The 140 characters restriction on Twitter

The two main things I find myself doing on Twitter are ”Status interaction” and Socializing through short text conversations.

The first is the flagship text on the home page of the site. With Twitter I can share with others (friends and strangers) what am I doing and find out what others are up to.  My other main activity on Twitter is what I called socializing through short text conversation. I often find myself jumping  into conversations with users I follow. I also look forward to getting feedback on my open questions from both friends as well as unexpected Twitter users. In this realm,FriendFeed is providing a good deal of competition.

The service, as you all now, is often accessed via web, desktop client applications as well as SMS, which seems to have been thought of as the main destination for content creation and consumption. Hence, the 140 character restriction.

But the 140 character restriction runs deeper than a mere technical restriction. I believe that it is a response to the way we generate and consume content nowadays. It is also why I think Twitter is a killer application.

During the first months of 1882, Nietzsche bough a Mallin – Hanses typewriter to help him easy the bare of writing with such debilitated eyes (via – Virtual Philosopher) . On what I find to be one of the most compelling posts on information overload, Nicholas Carr (Is google making us stupid?) explains the impact that the typewriter had on the author:

(…)the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The point here is twofold: the first is that SMS has changed the way we write. With SMS we have learned to express ourselves in a discrete but constant stream of short blurbs. And it works. What´s more, there are things that are better off saying via SMS. Voice mail or email won´t do. It is part of of what seems to be a movement towards lightweight communication schemes that a far as I can tell had their first significant manifestation on the Internet with the IM emoticons and that now have found to be extremely popular on social networks (with the Facebook Poke as well as with SMS, not only we found an ideal medium for specific messages but also we created new layers of socialization). Twitter took two way short text communication strings that where taking place via cellphones and placed them on the web to be indexed (e.g, made searchable) and shared on top of users´s social graph.

The other point worth mentioning is that SMS and the Web not only changed the way we write but also the way we read. We now scan. And for that new reader, Twitter short message offers a format that is easier to consume.

Information Overload

I just added a Knol (new google “wiki-like” project) on information overload. Thought this might be a nice first post for this blog.

Summary:

The amount of information we are now presented on the web is overwhelming. There is more information that we can process. This phenomenon is called “information overload”. Most of the effort on the web to deal with this problem falls under the term “information filtering”

More than a decade into the birth of internet directories and search, the hyperlinked web has provided us with a near instant access to all the information we might need, and more. With the recent exponential growth of user generated content –both general as well as personal information – build on social networks, blogs and micro blogging platforms, the amount of information we are now presented on the web is overwhelming. There is more information that we can process.

The effects of information overload are tremendous. It lowers one’s ability to focus and greatly deteriorates productivity. Time consuming information gathering has been replaced with time consuming information processing.

The response has been an effort to provide information filtering mechanisms to better digest all the information that we are exposed to on a day to day basis.

There are both algorithms as well as social filters to deal with information overload.

One possible non exhaustive classification for social filtering could be:

1. Content ranked by users to assess popularity.

2. Views or comments to assess popularity.

3. Both systems on top of a social graph allows filtering by users you trust or users with similar tastes.

I know very little to nothing about algorithm filtering (looking for more collaborators on this) but it seems to be that most of them rely on establishing correlations on your information consumption patterns. Another widely and current popular use is to leverage the social graph to introduce you to users you might want to “add as friends” and follow.