Distilling Twitter Down to 140 Characters
Part II: Easy is the Right Way
Thomas B. McClintock
In last month’s issue, Part I: Now is the Right Time, we discussed how, in 140 characters, Twitter reduces information overload. Much of its success is due to this 140-character cap, which exploits an evolving communication pattern favoring smaller information amounts, sent more frequently.
As a result of its message size, Twitter now challenges Google by allowing users to search what’s happening now, not what was reported days, weeks or months ago in HTML web pages.
But Twitter’s focus on now isn’t the only thing it’s got right. It’s also easy.
Easy Does It for Content Providers…
The Internet and, especially, social media, were already making communication easier before Twitter’s rise. Though the Internet greatly lowered publishing costs in comparison with traditional models— thereby reducing the need for financial backing—for anyone to listen, your idea still needed brand support: The Washington Post attracted more attention than “Joe’s Basement Blog.” With the rise of social media, though, even brand is no longer absolutely necessary.
This is especially true with Twitter, which avoids the closed networks of other popular social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. If you tweet a good idea, followers will retweet (RT) it, and your audience will find you. This disaggregation of content distribution and content generation makes it easier than ever to create and broadcast ideas.
In this “raw” state—without the financial resources and marketing cover of traditional media—ideas published on Twitter are tested and energized by others in a new free market of thoughts. Unfettered from money, and set on a level playing field that no longer requires an existing subscription base, idea development becomes liberated, organic, and truly easy.
…And for Content Seekers
The right idea, told to the wrong audience, is just as bad as poor timing. But Twitter makes it easy for content seekers to find the right idea amid information overload. First, it gets the obvious things right: the interface is free, simple, informal, compact, customizable, cross-platform, and supported by third-party tools. It’s also powerful, with wide-reach, real-time immediacy, and robust search plus filtering.
But the real innovation of Twitter’s idea presentation is its focus on individuals. Twitter is categorized by people, not institutions. A search through Twitter can reveal exactly the individual who can resolve a customer service complaint or seal a business deal. (Websites, in contrast, tend to shield people behind corporate spin and generic “info@” addresses.)
Even more important, Twitter streams can be scanned, allowing followers to browse or peruse at variable degrees of intensity. This is a freedom not found in other forms of communication. Emails, for instance, are either opened or unopened; telephone calls connected or disconnected; and web pages served or left unseen. Twitter streams, however, have their own “dimmer switch,” allowing someone to intensify or fade their scrutiny of a person, organization or topic. Hence, someone hesitant to commit to, say, a trade association’s email list may become a Twitter follower and only note events of interest. Someone too busy for daily newspaper headlines may follow on Twitter, checking only specific keywords.
As shown by the plethora of published Twitter anecdotes—about 62 million references at last count—Twitter's interface innovations make it an unparalleled tool for customer service, referrals, mediation and other communication. Its ease of use aggregates millions of ideas into a collaborative, searchable database, while the timing of these data streams makes them immediately relevant to individuals who need information available in smaller, easily scanned segments.