.

Using Twitter and Facebook to brainstorm gameday chants

From a new blog for Hysterical Hoosiers, the organizers explain the project:

Those of you students who have been to games this year, our atmosphere has been awesome. However, we can create an even more hostile environment. Each game, we will look players up on facebook, twitter, etc, and try and get some more personal info and dirt on a lot of thems. A couple days before each game, I will post chants we need to start up when certain players touch the ball, are shooting free throws, during time-outs, etc. Spread the word so we can make Assembly Hall the most hostile place to play in the country!

In a sign of the evolving value of media channels, the blog showed up after the Facebook and Twitter pages. By the end of the day, the Facebook page already had over 100 “likes” and the Twitter account had almost 400 followers.

The Hysterical Hoosiers Twitter account has caught the attention of the IDS, an IU newsman, a local sports bar, sports podcasts, the Crimson Guard, and the Big Ten Network. They are all dwarfed by Tom Crean, who is an active Twitter user himself (although he tends to tweet in bursts). This project would get a shot in the arm if he passed a link along to his 25,000 followers.

The suggested crowd actions will be curated and displayed on the new blog. The few visible in the timeline only reference Tijan Jobe and referee Jim Burr, but there is time to get the crowdsourcing in line before Saturday’s game against Northwestern. My big concern is a lack of good taste.

I’ve lamented this before: fans have great potential to be boors. Having more people swearing at referees or being classless in targeted taunts would not be a good outcome for Hysterical Hoosiers. More intimidating than being clever with words (mean or otherwise) is having a large crowd do complex things. I’d love to see this evolve into using the crowd to play Tetris in the stands, passing large blocks down the rows instead of waving Big Heads during free throws.

I think this is a creative way to elevate participation in and enjoyment of the games in Assembly Hall, as long as this is about crowdsourcing and not mobsourcing.

UPDATE 2/16: Founders Zach Litzelswope and Tony Adragna added a podcast explaining the project. They credit Bill Simmons with the idea, set their sights on being better than the Cameron Crazies, and talk about how some of these ideas might debut on Saturday. On a more ominous note, there may major fuzziness area about what is inappropriate (e.g., statutory rape) as a chant topic.

Many of these status updates had to do with interesting moments in Twitter, related to research in the service, but I also find my personal Twitter museum has collected a number of profound, hilarious, and striking status updates from others around the world. Here are fifty of my favorite Favorites …

this superbowl needs more vuvuzelas.—@djbender

Apparently there’s a sequel to Super Bowl 44 today – do I have to know anything about the other Super Bowls to prepare for today?—@trobinson79

After a brief flirtation, I’ve turned away from Quora. It’s too structured to be social and too closed for open talk. Also, it’s boring.—@shelisrael

I mean really, Mubarak should have done that speech while sitting in a swiveling chair and caressing a white cat. #Jan25 #Egypt—@KarlreMarks

The Spider-Man musical doesn’t need to close – it needs to be the next season of Survivor.—@moonandserpent

Assembly Hall just went from being the loudest place in America (after Hulls 3) to one of the most quiet (as Watford shoots free throws)—@IUSportcom

Now that the astrological birth signs have been recalculated, thousands of awful lower-back tattoos just become even more regrettable.—@justinkeller

My 5th grader has a paper due. It needs to be double spaced. She very carefully typed 2 spaces between each word.—@MacksMind

Glad they’re making Great Gatsby in 3-D. My favorite part of the book was when Gatsby threw knives at the reader’s face.—@BorowitzReport

I guess “A Christmas Carol” will forever be known as the episode where the shark jumped Doctor Who.—@lmcalpin

Google Wave Lesson: If a product is named as a Firefly reference, expect it to go the way of any Joss Whedon show.—@jeffcatania

If my quick glance at my twitter stream is correct, Brett Favre & Wikileaks are building a mosque in NYC.—@bmk

someone should submit The Economy to kickstarter.com—@jingman

Do all these muscles make me look fat?—@OldSpice

I’m glad I never have worry about forgetting whether or not Jesus saves. Thanks, bumper stickers and billboards.—@cmbeck_

The Emergency Alert System on the cable is preventing me from watching the local stations which will show me where the storm actually is.—@bubbas_brain

Discussing with my lawyer a new idea: adding “Agree to Disagree” option to my EULA dialog box, and let the user use the soft anyways.—@migueldeicaza

The cure for boredom is curiosity. The cure for curiosity is worksheets.—@alfiekohn

DON’T MAKE ME CRITIQUE YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE. YOU WOULDN’T LIKE ME WHEN I’M CRITIQUING YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE.—@feministhulk

If plastic bags live for thousands of years in a landfill, they’re like little time capsules. Why don’t we encode cool info on them?—@jingman

I saw a guy playing Solitaire on the iPhone. That is wrong in so many ways.—@SoundSystemSDC

Hotel internet is to internet as rice cakes are to oreos.—@clifflampe

Calling Butler “America’s Team” at this point is like commenting on a blog post with “First?!!!”—@tacojohn

My biggest fear of traveling back in time is that I’ll waste it explaining what it is that I do for a living.—@cmbeck_

incessant drumming. Me: Stop or I’ll have you committed. @cmakice: what’s that mean? Me: locked up in a room. @cmakice: Oh. With drums?—@amakice

One of the most painful things about being an academic is that no mater what you research, there’s always someone telling you how dumb it is—@whazlewo

wouldn’t it be great if we all pitched in to help people even when there wasn’t a disaster?—@aschweig

#Twible Ex 20: G’s Top 10. No gods, idols, blasphemy. Keep Sabbath holy & love Mom. Don’t kill, cheat, steal, lie, or look @ Xmas catalogs.—@janariess

Jim Zorn suspended practice, called investigators. Forensic experts determined white substance unknown to players was goal line.—@chucktodd

the Nobel Prize for Obama is really a Most Improved Player award for the USA.—@muchosalsa

Johnathan Frakes is directing. Yesterday, he called me Number One. My heart made a noise that sounded like awesome.—@NathanFillion

Why is the “default” image on most sites a male silhouette? I find it offensive when women are represented as a shadow of a man.—@zephoria

how many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? eh, it’s this really obscure number. you’ve probably never heard of it.—@treyp

When I take my pants off in public I’m being lewd. When I willingly do it in airport security i’m a patriot.—@cmbeck_

I always wondered how I could make “obituary” rhyme with “millionaire” and now I know. Thanks country radio!—@ryanvarick

My 6 year old son got a new watch. It’s 3:10 everybody.—@theaudioprof

@trotzke and I are now Bonsai buddies. Something he doesn’t know: I’m going to grow the hugest bonsai ever!!!—@BigDaveSmith

if nice guys finish last, then who would win a nice guy contest?—@StephenAtHome

wisdom of a 4 yr old: “the most important thing when deciding where to eat is if it has a gumball machine”—@mtwolf

Looking up the synonyms for unique.—@trotzke

@oprah ur caps r on, btw—@THE_REAL_SHAQ

Hey Twitter, you’ve been Punk’d. @aplusk is really a 14 year old kid who lives in Encino.—@SoundSystemSDC

@amakice I suggest the online moniker of Ma~—@benfulton

Hoosier Music Mt. Rushmore: Axl, Michael Jackson, Mellencamp, Wes Montgomery. Suck it, Hoagie Carmichael.—@SnailTrax

OH: Me: what are you doing? Archie: taking the onions out so I dont taste them. Me: they’re onion rings.—@amakice

OH: Nanna: “Is that his name? French Fry?” Archie: “Yes.” Nanna: “For Certain?” Archie: “No. French Fry.”—@amakice

Time to reset the Illinois governor sign once again to “This office has been criminal-free for 0 days”.—@dickc

I’m standing in the foot prints of giants.—@whazlewo

Charlton Heston is dead? Who is goign to take the gun out of his cold dead hands?—@zebtron

If you’re reading this now, I can only assume it’s because your family is boring the crap out of you.—@StephenAtHome

1. More than 250 million people use Facebook Connect every month

   There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about the portability of the social graph, your own network of contacts and personal information. Google, Facebook, Twitter … every new system that arrived on the scene had it’s own picture of your social connections. Initiatives like OpenID came into being to try to bridge those gaps across systems, but today many sites offer access to multiple authentication schemes and let their members decide which login to use. This can present some issues for both developers and users, of course, but it is usually a win for everyone to lower the barrier to entry for more people by refusing to commit to one silo. The fact that a quarter billion people leverage the Facebook authentication each month speaks volumes about the rest of the social graph ecosystem, too.

2. A lot happens on Facebook

   That’s an understatement. During the average 20-minute period in 2010, there were (among other things) 1.5 million wall posts. To put that in perspective: The great novel War and Peace is 560,000 words long. Assuming the average wall post is 15 words, that’s 127.5 Tolstoy novels worth of content every hour. The largest museum in the world—the State Hermitage Museum in Russia—has 639,000 paintings and graphic art works, just 24 percent of the number of photos uploaded to Facebook every twenty minutes. There are 14 million messages and comments exchanged on Facebook each hour, the equivalent of almost two-thirds of the volume of USPS mail. A lot happens on Facebook.

3. Twitter biographies increased to 69 percent

   From December 2009 to December 2010, users with a biography listed on Twitter increased from 31 percent to 69 percent. This is a significant change for two key reasons. First, it is a clear sign of growth in fluency using the microblogging platform. Informal studies have shown that people are more likely to trust you (and therefore follow you) if you have a full profile, especially a descriptive personal bio. Second, even if only to self-disclose who you are in a short paragraph, this is a significant behavioral shift from private to public action. There is still a large percentage of registrations who don’t use the service, but for those who do this is a big win for transparency and connection.

4. Friday at 4p EASTERN is the most retweetable time each week

   HubSpot’s Dan Zarella has invested a great deal of time in tracking the behaviors of link sharing in social media. His work typically looks at the aggregate picture, however, to show in chart form why it is better to craft your viral-friendly microcontent on Friday or Saturday afternoon, instead of Monday morning. While you can learn a lot by looking at the aggregate (e.g., Twitscoop), most Twitter networks are local in nature, reflecting existing offline and geographic connections. 4p Friday may be a great statistical time to get a retweet, but it may not be your best target for your audience. Ultimately, success in getting others to rely on you as an information source is tied most strongly to the relationships and trust you cultivate.

5. 4 percent of adults on the Internet use location-based services

   The current interest in place-based community started in earnest with Dodgeball, a service aimed at creating awareness in major metropolitan areas about who was in the same vicinity you were. Launched in 2003 as a thesis project in an world without smart phones, Dodgeball was later bought (2005) and then scrapped (2009) by Google. A month later, the same team launched Foursquare as a replacement, this time with a growing user base armed with iPhones, Blackberries, and Androids. Last December, the company reported 6 million users and information from over 380 million check-ins. With other services (Gowalla, Loopt, Google Latitude, Facebook Places) in this space, this 4 percent stat ought to grow significantly as companies learn to leverage the local context.

[I]t’s not just a question of micro-ego: when a juror is tweeting teasers from the jury room, part of them must know that a guilty verdict is much more exciting to their audience than one of innocence. How can that not subconsciously influence them? [...] In a perverse twist on the uncertainty principle, knowing that our behavior is being observed inevitably changes it for the more dramatic. Just look at reality TV.

While I am an advocate for the many positives that emerge from engaging people in their own lives and being willing to share these observations with others, Carr’s insight is undeniable. Humans have always been affected by their interactions with the environment. With access to social media and a culture of attention to support it, the difference now is that the observer is also a conduit capable of bringing others into the experience. Carr sees this as “a hideous dystopia” where participants are worried more about audience than the context of what they are witnessing.

This prediction of doom, however, is predicated on a handful of flawed assumptions.

The first is that posting content is performing for an audience. While journalists and the bloggers they spawned likely do view the world in that way, I don’t think it follows that as content contribution expands to the general populous everyone becomes a journalist. Most networks on Twitter are small ones reflecting social circles already existing offline. Posts in this context are arguably not about taking credit or reaching the masses as much as sharing experiences with friends.

The second key assumption is that the real-time web is an individual activity. It isn’t. Individuals are involved, but the appeal and value of real-time content is in the sheer number of people participating and the wide range of personal experiences they capture. Real-time is an emergent phenomenon, which means much of the value we may draw from it in the future is unknown. Writers following Twitter’s deals with Microsoft and Google may focus on how quickly trending topics can be identified and reflected better in search results, but where most people spend their search time is with the long-tail terms that have personal relevance. Search may well migrate from individuals-finding-information to ad hoc interest groups finding each other. The real-time web is made of people.

Most importantly, a culture of embodied observation is also one of changed behavior. A third assumption may be that those who are motivated by ego to post content will always be motivated by ego. With new information comes new skills and opportunity for reflection. We see this happening all the time with the evolving strategies of Twitter use (get lots of followers, prune your network, automate follow messages, don’t use direct messages, etc.). The value you see today may not be the same value you will see tomorrow. People change.

It would be a mistake to adopt a utopian view and discount Carr’s critique. However, I believe that what will ultimately emerge from real-time web is a Zen awareness in the here and now. The current flaws in this beast can and will be overcome.

I remember early 2009 as a boom for hundreds of how-to-Twitter posts, most of them annoyingly focused on marketing. Such lists are problematic: Every experience is unique, and generalizations just don’t apply very well to most people. I liked Ike Pignott’s question—”What is your experience using the web interface on Twitter?”—to pose to people as a filter before listening to advice on how to use the service. It was a good way to suss out who had experienced Twitter and who had just created an account.

Among the many list posts, two stood out. One was Tom Smith’s twelve problems with Twitter, and the other was Louis Gray’s thoughts on social network depression. In their own way, both articles contemplated the effects of using Twitter, couched mainly in how much of a gap there is between expectation and practice.

Smith’s Problems
Tom Smith listed several expectations that were, in his opinion, not being met by Twitter. These included:

• You feel you have an audience
• You feel you have something to do
• You feel you are connected
• You are meta thinking about meta thinking

One of the underlying values of this critique is that followers are only paying attention if they show it by responding or at least read everything. This is a blogger-marketer perspective on Twitter, and a good example of why the term microblogging may be a misnomer.

The popular aversion to personal trivia is based on the notion that such information is meant to be the equivalent of news. Rather, knowing how someone is feeling, what food they are eating, or when they are going to sleep is relational glue. This is the information you don’t typically write lengthy real-time articles about. It is information you would only get by being in the same room with that person, observing cues not otherwise available through computer-mediated communication.

One looming value Twitter is destined to give is the opportunity for longitudinal reflection. Thinking about what you are thinking about is precisely the kind of activity we should be doing more to facilitate. We have an obsession with doing, with being productive in tangible ways. Learning, though, involves periods of reflection. You are most certainly living your life when you stop to contemplate why you are smelling the roses.

Gray’s Depression
This is precisely the point of Louis Gray’s list of catalysts for social network depression.

• Getting less attention
• Repetition
• Despised popularity
• False prophets
• Absence
• Lost focus
• Snarkiness
• Lost value

What is interesting about this list is the diversity of things of value that social network use provides. Getting less attention and despising popularity are two opposite ends of the spectrum, for example, yet both can spawn depression in different people.

These are also largely issues of perception. The world we see probably isn’t changing as drastically as we think it is. We, as individuals, are usually the ones in flux. Being in a crappy mood to start the day likely means something on the above list will get blamed for the depression. Likewise, if we enter a social network happy, the world may seem more rosy or forgivable than it did the previous day. The world changes when we interpret change.

New Expectations to Manage
Given the recent buzz about the impending release of Twitter lists, I found Gray’s comments on “despised popularity” interesting:

The individual can start to question whether what we do online is more a herd mentality than one derived based on our own preferences, and questions the popular users’ value. (Example)

The suggestion is that as lists are created, the same names are repeated time and again – whether they are bringing real value, or not adding much from their presumed areas of expertise. But as with #2, even if a person’s original value was extremely clear, by the time you’ve run into them multiple times, across networks, their own value to you is likely diminished.

This may be one of the unintended consequences of Twitter lists: depression. On the one hand, the slate is clean and the same hunger for inclusion will probably dominate the early weeks of list creation. Basic network dynamics are against those not already well connected and known, however. The rich will get richer. Those with expectations of attaining celebrity status by being active with the list feature are not likely to have their needs met.

Twitter continues to change, as do each of us. The longer you spend tweeting, the more you might benefit from utilizing a tool like Loud Twitter to help you reflect.

Groups Have Always Been Around
From the beginning, the notion of groups has been absent from Twitter … at least officially. Early competitors like Jaiku and Pownce offered ways to follow events or topics, but Twitter avoided that (quite probably for architectural reasons, as well as for simplicity). That didn’t stop the Twitter community from improvising.

Lifted from IRC, Jaiku’s use of # led to Chris Messina’s proposal for hashtags, now firmly a part of the culture of use for Twitter. There have also been third-party applications, like TwitterGroups and Tweetworks, that specifically manage groups of followers. Popular web and desktop clients now embed this feature, too, but all of these solutions are simply methods of filtering existing twitter streams. To share lists of interesting followers, one had to go old school—write a blog post, or simply create a new Twitter account for that purpose—or work with a new open standard.

All of this happened before Twitter’s announcement of their lists feature. Members of the community fulfilled their own need. With API support, lists should quickly lead to upgrades across the board for existing Twitter tools, as well as some brand new third-party applications built around new user needs.

While this is going to produce a bunch of happy campers initially, lists may also change behavior in unexpected ways.

Unintended consequences of being included on a list

Reputation Management
The assumption for most people is that inclusion on a list is a social currency. As with follows, the more people who include you on a list, the greater your perceived influence. However, not all lists are going to carry positive connotations. Web consultant Orli Yakuel discovered during Beta testing that you don’t have the ability to opt out of lists. If someone wants to label you a spammer, noisy or something you don’t want to be, you may not have the ability to reject that label. It may mean your only recourse is to communicate with the list owner in the same way you might engage someone who writes a bad review of your product. Similarly, exclusion from a high-profile list may damage your reputation.

Death to Culture
Follow Friday is a recurring Twitter meme created by Micah Baldwin at the start of 2009. It regularly fills the tweet stream with hundreds of thousands of #followfriday hashtags at the end of the week, each tweet suggesting other people who might provide interesting content. Not everyone participates or enjoys reading endless context-deprived tweets with random names, but those who do have evolved their conventions over months of practice. Introducing lists will certainly challenge the norm—evolving from @usernames to links, or possibly even ending the need for Follow Friday outright. Some will rejoice, but others may cultivate a negative view of lists and what they did to damage their Twitter experience.

Pruning Follow Networks
Most Twitter users have small follow networks anyway, but for early adopters and those who follow as many people as possible, lists may be a way to justifying pruning. Including someone on a specific list—which has no cost to one’s own consumption of information—can be a way of recognizing or promoting an individual without needlessly escalating the relationship to a follow. This is possible because lists members don’t have to come from your follow network; you can add any account. A spot on a prestigious list may be worth more to a person than whether the list owner is following his tweets. On the other hand, lists may simply increase the social pressure to recognize strangers in a new way, beyond returning a follow.

Impersonal Consumption
If lists take off, there is a danger that users—particularly new members joining Twitter—will treat the channel as simply information broadcast. When you follow a group of people as a unit, relationships are not necessary. The members of a particular list won’t be notified each time someone opts to follow the group (emails are sent when you follow individually), offering no prompt to evaluate or engage that person. Lists can add great value to understanding the full Twitter network, by providing another form of endorsement and semantic description. However, the cost may be a decrease in relational value. Without relationships, Twitter is reduced to a customizable RSS feed.

At noon, Gaiman—the author of Sandman graphic novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book—kicked things off with the first line of the story:

Neil Gaiman offered the first line of a collaborative story

From there, the story took on a life of its own.

The goal for the story is 1000 tweets. After compiling a finished script, editors will turn it into an audiobook made available as a free download (also available through iTunes or other retailers). To participate, authors had to post a Twitter reply in the form of “@BBCAA [contribution to the story] #bbcawdio.” A moderator filtered the incoming entries to build an official story thread in the @BBCAA tweet stream, blogging updates with each new scene.

Writers Love Twitter
This isn’t the first time Twitter has been used for a creative writing event. In 2007, 140 authors each claimed one line each in a short story—”Twittory”—but it stalled with 86 people contributing.

The following year, Maryland teacher George Mayo encouraged his eighth-grade English class to collaborate with students around the world, writing a story using a shared Twitter account (@manyvoices). Six weeks and 140 international authors later, the book was edited on a wiki and published through Lulu. A couple months later, Brian Clark (Copyblogger) issued a challenge to write a story in exactly 140 characters, drawing 331 submissions.

This past May, the NYC Midnight writer’s community sponsored a twitter creative writing contest. Participants were divided into groups and given a word and a couple hours in which to create a short-form story.

BBC Audiobooks America billed this week’s event as a “choose your own adventure” experience, seeded by Gaiman’s initial tweet. However, the choice belongs to the editors directing the narrative. The result has been a tale clearly influenced by Gaiman’s previous work (maybe with a little Heroes throw in). This would have been a more interesting exercise if the many threads of storytelling could have emerged organically from Gaiman’s starter.

Technical issues forced the BBCAA experiment to end during the third scene. The action will pick back up again starting at 9a Eastern.

Larry Fitzgerald asks a question on Twitter

Within seconds of posting, the first person posted the correct answer:

The answer was Robin Roberts

Within 3 minutes of posting, Fitzgerald got 53 correct responses, along with a number of others complaining that his web site was no longer responsive. Within 20 minutes of posting his question, Fitzgerald generated about 1000 Twitter replies and attracted many people to both his website and his top philanthropic cause (breast cancer awareness and prevention).

Fitz credited Brian McGrath with winning the shirt and autographed picture, but his answer came almost two minutes after the first response. Such is life when millions of people are polling Twitter’s service through different clients and connections. The wording of his previous tweet, though, did give Fitzgerald some wiggle room.

The important take-home is this: Despite being late on a Sunday night—not the prime time for “marketing efforts”—a Twitter celebrity with a six-digit audience used the channel not only to generate some interaction with fans, but simultaneously generated site traffic, raised awareness of a worthy cause, and earned 1000 more followers in the process. And, Fitz plans to do it again.

Larry Fitzgerald’s Web Site

Not everyone appreciated his insight, which was shared in the midst of a build-your-network crowd. There are a number of guidelines Epstein uses that I don’t, but I was particularly intrigued by one of his rules: “I don’t follow more than 140 people.”

Jerry Epstein talks about building relationships at 140 Characters in June 2009

Beyond the Twitter-tastic obsession with the number 140, there are a couple interesting aspects to this constraint of network size.

First, it is close to the Dunbar Number, 148. This figure is derived from Robin Dunbar’s work in the early 1990s analyzing social habits of primates. While the exact number is suspect and has been revised upward a couple times by others, the central insight is that our human brains can only manage so many people at a time. I contend that mechanical computation lets us to offload the cognitive load, allowing social network sizes to be considerably larger. However, Epstein’s strategy clearly echoes this notion of cognitive limits.

Second, as a platform, Twitter has been appropriated for multiple uses. Some of these are traditional information broadcast, like CNN pumping out links to their articles. Some are conversational, or require large mutual networks. Many reflect small existing social circles of offline friends. Along with other aspects of Twitter, I most value relationships.

Epstein claims the following limit allows him to consume and respond to all the content he sees, giving him insight into how these important people operate. While there is no shortage of blog posts condemning tweets about mundane things, these details are exactly the kind of cues one needs to strengthen relationships. It’s not clear to me whether Epstein would consider knowing what Anil Dash had for lunch as noise, but I believe this is precisely the information we otherwise only get if we are in the presence of a person. If relationships are valued, then context is, too.

My own network has grown from the 40 or so other early adopters in my geographic and academic community into a behemoth that swelled up over 800 before contracting a bit last month. With each milestone (100, 200, 500), I swore I was following as many as I could handle. It wasn’t until my recent workload surged did I feel I really reached some limit. Even with a bit of a purge—motivated by Epstein’s talk—I am nowhere near a Dunbar number.

I enjoy following people in my current hometown, Bloomington (although I have largely sacrificed other Indiana communities to be able to pay close attention to home). I’m also part of an academic program that adds several dozen new people to my radar each fall. Throw in GeekDad, Twitter folk, and high school friends, and it is difficult to imagine trimming down further. If anything, these sub-communities will continue to expand.

Still, the idea of selecting only 140 of these Twitter friends to follow is intriguing, if only as a thought exercise. The value I get from my network is a combination of information gathering, professional interest, and social obligation—most of which have a real relationship formation or maintenance underlying the flow of tweets. Any contraction of my network would still need to include representative sampling from each of these areas. Starting from scratch and building from my current following list, I quickly went beyond 140 and gave up. This might be a similar problem for about 40% of my tweeps, but the majority of people in my network follow fewer than 140.

If you are a Twitter member, what is the minimum number of people you would feel comfortable following?

And what does it mean for accountability, when any individual can post manipulated footage on YouTube, or information on a blog site which hasn’t been subjected to some of the rigorous fact checking process newspaper or television or radio reporters have to go through before they can publish or air a story.

This is an old but persistent question about Web 2.0 content. The underlying assumptions are that rigorous fact checking will guarantee truth and that only trained professionals in traditional media are capable of checking facts properly.

First, mass collaboration in uncovering truth is, collectively, a rigorous process. Just as a common initial criticism of Twitter focuses on a single tweet (the “I don’t want to know what you had for lunch” complaint), rigor is often judged by the depth of work done by an individual or a small group of people providing oversight. However, crowds can cover more ground. Participants leverage their own personal expertise and self-select what interests them enough to warrant further investigation. Each person contributes a piece of the puzzle. A small group must be responsible for considering and acting upon all the pieces.

Second, whether formal or intuitive, training adds experience and efficiency to the process of fact-checking. Compared to the average Joe, journalists are likely to be better at confirming facts. However, their expertise is just part of the collective. No single person will have all experiences or the resources to generate a timely and comprehensive outcome. Collective participation is like pouring sand into a jar full of rocks. The wisdom of the crowds effect makes us smarter together than the smartest individuals (see: Wikipedia).

More importantly, suspect content found on the Web makes us question how true it is. The more we become familiar with Web 2.0, the more skeptical and skilled we become in confirming information. Our alarms start sounding, and we start to strategize where we might look for answers. When we consume or produce Web content, we are training ourselves in the art of criticism. We become less reliant on traditional institutions filled with formal experts to do our thinking for us, and more engaged with the social circles—including strangers—we trust.

By the way, the ANU forum is finishing today. You can catch up by following their Twitter stream or their webcast of the sessions.

The Twitter account for the City of Bloomington isn’t following anyone. Yet.

The loudest voices giving advice about Twitter strategy tend to argue for maximizing followers. These large network broadcasters often reject Twitter as an effective means of two-way communication, pushing links and retweets as the way to improve signal. If one’s focus is solely on broadcast of information, then size does matter and content should have relevance to the general audience. However, a relational community—particularly one with a mission of improving face-to-face interaction—is better served by quality over quantity. In a local context, knowing where someone is headed to lunch can add value to an offline relationship.

There was a time when one could describe local Twitterers with a short bullet list. Today, there are almost 1000 confirmed Bloomingtonians using the service (unconfirmed estimates are closer to 1300 accounts). Bloomington is a college town. A high percentage of transient residents coming and going through the academic cycle of Indiana University, making the relevant network considerably larger. While Bloomington appears to have found its voice as a technology and innovation hub, it remains small potatoes among the millions now using Twitter.

As an organization, the City was slow to pick up the value of social media. It is likely officials view it primarily as a broadcast medium. This is evident in the fact that, at the moment, their Twitter account isn’t following anyone. Two other local pillars—the Herald-Times and Indiana University (with many specialized accounts)—are also primarily broadcast accounts, but they have each made use of the two-way communication the service offers and humanized the information they distribute to their following.

Over time, the City of Bloomington will figure this out. We’ll know we’ve turned another important corner when our Mayor is tweeting about where he’s headed to lunch … and welcoming the conversation that follows him there.

The continued formalization of Twitter’s relationship with their extended developer community is wonderful. The company’s success was built in large part to the way they share access to data, and 2009 has been characterized by increased focus on the platform. The explosion of third-party applications has increased from under 2,000 to over 28,000 so far this year. Most of that jump in activity has come since the start of the summer. It has spawned a company (oneforty) and several databases trying to keep tabs on these new tools.

On September 30, Twitter announced the impending creation of a new internal feature: Lists. Nick Kallen is going to lead this project, which will include API access to the creation, editing, changes and timeline for a given list. Although there were some complaints from the developer community about a lack of advance notice, the third-party applications most affected by Twitter Lists were excited about how this addition can help their own projects. This comes after formal support of retweeting and geolocation were announced in August.

If there is any cause for concern in this news it may be in a feature creep that moves Twitter further away from simple. Those 28,000 third-party applications are buoying niche communities and augmenting the kinds of things Twitter can do. To have features added to the Twitter engine itself runs some risk of adding complexity that changes how the service is both perceived and used. Geolocation, for example, will certainly strengthen local user communities (a great thing) but is problematic for a number of reasons. We are nearing the final quarter of 2009 without a clear idea of how the company plans to make money, so it will be interesting to see how closely tied these changes are to future revenue. Once that shoe drops, community reaction to these additions will certainly change.

As I wrote in my book six months ago:

It is a credit to Twitter that it has resisted such changes. Making the service less simple would also make it less versatile. The void of unanswered user requests for functionality is filled by an ecosystem of third-party developers. The incentive for the innovation and resources these developers bring to the Twitter community would be critically lowered if the main service tried to do too much. A simple Twitter is better not only for the users trying to post their status updates, but also for the third-party applications trying to find their niches.

I think this insight is still valid. After the dust settles on a stable version of the API and the company business model, simple must remain a touchstone for Twitter.

This graphic—created by David McCandless—was inspired by Rohit Bhargava’s analysis of the Sysomos study, released in June. Ignoring the fact that the David’s viz now has only 95 people, not 100 (he hacked off an extra row), the idea behind the graphic is appealing: reduce Twitter to a number we can wrap our heads around.

The problem with doing so—and adding the snarky comments about these sub-groups—is that the value of Twitter is being pre-determined by the most obvious metrics, followers and posts. It is also misrepresenting the actual numbers in the Sysomos report.

Let’s critique David’s graphic based on the groups he identifies using color coding.

5 with more than 100 followers (blue)

On the surface, so many small networks seems bad. There are many blog posts and several Twitter applications that are geared specifically toward cultivating lots of followers. The biggest Twitter membership drive to date was fueled by a race to 1 million followers. However, there are two important things to realize about Twitter that soften the shock of this figure.

First, social networks follow a natural growth based on age of the account. Merely being around the service long enough is bound to find some random attachments that accumulate over time. Almost three-fourths (72.5%) of all Twitter accounts were created in 2009. It would be interesting to re-examine the data trying to normalize for length of membership.

Second, the implication is that only large networks are valuable. This is a decidedly blogger mentality, where readership means impact. With Twitter, value comes in many forms. An oft-overlooked value is strengthening small, known, local connections. I consider the small overall percentage with large networks to be a sign of strength of the service, not a weakness.

Technically, the body count in the graphic should be 6 (not 5). Sysomos found that 93.6% of the 11.5 million Twitter profiles they examined had fewer than 100 followers.

5 creating 75% of the content (purple)

When the uneven distributions of content was disclosed in analysis earlier this year, the popular implication was there was some problem with Twitter. While I haven’t seen a formal comparison of Twitter’s distribution of activity with that of other communities (both online and offline), I suspect that these numbers match up well with what we know about group participation.

At a certain size, the group dynamics influenced by signal-noise and turn taking will start to encourage inactivity in the majority of the group. When in the same room, there is a scarcity of attention that tends to be owned by the person doing the talking. Some people are more predisposed to be that talker, and others the listener. Online, the same is true with posting and consumption of information. That doesn’t mean the group is dysfunctional.

There is also a relationship between network size and posting activity. According to Sysomos, as Twitter users attract more followers, they tend to Tweet more often. At 1,000 followers, the average daily posting rate climbs from three to six tweets. Above 1,750 followers, that number rises to 10. There is no effort made in this study to parse out the quality or type of tweet. Replies, for instance, increase with network size simply because there is more consumption of social artifacts around which to communicate. It may also be true that those most likely to have large networks are the kinds of users who believe Twitter to be about broadcast (news media, A-list bloggers, celebrities)

20 with empty accounts (red)

Here again, the graphic is a bit off. The Sysomos data suggests 21 out of 100 are empty accounts, never having posted a single tweet. It is not clear from the report, however, if all 21% also have no network (i.e. following no one, being followed by no one).

Empty accounts can be placeholders or test accounts, as Rohit speculates, but they can also be requirements to use desktop clients or web/mobile applications that allow for consumption of other content. The absence of posts is not necessarily an indication of an unused account. I guarantee there are lurkers in the Twitter community, as much as any other. Lurkers are active in a different way, not “dead.”

50 with no tweets in the last week (green)

“Active” is a very ambiguous term. Most commonly, it is defined by the available statistics that can easily prove a member is using the system. There are no such statistics available for readership, for instance, or to take into account specific use cases or network size. One man’s active is another’s dormant, or—in David’s eyes—”lazy.”

It is also unclear, with so many new users, what percentage of these will grow into more active usage. There are a number of accounts that would have been classified as dormant a year ago that are now active. For some people, it takes time to learn to integrate Twitter into a routine.

20 with a small following and recent content (gray)

This is the most ambiguous group. It is viewed on the map as “leftovers” without considering how these previous groups might overlap.

For starters, the flip side to the previous statistic is that about half of all twitter accounts are using the service at least on a weekly basis and about 70% are posting at least once a month. The implication from the graphic is that none of the 50% who haven’t tweeted within the past week are the same as the 20% who have never tweeted. With so many new accounts, however, it is likely that many of the dead accounts fall into the Green group. So rather than a 30-70 split of dormant to active, it’s actually 50-50, making this gray group considerably larger.

The same is true with overlaps with Purple (lots of content) and Blue (lots of followers). As pointed out earlier, there is some relationship between tweeting and network size. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of Purple and Blue groups were the same people. Recognizing that makes the Gray group larger. In fact, since Sysomos found that 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than once per day, about 35% of all accounts fall between daily and weekly use.

I’d love to see someone take another crack at this visualization with a deeper understanding of how the statistics overlap. Perhaps even turn three of those male icons into women to further improve its precision—the Sysomos survey discovered there are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%).

Getting My Geek On
As a sometimes contributor to Wired‘s parenting blog, I’ve managed to publish nine articles this summer for the volunteer group blog, GeekDad:

• See Dick and Jane Bedoop
• Frye? … Frye? … Cameron is Moving and You Can Buy His House
• 10 Internet Memes You Can Share With Your Kids – And a Bunch You Can’t
• The 140 Project: Filmmakers Capture 140 Seconds of Home
• Happy 25th Birthday, PG-13
• Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Mythbusters
• Hey, Kid: Support Your Local Wiki
• Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Harry Potter
• Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from the Apollo Program

The latter “Everything I Know” series has been a fun project to do with Amy. I may get the (unpaid) byline on Wired, but she’s the mastermind behind the actual parenting know-how. Maybe there will be a parenting book project in our future, if we can just get rid of these pesky kids.

To Meme the Impossible Meme

Oh, yeah … I wrote a book, too
You probably can’t tell from looking at this blog, but it has been a busy year. Last July, one of the professors at the School of Informatics passed my name along to a literary agent who was looking for someone to write a Twitter book. By August, I had a deal with O’Reilly Media. It wasn’t until this past March, however, that the book—Twitter API: Up and Running—was released. The effort was twice as long as estimated, both in time and content.

Although the technical descriptions and code in the book haven’t drawn complaints, it is the first chapter of which I am most proud. My original plan was to make that that book and just have a few chapters on the API. O’Reilly being a technical company, my “Twitter Culture” book will have to wait for a future manic period.

That bit of work, though, got me some invitations to do some talks (as well as some I couldn’t attend). The most interesting one happened last night, with a virtual trip to Googleplex for a Tweetup. (Google was smaller than I had imagined, in my little Skype window.) The event was organized by Sudha Jamthe, with help from others—especially Perrine Crampton and Shuchi Rana—and featured a panel of Twitter employees and developers.

The “talk” was pre-produced, to avoid any glitches with the online connection. I’m glad it worked out that way, because sound went in and out throughout the night. It was odd to listen to myself speak and occasionally hear a dog barking in the back of the audio track I made in my downstairs office that day. One happy outcome is that I finally created accounts in Vimeo and SlideShare to try out those services.

Maturation of the Twitter Ecosystem

Ready for Next
I’m at a bit of a crossroads at the moment, considering what my future is going to look like. The academic path I had expected looks less and less appealing by the day, and if it happens, I’m going to aim for a university program that values portfolio-based teaching. More likely, I’ll head back to industry, where I can apply whatever I learned at the School of Informatics to building things. I’ve had a couple projects this summer (one bust, one brilliant) and am spending more time with SociaLens (another place I may be blogging soon). With CHI 2010 deadlines in September, I need to make some decisions about where my priorities will be. It is not far-fetched to imagine taking a year off from the dissertation grind, before it starts in earnest, and play in industry a bit.

Wish me luck.

Twitscoop notes the rise of @reply change protest

The change, reported yesterday, sparked some trending topics that have exploded this morning. People who likely never knew the feature option existed—the default setting, buried in the Twitter user settings on the web site, is the one everyone now has—are twittering in uproar, fueled by angry headlines on popular blogs. The small percentage of users who changed that default to show out-of-network conversation (stats only Twitter possesses) likely doesn’t match the vitriolic reaction showing up on Twitscoop.

Historically, there has been confusion about this little-known setting. The wording implies control over external interaction initiated by people not in your network, not voyeuristic glimpses at the people to whom your network is talking. In the first interpretation, the setting becomes a prevention mechanism for @reply spam, something that typically affects only those with huge networks and some measure of celebrity status. In the second correct interpretation, the setting allows you to see beyond your network through the tweets of those you already have chosen to follow.

There are three main issues that arise from this change:

1. Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
2. User control of the personal information stream
3. Cost of functionality

One other issues is relevant, too, and discussed a bit later.

Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
For myself, my misinterpretation—I wanted to let anyone reply to me—is what led me to change from the default setting in the first place. Particularly when my network was considerably smaller, I used that mode of discovery to find people in Bloomington or other alumni. As my understanding of the feature changed and my network grew, I turned it back to the default to show only conversation with people already in my network.

This had the immediate effect of quieting people I found too chatty. My information stream grew calmer and allowed for further expansion to follow others, people I likely would not have followed because of their own conversational habits or because my threshold of information had been reached. Turning this setting off allowed me to become more connected. The need for discovery lessened to the point where I didn’t miss the out-of-network conversation.

So, yes, the feature that went missing has value, but it isn’t universal value for all people, nor is it suitable for all stages of network growth.

User control of the personal information stream
If anything, the ideal response would be to give users more control over fine-tuning information streams, not fewer. I would still love to see the out-of-network conversations of my local tweeps—to help me continue to identify Bloomingtonians who have joined the system—but my network now contains many different social circles, some of which I don’t have the capacity to join and track. I don’t need the conversational awareness for those people. It would be wonderful to be able to filter content on an individual basis.

Sometimes, however, having more control increases the barriers to use, rather than lowering them. One of Twitter’s strengths is found in its simplicity. More is not always better, especially when there is a vibrant ecosystem of developers ready to scratch the itches of niche groups within the larger community. I don’t have enough information to support the decision to get rid of this particular @reply control, but I do agree with a general philosophy for Twitter to simplify.

Cost of functionality
The underlying assumption is that some internal analysis was conducted to determine that the technical implementation might be improved if Twitter didn’t have to deal with this particular option. Apparently, not many people were taking advantage of this setting, and the patterns of use the analysts can monitor provided evidence that the feature wasn’t adding significant value to Twitter. The only people who can speak to this directly, of course, are the ones who made the decision, so the issue of technical cost-benefit can only presume to be noteworthy.

There is a cultural cost, too. I’m not speaking about the reaction of the Twitter community today, but rather the norms that arise from the 140 character constraint of the channel.

Twitter already made a significant (and widely welcomed) change to include “mentions”—when @username is used anywhere in the message, not just at the beginning of the tweet—a couple months ago. This made it possible to track conversation about you without having to conduct vanity searches or set up special alerts. Although I don’t yet have significant evidence from my research on this point, I suspect that the increased visibility had an impact on how often people reference other usernames, knowing that they would become visible.

The @reply convention was historically flawed. Originally, it allowed a message to be tied to a single user—the one referenced at the beginning of the tweet—regardless of mentions. It could also be attached to the wrong tweet, since there wasn’t a way for third-party developers to associate a reply with a particular message. In fact, @replies were a cultural contribution of the early adopting Twitter community and not something that was part of the original design (about 1 in 4 tweets is a reply).

It seems to me like there is a conscious effort by Twitter to guide use of the system toward more powerful implicit controls. If you want to have someone not in your network see your tweet, a simple @username mention in the context of the message will accomplish that. If you want to help reduce your own network noise, use the @reply convention at the start of the message to keep it relevant to the people who follow you. No need for special settings; this is a behavioral change that puts the onus on the publisher to help make relevancy decisions.

A participant community
There is a fourth key issue: Twitter must involve their user base in decision making about changes. It is not sufficient to simply look at the statistical footprint of use and make unilateral decisions, often without much (if any) advance warning. There are literally millions of people from which to select random samplings and invite into conversations, focus groups and surveys, to get more grounded evidence to support decisions to change the service. I have to assume that Twitter does some of this kind of user experience inquiry, but I have no way of knowing without even more transparency from the company on their process.

For the moment, let’s assume that costs—both technical and cultural—outweighed the benefit of having the option to show out-of-network @replies. Let us also assume that there is a greater plan at work with an eye at shaping the Twitter community behavior for the better. If the decisions came out internally without involving significant input from the people using the system, then Twitter fails the same UX test that guides most technology-driven businesses.

Social Collider, a Chrome Experiment in action

The project is several months in the making. The @socialcollider Twitter account posted the first update about a revision in early January. Social Collider is one of the nineteen initial Chrome Experiments, which showcase interesting uses of JavaScript and web browsers created by designers and programmers from around the world. In the description of their project, Schmidt and Pohflepp describe the information problem:

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

The solution is inspired by visualizations for particle colliders, drawing pictures of how the subatomic matter interacts. The tweets that resonated with others connect horizontally with those of other users writing about relevant topics. Sometimes the connections are direct and obvious, but this visualization also reveals more subtle relationships amongst all the Twitter activity.

To start the visualization, you define two options. First, the keyword search can be done on a username, a phrase, or the trends tracked by Twitter. Second, determine the duration of the data set, from one day up to one month. Once submitted, the querying begins to populate a graph with tweets. The most recent tweets are represented as dots at the top of the screen, and each user in the network appears as its own column of dots—identified by topic, link, or username at the bottom of the screen.

That’s when the magic happens.

Social Collider shows how my tweets are related to others

Using connector cues, such as @username references and shared links, the visualizations starts tracing the connections made between tweets. Every colored track is a new related topic; You can trace the patterns of how the content and people are connected by following any line. A flash of retweets might be a tight circle contained near the top of the page, whereas more persistent topics run the height of the screen. Conversations spiral around between users, easily identified from the mass of dots.

A topic search for my the initial announcement of my book

The AIG scandal is tracked as a Twitter trend

The weaknesses of Social Collider are few but important. Each tweet can be revealed by mousing over any dot, but the target is so small that this becomes a difficult task, impeding exploration. At least on my MacBook, loading this tool results in that jet engine sound that accompanies a heavy processor load. I was unable to leave the visualization, too, without the browser asking me to manually stop the script from running.

I was impressed, however, with the patterns that did emerge. The user search appears to be the easiest to comprehend, showing how my most recent tweets on topics like Star Trek and AIG fit in with or sparked other posts. My new book, “Twitter API: Up and Running,” got a plug and a bunch of retweets a week ago. Those show up as a swirl and a red line crossing several users. My test of the Twitter trend “AIG” was surprisingly segregated, with not much activity running horizontally. I’m not certain what that means, but I do appreciate that the visual patterns are made easy to identify should I want to investigate.

Give it a try. This kind of insight and originality is sure to characterize Twitter visualizations in 2009.

UPDATE: Want proof the Internet works? Lollicode responded to this blog (see comments) and addressed these issues less than two hours after I posted this at 4:50a. Awesome. Follow @twitscooptrends for trending alerts.

Lollicode’s Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com) is arguably the best tool for showing what is trending on Twitter. It leverages the mathematics of financial markets to crawl hundreds of new tweets every minute, extracting the most interesting new words people are posting. The results are displayed in a dynamic tag cloud that moves as the terms change in popularity (There are some widgets to integrate the dynamic cloud into websites). Twitscoop also keeps tabs on its own list of trending topics … different from the one Twitter shares through its search API.

For example, Twitter is currently showing the top trending items as Jim Cramer, #sxsw, Diddy, Daily Show, Austin, John Stewart, Watchmen, Syracuse, Red Nose Day, and Goodnight. Twitscoop’s list: ticketmaster, echo, overtime syracuse 6th, game overtimes, 4th, triple, stewart cramer, henrie, george clooney, and edenfantasys. The differences reveal a greater sense of now in the collective answer to Twitter’s prompt question, “What are you doing?”

On page 66 of the book, I note:

What makes Twitscoop so influential and useful, however, is not simply the fancy web work and computation. Twitscoop has its own Twitter account, which it uses to broadcast the more interesting changes in public chatter as they are detected. I’ve found that I am much more likely to go and explore the site when I’m first prompted that something interesting is going on there. Now, whenever I want to check whether some repetition in my personal information stream has become widespread, I visit Twitscoop to look for the terms in its cloud.

Something interesting and a little disturbing happened to that @twitscoop account recently. On March 10, presumably as part of the current redesign of the site, Lollicode appears to have injected automation into their information stream. Instead of this:

followers now get this:

Not only does this reek of the impersonal, it also feels noisy. I believe there are people who will find the immediacy of the trends changes to be constructive and desired, but I’m not one of them.

Before the 10th, I felt connected to whatever human was manning the account, as if that person were taking some active role in the filtering of what was interesting. I clicked on the links provided, all pointing back to Twitscoop, on a regular basis. I don’t do that with the “new hot trend” tweets.

There are two suggestions I can make to remedy the impersonal nature of new use for the Twitscoop account:

1. Create separate accounts—Digg (or an evangelist of Digg) has several accounts tied to different areas and levels of interest. I follow @digg_2000, which only posts when an item reaches the magic plateau of 2000 diggs. While some of this information is “old” news by the time it is posted here as a tweet, most of it is unique to that community and adds value to my Twitter stream. Similarly, someone tied Twitter to a Dow Jones stock market feed that reports when the index rises or falls by 50, 100 or 200 points. Twitscoop could easily create some special trending accounts with similar throttles. I would probably subscribe to one that groups the trend changes in fives.
2. Add context to the automation—Currently, Twitscoop is posting their new trends tweets in a form of: “http://bit.ly/pbf3R – trending term (new hot trend).” Boring. Unhelpful. With all of the great use of algorithms by Lollicode, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to turn this into a form of a retweet, taking a sample human-written tweet and using it as the alert. As in, “♺ @msrez: thinks the Ticketmaster web site sucks, and just wants a fair way of purchasing an MJ ticket. — http://bit.ly/pbf3R.” Certainly, there would have to be some intelligence added to the automated selection, perhaps in the form of trending terms within the subset of tweets about the main trend. However, I would be much more interested to read some context to the trend rather than just get a single word or phrase as a prompt.

Either way, the current form of automated posting would stop on the @twitscoop account.

There is some irony to this article, of course, since a number of people will be notified of its existence by an automated tweet in my own Twitter stream using Twitterfeed. I’m clearly not against automation as a rule. One definite benefit to the current approach is research; it would very easy to track changes in trends at a granular level simply by mining the @twitscoop tweet stream. I would love to see that information provided in a different delivery format, however, and return @twitscoop to the humans.

I gravitated toward things with which I was most familiar—a phone call, web browsing, Twitter apps. Today’s reflection is about my exposure to the new interactions that came with the phone.

I started a blog thread on Smaller Indiana asking how important your cell phone has become to your day-to-day routine. There is also a short survey about cell phone functions you can complete. If you want to help me out, leaving feedback in any of these forums is appreciated.

Out of the Box
I know this thing is more than just a phone. I got four cables with it in the box to give it computer cred. Even though Hanapin did get a real T-Mobile phone service package with the phone—which incredibly arrived about 20 hours after making the online purchase—I was expecting some kind of activation process, or at the very least a lengthy battery charge. To my surprise, the manual suggested I try the little red power button. Moments later, the Android was squeaking at me.

My first hiccup, though, came quickly: with the login for my Google account. There were only two simple boxes on the screen, plus a displayed button (as opposed to the form factor ones on the device). It didn’t take that long to successfully click on the first one and type my username. Selecting the password field, however, was a challenge for me. The phone alternated between dragging the visible page up and down and briefly highlighting one of the two input boxes. With some patience and better aim, I got the cursor into the proper position to type. My password, though, wouldn’t take. I probably spent a good 5-10 minutes on that one first interaction before I could move forward.

Those two particular interaction issues—an inability to select objects on the screen, and difficulty getting my passwords to take—plagued me as I downloaded and explored a variety of applications.

My most important application is likely going to be the one that gets me access to Twitter. The tool of choice was Twindroid, a third-party Twitter application for the Android that was recommended on a number of sites. After surfing to the web site through a Google search, I clicked download (nothing happened) only to later read that installation required downloading software through the Android Marketplace, a button buried in a hidden window from the home screen. The process of locating and installing Twindroid was quick and easy, but I couldn’t get the application to accept my password. Giving up, I came back to discover it did, indeed, know who I was.

My index finger is huge compared to the links it needs to click

Re-learning Interaction
I’m not certain if this is a breakdown of feedback or expectation. Maybe I have to get used to unpredictability of so many coordinated connections (me, my phone, the data access service, the application, Twitter), where there may be more opportunities for a broken channel. I do know that it was very frustrating for me to not understand why the thing I wanted to do (log into Twitter through Twindroid) wasn’t working. Even with interactions I assumed I knew, there appears to be a separate learning curve unique to the smartphone environment.

This is particularly true with something as simple as clicking on a link or button. Unless the web site or phone application maintains the proportions of the target to the real-world size of the fingers touching them, the interaction creates a barrier to use and efficiency.

So far, I have encountered the following kinds of interactions:

1. Click the Button—This is the most certain interaction, since it involves tactile feedback and some permanence of function. I’ve always got a way to get back to the main menu and navigate backwards in the current breadcrumb, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to move forward. In addition to the five buttons on the front, there are also two side buttons. One controls the volume, and the other takes pictures. I don’t know yet if they serve other purposes.
2. Touch the Screen—I am not used to touch screens, but my expectation is that it is pressure sensitive, like the old kiosks where you have to push to make contact between lower layers under the surface. This is not how the Android touchscreen functions. A light touch is sufficient. In fact, I suspect the pressure I was applying after I first turned it on probably helped spread out my heat signature and made my fingers fatter.
3. Tap the Screen—The first light touch seems to select. Holding down my finger or tapping a selected item appears to click it. Initially, there was a lot of combination interactions trying to force a response. As I have started using Twindroid and Google searches on the phone, though, a lighter touch and tap is giving me more control, and confidence.
4. Drag the Screen—This is a basic but sexy interaction, where you can flick your finger and have the screen fly by in a multi-dimensional scrolling action. It is the same kind of interaction I would have with a piece of paper, so this was the easiest to get the hang of. The only drawback is when I mess up on the touch selection above.
5. Turn the Screen and Slide the Screen—With the iPhone, you can turn the phone and it will detect orientation. While the Android has an accelerometer to potentially have this same response, the orientation of the screen seems to be tied not to the orientation of the device but whether or not the screen is slid open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. It is nice to have the option of how to best view content, as well as having that content adapt to the change in screen orientation. However, sliding the screen out is an extraneous interaction unless you want access to the keyword. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to do some kind of typing without revealing the full keyboard.
6. Typing—For someone who texts at the pace of an arthritic grandmother, I welcome more options afforded a QWERTY keyboard. I found myself typing with my right index finger to try to solve my password entry problems, but in general feel quite comfortable now using my thumbs to hunt and peck. The shift and tab-to-select actions, though, are awkward and non-existent, respectively. At some point, I’m going to compose a blog on the Android to really put it through the paces.
7. Scroll the Selector—Initially, I found the little scroll wheel on the front of the device meaningless. I never used such interaction objects on laptops or mice that had them, so I assumed I would ignore it. It turns out that scrolling ball is very useful for navigating the links and form objects on web pages. It always retains context of what is visible on the screen, even if you scroll from the top to the bottom of the page quickly with the finger drag interaction. It may help solve my fat finger problem trying to hit the small text links.
8. Shake the Phone—I’ve seen the iBeer app on video and other mindless apps that use the accelerometer to sense motion. The first (and maybe only) application I downloaded and installed that relies on this interaction is the Magic 8 ball. I shake the phone, the picture on the screen shakes as well. I am wondering how much shaking interactions will be used in meaningful applications (for example, if I start playing music, can I shake up the playlist to scramble it).
9. Plug in the USB cord—This doesn’t help with my interaction on the screen, of course, but it was one of the first interactions I performed on my Android in order to keep it powered up. The phone comes with two USB connections, one that goes to an outlet and another that goes to a laptop.

Nothing life changing yet, but I have yet to try to integrate my phone into my daily routine.

I am a cell phone n00b

Not Smart at the Start
I never liked the idea of talking on cell phones and only reluctantly agreed to get one to appease my wife’s desire to be able to reach me directly. Mostly, my phone sat in my pocket—often dialing nonsensical numbers as I walked about, until someone taught me how to lock the keypad—and waited until Amy called. I’m a good case study for this kind of journey, being an early adopter of most kinds of technology as an adult, but a reluctant user of cell phones—which means, I have the predisposition to dive into what is for me a new technology.

My hate-hate relationship with cell phones began with the absence of a dial tone, that important cue that on a land line phone tells me that a connection has not yet been established. It was always a bit disconcerting to pick up my simple Nokia 3120 and not hear that familiar buzz. I also rejected texting from the start because it was too awkward to use a numeric keypad to form letters (which I tended to type with my index finger, not my thumbs). In both cases, the barrier to use was found in my attachment to existing routines and experiences.

One unanticipated value that Nokia brought me was a clock. I long ago stopped wearing wristwatches, because they kept stopping on me. Even more than the phone calls, I used my Nokia as a timepiece. It gave me something to look at while waiting for the bus to arrive. In essence, my cell has long served as a watch I can use to communicate, like Dick Tracy’s two-way radio of yore.

Dick Tracy and his two-way radio watch

Evolution of Use
After losing my Nokia bar phone at a local park, I spent some time with an old Motorola phone that had terrible reception. That was eventually replaced with a new Sony Ericsson Z310a, my current phone and my first with a camera.

The transition was somewhat awkward when I realized how much contact information I had kept on my lost phone. Some of the phone numbers of friends and colleagues had only be stored in the cell phone address book and were never replaced (most of my use remains talking to Amy). However, that was the extent of my customization. I didn’t have a custom ring tone, but I did miss the simple chirp-chirp I used with the Nokia. I never wanted my phone to sing as much as signal.

I did try the camera soon after receiving the new phone. The pictures were very low resolution with no real use outside of the device. I managed to get a snapshot of my youngest son to use as a background image, but it hasn’t been used since.

One major behavior change for me came about not because of the phone, but as a byproduct of using Twitter extensively. I configured my phone to receive all direct messages (not the tweets themselves) and found myself texting messages to 40404 while waiting for a bus, riding in the car, or at other locations where my laptop was not available. This was the first appealing consequence of mobility. Much like my switch from desktop to wireless laptop a few years earlier, mobility makes me very aware of how tethered I am in my regular routines.

Looking to Get Smart
None of my prior phones—which also includes a big bulky CellularOne box from the mid ’90s—were considered “smart,” although that line is a bit blurry. A smartphone typically includes the non-phone features that might be found on a typical PDA, such as email clients and note editors. Under that definition, my Sony Ericsson is a smart phone, as it does have email capability (I don’t use it) and MEdia Net, a mobile web infrastructure by AT&T. However, About.com lists the following as additional criteria that a true smartphone will have:

• Operating System—The BlackBerry has BlackBerry OS; the iPhone has the iPhone OS; the Android has the Android OS; and, other devices run on systems like Palm OS or Windows Mobile.
• Software—Smartphones go beyond basic address books and allow you to edit Word documents, edit photos, view maps for driving directions, play music, or manage finances.
• Messaging—Smartphones go beyond the sending and receiving of text messages by providing clients to manage multiple e-mail and chat clients.
• Web Access—Cell phone carriers have data plans that let you access web content, or you can do it pay-as-you-go (at a penny per KB, that can get quite costly). Transfer speed is an issue separate from access; those without 3G data networks will suffer slow navigation.
• QWERTY Keyboard—This is definitely one criterion that keeps my phone dumb. My clamshell device has a standard numeric keypad, not the standard keyboarding layout.

My first experiences with a smartphone were limited to watching friends and colleagues play with new iPhones. The sexy design, touch interface, and explosion of fun and useful applications caught my eye, but what turned me green was the constant access to Twitter, Wikipedia, Google Maps, and other sources of information and connection. My phone configuration allowed me to send out, but not receive.

Crowdsourcing led me to the Android G1

Creating a Monster
When Hanapin offered to get a smart phone for my use, Pat East and I ruled out the iPhone and Blackberry because we already knew people with those devices. I crowdsourced the question and wound up with a strong recommendation from my social network to get an Android G1. After confirming that I could use it without a service plan, we wound up ordering the works from T-Mobile.

My charge now is to figure out how to use it, both from a technical perspective and from an experiential one. I fully expect to have fun exploring applications, probably after some fear and headaches about activating it. I am certain my Twitter behavior will change, as will my reliance on the laptop (which I may power down with greater frequency). Mostly, I want to explore the obstacles this system puts in place that prevent widespread consumption of the mobile web.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson wrote about profile pictures after noticing the variety of image choices used by his followers. His own icon came from a 2006 blogging gig. Initially, it was just one of several Wilson used, depending on the nature of the online presence:

“For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I’d use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I’d use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.”

Over time, the sketched icon became his main visual identity. Wilson noted the benefits (easy to recognize) and potential downfalls (easy to steal) of unifying all profile pictures. He speculated this is why some people change their profile pictures frequently.

Although Wilson refers to them as such, profile pictures are not avatars. Second Life researcher Mark Bell provided this definition of avatar:

Any digital representation (graphical or textual), beyond a simple label or name, that has agency (an ability to perform actions), presence, and is controlled by a human agent in real time is known as an avatar.

The pictures uploaded to social networking profiles arguably have presence and a form of agency—I’d argue the inherent action is reconnection—but Twitter icons certainly fail on the third criteria of real-time control by the human. Though the role they play is primarily one of identification, there are other more subtle functions that emerge when so many people upload so many different images.

How do we use profile pictures?
Through work with Hanapin Marketing, I released a little web survey into the wild last week. It wasn’t the viral stallion I had hoped to find back in the stable today, but we did get several dozen responses.

The 55 people who completed the survey were mostly from the Midwest (77%) but overall represented a dozen states and three countries. While demographics favored men (56.6%) and thirty-somethings (47.2%), one in five participants were over 40. The majority of participants held advanced college degrees and fell within a family income range of $50-100K per year. Despite the call for participation being posted as a tweet, there was no Twitter bias. Three-fourths considered themselves active with both Twitter and Facebook, our primary systems of interest.

We asked several questions about what went into a person’s decision to change her own profile image and evaluate the pictures others use. Most of the respondents fell into two groupings of interest: one based on how quickly they changed their profile pictures; and the other based on gender.

Do as I do
After creating a new social network profile online, the vast majority (70%) immediately changed the profile picture from the default image to something more meaningful—in fact, all but 5% did so in the first week of use. Leaving the default image up even a little while suggests distinctions in other image-related behaviors. Those who changed the default picture immediately were motivated to later changes by things like how the image fits into the design of the rest of the page, how other community members are using their pictures, and how long it has been since the picture was last changed. The slower group was driven by convenience and their emotional state. Quick changers also looked less favorably on the presence of the default profile picture, particularly with strangers, and were prone to change pictures again.

In general, the age and type of picture were the most important factors for both changing one’s own picture and evaluating those posted by others. The majority of participants valued the entertainment value of other pictures, as well. Other factors the participants mentioned specifically were related to identity, style, authenticity and public perception.

Gender also played a distinguishing role. More women in the study were active only on one social network (21% used Facebook only, compared to 13% of men who exclusively used either Facebook or Twitter). Emotional state and changes in life played larger roles when deciding whether to change the picture again. Men were much more likely (80% to 56%) to change their profile picture immediately and were slightly more critical of default pictures in other profiles.

Reality doesn’t bite
Participants were shown three groups of six pictures—intentionally selected as representative types from a random polling of Twitter members—and asked to evaluate these images based on likelihood of friendship, trust, and self-representation. Each group had a mixture of photos, graphics, genders, and eye contact.

How likely are you to befriend someone based on these pictures?

In the first group, the father-child picture (D) garnered the most positive response (46%). This was somewhat surprising since many of the comments participants made about these images expressed dislike of the use of children or more than one person in a profile image. Emotional response and degree of authenticity were also cited. The least likely to spark friendship was the skull (A, 35%).

Who do you trust the most?

The two women in the second group were deemed the most trustworthy (B led with 55%, followed by F at 21%). The least trustworthy was the picture of the train (E, 42%). Participant comments suggest that issues of authenticity factor heavily into evaluations of trust.

Which is most like you?

For the last group, participants were asked to select the image they would be most or least likely to use as their own profile picture. While this is an artificial exercise—we had a couple comments noting the absurdity of limiting profile pictures to these six—the constraint does reveal something about the way we classify ourselves and what factors into our decisions.

The picture of Heroes star Brea Grant (B) was the most chosen avatar, rated highly even for male participants, with the picture of the child (D) a close second. This, despite several comments ridiculing people’s use of their kids to represent their identities online. The picture least selected was the Ogilvy signature logo (A).

While the size of the sampling (both pictures and participants) isn’t sufficient to draw any firm scientific conclusions, the strongest patterns of response came when examining the differences between real photos and created graphics.

The anime in the first group (friendship) was singled out with a number of negative comments, but in general, cartoons and clip art were frowned upon. As is evident in this comparison of positive and negative reactions to each image, graphics profile pictures suffered across the board:

1. Friendship Group:
   Photos: B*(9.3%-20.4%), D (46.3%-3.7%), E (27.8%-5.6%)
   Graphics: A (3.7%-35.2%), C (11.1%-14.8%), F (1.9%-20.4%)
2. Trust Group:
   Photos: B (54.7%-5.8%), F (20.8%-3.8%), E** (5.7%-42.3%)
   Graphics: A (7.5%-21.2%), C (9.4%-11.5%), D (1.9%-15.4%)
3. Selection Group:
   Photos: B (33.3%-15.1%), D (27.8%-17.0%), E (13.0%-7.5%), F (14.8%-7.5%)
   Graphics: A (9.3%-32.1%), C (1.9%-20.8%)

* There is a question in this case whether race or authenticity played a larger role in the negative response to this woman’s picture.
** While the train picture is technically a photo, the comments and reaction lumped it in with the graphics as inauthentic and confusing.

Conclusions
This is a design inquiry, not a rigorous bit of social science. Still, our survey does suggest a few things worth of deeper exploration:

1. What people do influences how they evaluate what other people do.—If you are willing to change your own profile regularly, you are likely more aware than those who don’t of how other people are using pictures. That adds some importance to evaluative criteria that others ignore.
2. Women and men value pictures differently.—Other than the glimpse from the survey of a few clues (more likely to be active in fewer social networking platforms, valuing emotional and situational cues), we can’t say what these differences are. Prior research, however, supports the notion that both use of and reaction to profile pictures is gendered.
3. People perceive photos more favorably than graphics—Profile pictures are not the only input people have when choosing to befriend someone in an online social network, but particularly with strangers, it can play a big role in whether a relationship forms and is maintained. The strongest insight from this study may be revealing the bias against non-realistic graphics of people in a community.

This Christmas season, though, has been painfully short and lacking in resources. It hit me today how much my ideal of Christmas had given way to realities of economics, time and life style choices. Somewhere between pulling the car over to wait out backseat kid fights and discovering the run on under-the-counter kitchen radios at Best Buy came yesterday, I realized how much had been carved away. It is depressing.

Spreading holiday fear

I tweeted as much, and true to Twitter form got some replies both quick and compassionate. My first reaction was to feel embarrassed. There are people starving in China, the saying goes. It isn’t difficult to imagine situations of domestic strife, human tragedy, and even more economic problems then we have. I stopped going down that road when I had another insight: knowing there are people worse off than me doesn’t make me any less depressed about what is happening to my Christmases.

Once upon a time, I was routinely finished shopping by Thanksgiving. In that happy scenario, all I had to do was savor the lights and anticipate the faces. I was able to sleep, to relax, to help others catch up. Every year, it seems, I have a short-lived New Year’s resolution to return to that advanced state of preparedness. Every Christmas, I seem to slouch a bit more toward Bethlehem. What is most disturbing to me is how much of my current mood is being triggered by commerce, or lack thereof. This should all reverse course with a normal life, one characterized by a regular job and a requisite number of hours sleeping each night.

I have inside information that Santa is bringing Archie a friend in a couple days. I got to meet this friend yesterday, when he started bonding with our depressed beagle. My inability to get gifts—or even make them, time has been so precious—for the people I care about will probably be eased by hugging the new addition to our family for a few hours. That image takes the edge off.

I’m anxious to end 2008, which was double-booked from start to finish. I’m ready for next, but current has not let go. So I’ve decided to shake it loose. Tonight, I’m ending the year early with a late-night showing of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” my annual booster shot for holiday spirit. My gift to myself and others will be wrapping up the past with a nice little bow of Zuzu’s petals.

Happy holidays to everyone.