Distilling Twitter Down to 140 Characters
Part I: Now is the Right Time
Thomas B. McClintock
Why Twitter Impresses Dialogue Experts
Despite jokes about Twitter users informing the world of what they ate for breakfast, the Twitter network conveys an astonishing amount of useful information in the thousands of tiny sentences transmitted each day. In fact, in just a few years, Twitter’s growth as a communications medium has changed the communications landscape and has helped elevate social media above press releases, newspapers and email in immediacy.
I’ve often thought about how much meaning gets packed into some of the 140-character tweets. I got some further insights on tweet structure recently while attending a recent CodeBaby Forum on Social Media. (CodeBaby is a leading provider of virtual agents, or speaking avatars, used to communicate on websites.) I learned that CodeBaby has been successful at distilling online communication into effective dialogue scripts which its digital characters follow to interact with site visitors.
These dialogues are composed of discrete conversation segments, which CodeBaby has found work best when they last about 7 seconds. (Longer than 7 seconds risks losing the visitor’s attention; shorter than 7 seconds may not convey information well enough for useful interaction.) How many characters does it take to spell out 7 seconds of dialogue? Turns out, it’s about 140—a tweet’s length.
So, Twitter’s architects were on to something when they established their tweets’ size limit. Stating it in about 140 characters: Twitter reduces info overload, thru easy creation and access of a customizable database of immediately relevant data, ready for broadcast. Tweets are long enough to convey a basic thought in just a few seconds’ reading time. Not only that, but the messages are easy to store, search, retrieve and aggregate.
Now is the Right Time
The right idea, introduced at the wrong time, is actually just the wrong idea. Fortunately for Twitter, the social web was just coming into its own in August 2006 when the service was introduced. Though many have viewed it as a platform for trivial or even banal information, Twitter is actually an answer to information overload, arriving at the right time due to its evolutionary and revolutionary qualities.
To the first point, communication has evolved from sending more information less frequently, to sending less information more frequently. This evolution has played out in the continuing trend from conveying important information by letters and newspapers, to increasingly brief and accessible message platforms that include email, blogs, instant messaging, text messaging and, now, Twitter. [1] This evolution is made possible by increasingly sophisticated database-search technology, which cobbles together data disseminated across separate points in time into useful information that we view as Twitter streams.
Meanwhile, one of these communication channels, the blog, was actually revolutionary because it was the first broadcast medium to truly facilitate feedback. Even better, because feedback is allowed but not required, the medium is less intrusive and demanding than narrowcast media (i.e., email, instant-message or an old-fashioned letter), which generally require (or imply a desire for) a response from the recipient. Instead, blogs merely invite feedback, thereby enabling the power of the community without the pressure of a personal relationship.
These two fundamental changes to how we communicate are what Twitter—a microblog and heir-apparent in the blog’s line of succession—leveraged to become one of the top 50 most-visited sites. In March 2009, Nielsen Wire pegged Twitter’s year-over-year growth rate at an astonishing 1,382%, and its user base at 7 million monthly visitors. [2]
Twitter accentuated its appeal in April by adding a search bar. In its most recent redesign, the search bar was added as the dominant feature on the homepage, encouraging visitors to search even without logging in or having to create a username. These simple moves challenged the online status quo. How? By offering not a search of web pages discussing what’s already occurred, but a search of what’s being discussed “now.”
It’s the conversations about what’s happening “now” that matters most to those who follow and profit from the daily zeitgeist. This is why so many are asking how Google will respond to Twitter. While Google may buy Twitter, or otherwise co-opt its “now” advantage, the 800-pound search gorilla is already responding by indexing Twitter handles (user names).
Next Month: Why Easy is the Right Way, and How Organizations Reach End-Users Through the Twitter “Dimmer Switch”….
- See an illuminating discussion of this complete with illustrations: Alex Iskold, “Evolution of Communication: From Email to Twitter and Beyond,” ReadWriteWeb, May 3, 2007.
- Michelle McGiboney, Nielsen Wire “Twitter’s Tweet Smell of Success,” March 18th, 2009.