Qwitter, the Darwinian side of social networks
Twitter is the web service that perfectly epitomizes the information sharing addiction of our age. The micro-blogging platform allows users to create a constant flow of short text-based messages (tweets) that can be spread with different systems, such as SMS, RSS or Instant Messaging. Updates usually concern everyday activities and trivial thoughts, and are shared among circles of friends. It has been argued that getting constant updates from the social network helps the user to develop a sort of social sixth sense that facilitates face-to-face relations, but many commentators see Twitter as the most pointless and addictive internet fad. Qwitter is an additional web service in the Twitter ecosystem that might be seen either as a tongue-in-cheek satire or as a smart exploitation of micro-blogging’s intrinsic weaknesses. Qwitter, not affiliated with Twitter, interfaces with the main system and provides a missing feature: the notification of the users that unsubscribe to your updates. The “quitters” will be exposed with a message like: “John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet: What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?“. The implications of this simple notification are far from trivial. It’s often implied that the sharing of every social gesture strengthens the network, Facebook’s news feed that tracks all the interactions among friends turned out to be its most successful implementation. But Qwitter intervenes in an ambiguous territory pushing information sharing toward the paradox and potentially disrupting the mood that informs platforms like Twitter. Is Qwitter an effort to educate people to more responsible and meaningful acts of communication? Intentionally or not, it provides a sharp commentary of the attention economy in the age of web 2.0: if everybody can communicate, everybody is in perpetual competition. Qwitter simply reveals the Darwinian downside of this economy. — Paolo Pedercini, Neural.
helen
jo
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One Response
Paolo,
As a recent and–relatively speaking–moderate twitter user, I agree that there are many trivial tweets going around the twittersphere.
I use twitter for two main reasons:
1. To practice brevity…
My main purpose in blogging is to gain an audience for my writing. The 140 character limit offers me a wonderful challenge. I try to write aphorisms and haiku. I see it as a wonderful creative challenge.
2. To attract more readers to my blog…
The promotional opportunities that twitter offers are tremendous, if for no other reason than for the sheer rate at which anyone can accumulate hordes of followers. This is why I use http://twitterfeed.com/ to feed my blog posts through twitter. It’s just another place where people search for things of interest.
Notice that neither of my reasons involve wanting to follow others. I do follow a few (relatively speaking) people. I check twitter every day to see if anyone has tweeted anything interesting. I look for like-minded twitterers: people who use it as a challenge to their writing.
It is easy to add people to the list of those you follow with services like http://www.twollo.com/ but the searches on this sight and on twitter itself are lacking. I’m not a tech-knowledgeable person, but I know that the results I get on twitter and on twitter-related services are not nearly as useful as those on google. I think the former use just keyword, with no preference for popularity of previous results.
On the Darwinian side of things, twitter’s success has sparked all of these parasitic entities–that’s pretty interesting.
I do agree that the temptation to use twitter for meaningless trivial tweets is a very big problem for too many twitterers. I am not above this temptation although, I think I am only guilty of it once.
I try to use twitter sparingly (again, relatively speaking), so that those who follow me keep doing so and really read what I write. But not everyone on twitter has the same constraint. There’s a lot of nonsense out there in the twittersphere and it’s hard to find people worth following.
Qwitter reminds us of the need to have purpose in our writing. But as funny as qwitter may be, I don’t think it’s really informative. There are many reasons why people follow and stop following on twitter and, again, much of this has to do with those compiling services that make it so you can add another 500 people to follow in just a matter of minutes.
Finally, I return to my mantra about all new media: there are no rules and it is the need for breaking the mold in the first place that makes the new media even exist.