Twitter, emergent properties and continuous partial attention
I managed to squeeze 3 buzz-phrases into 1 title!
Continuous partial attention is one of the Harvard Business Review’s breakthrough ideas for 2007. I was reminded of this when I finally took a look at Twitter today. Continuous partial attention is all about people having too many things going on at once, like when you go to a meeting and everyone’s so busy with their Blackberries they’re not listening properly to each other. When I worked with a mobile telco in 2003 they were all texting all the time. I thought it must be their business at the time, but now most people seem to do it.
Anyway, where was I? Twitter is a website that allows people to log details of their daily lives, like “I’m writing my blog on the train”. Sound dull? It mostly is, very dull. One or two people are using it in more interesting ways, real time note taking during speeches might be an example. Most of it is tedious and would hardly be of interest even to the people who know the authors. It almost seems like a way for people to share their continuous partial attention problem with the World, and why would we need that?
I can see 2 reasons why Twitter might be interesting.
The first reason is that Twitter has been built as a piece of infrastructure. You can post to it and view it from the website, of course, but they’ve built SMS and web service interfaces for posting, and RSS feeds, SMS and other outputs for viewing. It’s actually a piece of messaging middleware that could be used for lots of things. Someone I read a couple of weeks ago was thinking of using it to keep them posted on events from their home security system. This means it’s not limited to what people seem to be doing with it interactively today (”oh, look, someone’s just got back from a coffee break!”) but has extensability built in. This is interesting.
The second reason is Twitter’s potential to have emergent properties. These are unexpected traits that appear as it grows and develops. Imagine if 100,000 last.fm users were suddenly broadcasting what they were listening to right now through Twitter, and you could watch a stream or a chart of those events. 5 users is boring, but millions can start to look very interesting in aggregate. And how about if the last.fm information could be combined with that from other music players, or geo-location information could be included in the messages?
We don’t really know what Twitter’s emergent properties might be, yet. They wouldn’t be emergent if we did, of course. As a potential channel, and as part of a mash-up, it’s an awful lot more interesting than it would superficially appear.
The first time I saw the site, I thought it was a complete waste of time. However, I think it could be useful for project managers or traffic managers to keep track of what people are working on. They could shift around resources without having to chase around and peer over everyone’s shoulders. Plus, if copywriters, designers, etc. updated which jobs they were working on on Twitter, just think of how easy it would be for them to fill out their timesheets at the end of the week!