Over at the Inverse Square blog, Tom Levenson announces that he’s started Twittering in a post that contains, via Carl Zimmer, the best argument for why Twitter matters:
Carl laughs me out of my seat. He points out that he tweeted his visit to my class, and received in return a couple of requests to pass on hellos from blogospheric friends I haven’t seen since January (hello back, Dave); that a growing audience exists to feed him almost real time reactions to questions; that whatever I might think there is a hierarchy of information, and if I ignore the swift and the short, then I lose my chance to talk to people in conversations each party values….
It’s as strong an argument for the worth of Twitter as you’ll find, and similar to what I realized about the usefulness of FriendFeed back in September when people were using it to record and discuss the Science in the 21st Century meeting. It also contains the core of why I am unlikely to ever use Twitter much.
The key problem, for me, is one of time scales, something I didn’t really appreciate until Cameron Neylon laid it all out:
But while everyone is focussed on “real time” I think it is starting to reveal a more interesting problem. One I’ve been thinking about for quite a while but have been unable to get a grip on. All of these services have different intrinsic timeframes. One of the things I dislike about the new FriendFeed interface is the “real time” nature of it. What I liked previously was that it had a slower intrinsic time than, say, Twitter or instant messenging, but a faster intrinsic timescale than a blog or email. On Twitter/IM conversations are fast, seconds to minutes, occassionally hours. On FriendFeed they tend to run from minutes to hours, with some continuing on for days, all threaded and all kept together. Conversations in blog comments run over hours, to days, email over days, newspapers over weeks, academic literature over months and years.
Different people are comfortable with interacting with streams running at these different rates. Twitter is too much for some, as is FriendFeed, or online content at all. Many don’t have time to check blog comments, but perhaps are happy to read the posts once a day.
This is the essence of my problem with Twitter. The way I work means that I really can’t keep up with conversations that take place on the time scale of Twitter. I can’t even keep up with active blog comment threads– I barely look at Making Light any more, because in the time between a post going up and that post turning up on my RSS feed, fifty comments have been posted. And by the time I read all of those, another twenty have gone up, and by the time I can formulate a reply to any of them, three other people have said what I was going to say. I can barely manage to keep up with the comments here.
I haven’t really experimented with Twitter, other than catching a little bit via FriendFeed. Dave Munger is one of the people I follow, and the vast majority of his FriendFeed traffic is really from Twitter. And I’m seriously considering hiding it all.
The problem is that what I’m seeing on his Twitter feed is one half of six different conversations. It’s like living inside Overheard in New York, only with fewer crazy people. And yeah, I can follow links to piece together more of the conversation, but when I do that, I find myself wasting an hour clicking through random Twitter feeds instead of doing anything remotely useful.
Especially since the arrival of SteelyKid, my work pattern just doesn’t let me fit in with these rapid-fire conversations. I’m actually just about the opposite of Walter Pincus’s typical online reader, who mostly reads web sites between 10 am and 4:30 pm– when I’m at work, I limit myself to only GMail, and maybe Facebook and FriendFeed. I need to monitor my email to watch for students in distress or spam attacks on the blog, but anything more than that is too much of a time sink. When I really need to get work done– book revisions, say– I print it out on paper, and go to the campus center or some other location where I don’t have Internet access at all.
The bulk of my blog reading is done in the morning before work, and in the evening after dinner. Which means I’m only really comfortable working with information streams that have a natural time scale of several hours. Twitter is just incompatible with the way I have to work, by its very nature.
Ironically, a big part of the problem I have with fast information streams comes from spending too much time online. After fifteen-plus years on Usenet and blogs, I actually write more slowly than I used to. Watching thousands of promising conversations go horribly wrong thanks to somebody taking offense at an offhand remark, I’ve become an obsessive reviser– I re-read, re-edit, and re-phrase my writing almost compulsively, in hopes of avoiding some grand blow-up.
This has, at least, kept me out of debacles like RaceFail, but it also keeps me out of things like Making Light and Twitter. There are no fast comments in my world any more, which means that blog reading needs to be sharply curtailed during the hours in which I’m trying to be productive.
So, while I can see the positive features Twitter has to offer, its short intrinsic time scale means that I’m unlikely to be able to take advantage of them. By the time I get to read them, let alone formulate a response, the conversation has moved on to other things.