A Twitter-related cartoon from Noise to Signal

No, I’m not talking Butter and his affection for birds. I’m talking about the mini-blog web app, Twitter. It’s sort of a dedicated, more sophisticated “What are you doing” feature from Facebook. You can track what other Twitterers are doing throughout the day, and you can post what you are doing.

Now, as you read what I just wrote about it, you’re going to think about what a silly application that is. Why would I want to know what my friend Aiden in San Fransisco is having for lunch? That’s the way I felt about it, too. But I gave it a chance — I know some people who Twittered, and I wanted to see what the hubbub was about.

I have to say, it is fun. I can get insight from people I might not otherwise talk to — Leo Lincourt, who is a fellow Freethinker, for example. And from Andrew Hoffman, who is in a non-profit networking group with me and runs a great social service organization. I figure otherwise, I would see them once a month and say hi. But Twitter lets me throw little comments out there and get their take on it.

Read the rest below the fold.

It makes you feel connected to people. Whether this is something you want to do or not, it’s up to you. But I am not the only one who noticed this: Lettie Haver, a friend from the same networking group as Andrew, forwarded me a great article from the New York Times about the Facebook app and Twitter. The ever-fascinating Clive Thompson talks in-depth a lot about what I was saying:

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing.

From The PC Weenies

He goes on to talk about Ben Haley, a Twitter convert.

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Thompson may have over-romaticized it as a “’tis the dawning of a new age,” Celestine Prophecy-ish thing, but it is true. I know what’s going on in my Twitter followees’ lives more than in my own sister’s, who lives in Florida. She’s been busy, I’ve been busy, and we haven’t talked for a couple weeks. It takes way more time to have a phone conversation than to post a sentence or two on Twitter.

A side-effect of Twitter is that it is a magnificent caller-to-action. I’ve heard groups like Improv Everywhere and even the Barack Obama campaign use this to gather people to come together for a reason. Here’s what Thompson said:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter — she has more than 5,300 followers — recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

So if you’re a Twitter use, look me up. If you’re not, try it out. You might think it’s fun.