Broadasting on Twitter

Mack Collier wrote on MarketingProfs about a trend he sees in Twitter - it’s feeling more like a broadcast medium than a social medium.

Earlier this year, I would normally use Twitter during the morning to share links as I went through my feeds. If I found something interesting, I’d share it with my followers. Then at night, I would get on Twitter and use it as a time to interact with others and join in on conversations.

But as constant downtimes have plagued Twitter, I’m finding that the conversations and interaction have all but disappeared. I think this is partly due to many people simply spending time on other sites. But I think the bigger reason is, many people don’t want to try to use Twitter as a place to converse, if the site is going to go down just as an interesting conversation gets started.

Twitter’s ups and downs (and downs and downs) have been the topic of a lot of blogosphere angst lately; I don’t, however, think it has much to do with the phenomenon Mack is commenting on. (I’ll also note that lately, Twitter has been working a whole lot better).

Yes, many of the social media power users have been spending time on Plurk and Friendfeed and Identi.ca lately. I don’t think that means much; Twitter’s power is that people are there, and that it does a few simple things really, really well. Friendfeed does a bunch of things, enough that I just cannot love it (not a knock on them - just my reaction, that without the wonderful simplicity of Twitter the whole business has too much overhead for me to want to bother with it), Indenti.ca is wonderfully Twitter-like except for no one being there (same problem as Pownce), and Plurk failed so miserably when I decided to check it out (site crashed, my preferred common user name got locked up because I was halfway through signing out, nobody there answers email) so I just never went back. Twitter is where the people are.

But here’s the thing: it’s been a broadcast medium for a long time. And the power users are the biggest broadcasters.

I follow 174 people on Twitter, and 256 follow me. When I tweet to 256 people, that’s a broadcast. My numbers are actually quite small; Mack has more than 1,500 followers. Some of them are people he is socializing with, of course; but I seriously doubt he’s having truly social interactions with 1,500 people.

Consider Robert Scoble, the poster boy of social media power users; he’s got nearly 30,000 followers and people he’s following each. That’s not broadcasting?

The one thing that no social medium has done - and I don’t think any ever will - is increase the amount of attention we have for others. I have no idea who most of those 174 people I’m following are, and I don’t read most of what they put out on Twitter. I’m not socializing with them. They are interested in what I might say, I guess, and that’s cool. I’m sure lots of the people following me have no real interest in anything I say, either; I’m just there scrolling by on the list of tweets.

I’m not, by the way, criticizing any of these people, or Twitter. All of this is what it is: the world of social media, where attention is fragmented to the point of meaninglessness. So we do what humans do in the face of an oslaught of stimuli; we pick what we want to pay attention to.

So, if Twitter is seeming less social, I suspect it’s just because there’s a lot more of it. Most of the emails I get telling me that I am being followed are not from people, they’re from nutritional supplements, link farms, and get-rich-quick schemes. (No, I don’t follow back.)

In that kind of environment, there are relatively fewer conversations, because the background noise is going up.

That’s not good or bad, that’s reality. Lots of people will use Twitter to broadcast to thousands. Some conversations will come up. People will make their Twitter A- and B-lists - not even consciously, but they will reply to some contacts with whom they have real relationships, and not bother with others.

We’re human beings, and we can’t have meaningful relationships with 30,000 online friends. (Nor is there any reason to think we’d be better off if we could.)

This is, I think, just part of the natural evolution of these media. No cause for alarm. But certainly an interesting thing to watch.

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