Twitter

Thanks to Kelly Abbot of Dandelife for inadvertently introducing me to Twitter, a daily journal widget that has great potential for both community building and design. Built by Obvious a year ago and released for public consumption last fall, Twitter has tools for updating and displaying the short journal entries of yourself and friends to keep apprised of what everyone is doing.

Although it is also possible to post via web or cell phone text messages, I prefer IM. After registering my account with Twitter, I am able to post little 140-character snippets at the major breakpoints of my day or as news comes in. Amy—who lacks Internet access this week—is doing the same from her cell phone. Attached to the front of our blog are two little widgets that allow the latest update to become visible, with navigation and links to show the full history. There are other tools that allow for multiple account updates in the same content pane, and Twitter has a wiki and an API that can guide development of custom applications. There is also a pretty cool desktop tool for Mac, Twitterific, which allows me to view friend updates without having to constantly ping my own blog.

What is most interesting about Twitter is the variety of use. Amy and I are using Twitter to keep tabs on our respective spring breaks. She’s in Florida with the boys, and I’m in Bloomington doing academic stuff (I include this). Neo-technologist politician John Edwards, who clearly has a Web 2.0 savvy office staff, is using Twitter on the campaign trail. While the individual messages are only semi-informative, the collective log is an interesting read that tracks with great precision where, when and what Edwards is doing.

In this sense, Twitter has great potential as a tool for design inquiry. Since it can incorporate both text and images, and can be updated from a variety of sources (web, cell phone, IM), Twitter could be utilized to see how a community of users interacts with both products and each other in context. Context matters in what kind of tool Twitter becomes. At the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) this week, Twitter had some plasma screens set up to encourage attendees to post their journal entries to a public log. (Maybe that is why my IM updates had problems Sunday and Monday?) Behavior must have changed from personal contact to a sort of competition as each post easily gets lost in an ocean of other journalists. That makes Twitter a very flexible platform for design research.

The primary value of the tool, though, is the small, informal contact between individuals. It has been likened to bumping into someone in the hallway and asking, “What’s up?” Ian Curry of Frog Design wrote a great blog post about Twitter, saying “it’s not so important what gets said as that it’s nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.”