Why Do We Tweet?
February 25 2009This post has been sitting in my blog drafts pile since August last year; for some reason I never got round to posting it. Recent Twitter-related conversations with friends (including Nick’s recent Twitter post), as well as the move of Twitter into the ‘mainstream’ have inspired me to dig it out, dust it off, and finish it. This was originally going to be a post allowing me to examine why I use Twitter and how it fits into my life, and to open up a discussion of why you, dear reader, tweet (if indeed you do).
So, why do we tweet? Why do I tweet?
Back to the beginning
I found it quite interesting taking a look back at my very first tweets, and seeing how they’ve changed over time. They started off very much to-the-point; simply answering the original Twitter question: What are you doing?
I consciously began every tweet with a verb, as though each was prefixed with an invisible “I am” or “I was”. I did this for two reasons: 1) for consistency, and 2) with the forethought that I might one day integrate my Twitterstream into my blog/website, and I could then automatically pull in what “I am” doing or what “I was” doing at any given time.
So, I began using Twitter in, I guess, the way it was originally intended: I simply stated what I was doing. But due to trends in the way people used it, Twitter evolved. People began replying to each others’ tweets, prefixing their replies with @username to target a particular user. After a while, the folks at Twitter picked up on this, and made it a proper feature of the site. But for a long time, I was reluctant to use it. In fact, it was only after many months that I began using a very occasional @reply, and only quite recently did I finally broke out of my “I am”/”I was” style of writing tweets. I think the reason I was reluctant to adopt @replies was that to me, they changed the nature of Twitter; they added extra functionality, and to me detracted from the original idea behind the service. “What are you doing?” isn’t answered by replying to a friend.
The UNIX Philosophy
If you’ll allow me a brief segue, I think I may be able to explain why I wasn’t a fan of @replies to begin with, and it’s best summed up by the UNIX philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is really a set of 9 precepts, but it’s sometimes simply summed up as:
Do one thing, do it well.
To me, allowing one to answer the question “What are you doing?” and to see my friends’ answers to this question is doing one thing, and well. Using such a system to chat with one another seems to be another use entirely - and there are far better software systems whose whole purpose is to allow you to chat. They do one thing, and well.
This is the reason I don’t like or use Facebook: from my point of view, it’s about as far away from ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘do one thing, do it well’ as you can possibly get. If Facebook was simply a way to keep a public profile, and to get in touch with old friends (and for them to get in touch with you, via your profile), then fine. That’s doing one thing. But Facebook attempts to be:
- A photo gallery.
- A chat system.
- A blog system.
- A Twitter-like status-updating micro-blogging tool.
- A video hosting system.
- A messaging system.
- An application platform.
- And much more besides.
And I’d argue that it does none of these things particularly well. For instance, the photos section of the site (for those of you unfamiliar with it) only displays images at a maximum resolution of 604 pixels wide (whoever decided that?!), and it doesn’t even store the original image. Just ghastly - your images deserve better than that. There are already many pre-existing systems that are targetted specifically at the various functions that Facebook half-heartedly includes, and they do a much better job of it. Small is beautiful. I think @lottiotta summed it up fairly well, recently:
Twitter for status, flickr for photos & email for keeping in touch. Will quit facebook; not ‘cos of the drama, just ‘cos I don’t need it.
5:52 PM Feb 18th
I have Flickr for photos, Jabber/MSN for chat/instant messaging, WordPress/Tumblr/etc for blogging, Twitter for status, Vimeo (or YouTube, if you like) for video, e-mail for sending messages, and a computer and a web browser in which to run my applications. Sorry, Facebook, but I don’t need your half-baked features and your incredibly low signal-to-noise ratio.
So really, why do I tweet?
I joined Twitter to answer a question: “What are you doing?”. So that’s what I did, and I hoped someone would perhaps have an interest in what I had to say. And even if no-one cared, I did - Twitter essentially allows me to create a diary, without even thinking about it. In years to come, I’ll be able to look back and have a fairly decent record of what I got up to in the early 2000s and beyond.
And once I started tweeting, and my friends did too, there arose a larger, secondary, less selfish reason to use Twitter: it allows me to more easily be a part of my friends’ day-to-day lives. Friends who I might not see for days or weeks otherwise. I know what they’re doing, as they do it, as though I was there with them. It allows me to share in their lives, when I’m unable to be there in person. And, at least to me, it helps me feel closer to them.
I have something of a problem with Twitter’s current ascent towards being ‘mainstream’. In recent weeks, an increasing number of high-profile celebrities have begun using Twitter (thanks in no small part to @stephenfry), and this has caused people who would ordinarily have absolutely no interest in Twitter to sit up and take notice. The regular media have latched on to it, resulting in frankly trashy pieces of reporting, telling people how to get started and what they should be doing with it. I’m sorry, but if you need a guide to tell you this, you’re probably not in it for the right reasons, and you’re just doing it for the sake of it. One piece I came across at the Times Online stated:
“it’s not about connecting with people you know, it’s about following people that interest you.”
To me, this isn’t Twitter as I know and love it. To me, Twitter is precisely about connecting with people I know. In fact, I only follow 2 or 3 people who I don’t actually know/haven’t actually met. Fortunately, Twitter by its very nature lets you avoid the things you don’t want to see, and so by and large people can use Twitter how they like without impacting too much on anybody else. I couldn’t give a crap about celebrity gossip, so I’m not in it for that - Twitter is not my ‘Entertainment Weekly’. Twitter isn’t my RSS reader (despite many websites seeming to think otherwise and using Twitter to push out news which really deserves to have proper articles written about it, in the proper medium). Twitter is not my e-mail: (you don’t have to read every single message). Twitter isn’t my f*cking khakis.
Twitter is my friends.
Why do you tweet?