Micro-blogging service Twitter seems to be enjoying a surge of interest lately. Much of the conversation seems to be a renewed effort to define (or at least describe) just what this Twitter thing is.
The roundup (in no particular order):
- Maggie posted Lee LeFever’s recent CommonCraft video on Twitter. Note: I usually gush about Lee’s videos, but I just didn’t think Lee captured the essence of Twitter the way he has with RSS, social networking, etc. It feels like an out-dated description of Twitter’s original intent rather than the reality of what it has become.
- Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb wrote that Twitter Is The Tech Water Cooler. My SMG colleague Rob has made a similar analogy in the past.
- Chris Garrett at BlogHerald wrote that Twitter is like a coffee break.
- Nathania Johnson at Search Engine Watch thinks that Twitter might be the new Google alternative.
- Jeremy at ShoeMoney.com thinks that Twitter is somewhere between IM and a blog.
My $0.02.
The water cooler and coffee break analogies are pretty close and certainly capture a lot of what we see in the Twitter-verse. My preferred analogy, however, comes from the few months that I spent working online from a local coffee shop and the may hours I’ve spent in little pubs. Twitter is either a pub or a cafe – depending on your preference and/or the time of day.
Twitter is much like these places for a number of reasons:
First, every conversation is somewhere between public and private. You might be sitting in a booth having a conversation that may be private – but since you’re in a public place, it is certainly not secure.
Second, you can talk to one person at a time or many. A Twitter conversation can be a quiet chat in the corner, or you standing up on your chair to make an announcement to the room.
Third, you get interrupted a lot. Sometimes it’s someone barging in halfway through an ongoing conversation that they only half-heard. Other times someone just walks in, heads straight for you, sits down and stars chatting.
The pub/cafe analogy isn’t perfect, but I think it comes closer to capturing the full breadth and depth of the Twitter experience. What do you think? How do you explain Twitter?
ShareRelated posts:
- Twitter is down – and I’m OK
- Debating the Benefits of Twitter
- Fleet Thinks Scoble is ‘Dead Wrong’ About Twitter
- Canadian Twitter Traffic vs. Facebook
- Twitter Spam Doesn’t Exist
Tags: Twitter
Colin – fantastic analogy,… while twitter is hot now I wonder, will the Influencers be using it this time next year? or will they have found a new form of communication/toy?
I prefer to think of Twitter as a bookmarking tool for thoughts. I have wordpress scraping my twitter feeds and converting them into posts. The immediacy/simplicity suit my needs and allow me to actively maintain my sites without a large investment of time.
[...] Twitter is the world’s largest pub. If you walk in with earplugs in and start talking to everyone – you will probably get hurt. On the other hand, if you try to sit at every table and never say a word, well, you’re probably just hurting yourself. The two extremes. [...]
[...] have been a number of interesting parallels made between Twittering and having a conversation at the Pub. I prefer to think of Twittering as writing on the pub’s bathroom wall. The message is [...]
[...] I’ve said before that the best offline analogy to Twitter is busy pub or cafe – depending on the time of day, I suppose. That analogy was driven home for me last week when several local Twitterers gathered in a bar in downtown Detroit for a Tweetup. What did we do there? Mostly we did what we do on Twitter – minus the 140 character limit. We made introductions, talked about Twitter and social media, politics, sports, and bikers (don’t ask). [...]