03 Feb 09 Twitter is a chorus, not a bunch of solos

I have struggled with language to describe the people whose web page citations appear on Tweetsnet.  I started with a simple illustration about influence, the idea that people whose followers have more followers are potentially more influential, that influence is at least a second-order phenomenon.  But that doesn’t really describe what I’m doing.  I also experimented with the word “perceptive,” thinking that people who regularly are among the first to cite web pages that become popular may not be influential, they might just be good at seeing where things are headed.  But that’s not the whole story.

I think I finally found the right phrase when I updated Tweetsnet’s “About” page to say that it looks for people who are “in tune” with what becomes popular.  I see Twitter as a platform where people constantly organize themselves into choruses, amplifying the most pleasing melodies, generating and discovering harmonious ideas.  As with flocking behavior, these choruses have no single leader, but unlike a flock (as far as I know), some people are clearly more “in tune” than others.  Those are the people Tweetsnet seeks to identify – those who most frequently cite web pages that become popular.

I suspect there is a great opportunity in reporting what the choruses, known and discovered, are singing about.  In other words, monitoring the buzz in sections of an ecosystem of interacting, overlapping shared-interest communities.  This is where I want to take Tweetsnet, generating verticals, starting with known popular subject areas such as social media.  I’m sure there’s a lot of thinking and experimentation to be done about the ways we could define the intertwined borders of such choruses.  One thing I’m sure about – we need to change the way we tend think about redundancy.

Our left brains tend to think that duplicated effort is inherently wasteful, but the fact is that we are creatures of community.   But here’s the most important idea to take away from the “chorus” metaphor: when a bunch of people act similarly in social media (e.g., post the same URL), it is not redundant, it usually adds value.  That is deeply contrary to the one-to-many 20th century idea of information distribution, in which achieving stardom, not harmony, was the goal.  We still have room for stars, but some of them will be choruses.

Here are some thoughts on features that contribute to Twitter’s “choral value.”

• Retweeting has very choral  high value, as it strengthens the “melody” – people’s deliberate arrangement of information into tweets – and the “harmony” – the commonality among Twitter users that goes beyond simply posting the same information.
• UI design that makes retweeting easy is good, as long as it doesn’t encourage people to spew everything.
• Excessive tweeting and retweeting becomes noise – witness the efforts I’ve had to make to remove aggregators from Tweetsnet.  The greatest value is added by the “jazz” tweeters, who have a melody and know how to harmonize, but aren’t afraid to improvise.  In other words, have a focus, but don’t be a robot about it.
• Anything that shows how much human energy and thought went into a tweet adds value.  Anything that makes it easy to tweet will eventually diminish the value.  This is why the 140-character limit has added value – even headlines often are bigger, forcing people to think about how to squeeze information.
• Hashtags reduce Twitter’s choral value as  ”solos” they do more to discourage than encourage retweeting.  If a tweet is already tagged, I think people tend to assume there’s no need to retweet because interested people should be monitoring the hashtag.
• Followering somebody only matters if you take action; the main visible action is retweeting.  Blogging about something you found on Twitter would add “choral” value if there were an easy way to discover it.
• Twitter’s APIs make it fairly easy to track user, URL and word usage, which is good data not just for Twitter’s basic features, but for discovering things we didn’t know to look for.  It’s great that everything is open by default, unlike most other social networking platforms.

What’s the “choral value” you see in Twitter?  What could the company do to further encourage it?

P.S. I’m going to change Tweetsnet’s name to TwURLedNews.

Tags: tweetsnet, twitter