Last week I gave a brief presentation about Twitter to a Bay Area business group, many of whose members weren't using Twitter because they found it perplexing, silly, or pointless. In preparing, I read a lot of articles about using Twitter for business, and I thought back to my own mystified antipathy when I first learned about Twitter two years ago (one year after it launched). And I asked myself: What makes Twitter so hard to understand and to explain to others?
I came up with my own primary reason, which I'll get to later. But two days after my presentation I chanced upon the best explanation of all. In The Other Blog with No Name, English blogger Tim J asks "Why is Twitter so confusing?" and concludes: because the way Twitter describes itself is misleading.
In short, Twitter has a language problem.
Here's the evidence.
When you first visit Twitter.com, you're greeted by a screen that should tell you, simply and directly, what Twitter is and why you should sign up. Instead, you see this:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Most of that statement is flat-out untrue, and that's where the confusion begins. Yes, Twitter can connect "friends, family, and co-workers," but its most valuable function—the one that most Twitter users single out—is its ability to connect you with people you don't know. In that it's completely unlike other social-media platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook, which require permission to connect and which even (in the case of LinkedIn) warn you not to connect with anyone you don't know. Twitter sets no such barriers. If I'm amused by Paula Poundstone or eager to learn from Robert Scoble or curious about the Library of Congress, I can follow their tweets. They can then choose to follow mine, or not.
Some people do send "quick, frequent" messages, known as tweets; but others tweet only occasionally, crafting their tweets with great care, distilling them to pack maximum meaning into the 140-character limit. (For example, Twitter turns out to be ideally suited to haiku.) Some people don't send any messages at all. They just read others' tweets. That's OK, too (but not nearly as rewarding as full participation).
As for answers to "What are you doing?" it didn't take long for the Twitter community to discover a much broader and vastly more interesting range of possibilities: sharing links and tips, spreading news, telling jokes, publicizing events, replying to or forwarding ("retweeting") other people's tweets. Twitter has even been used to locate missing children and raise money for charity.
On a more mundane level, and by way of illustration, here are some of the tweets I sent during a recent 24-hour period:
Use www.googlefight.com to stage a showdown between spellings--e.g., "alot" vs. "a lot." Ding!
It's a bad time for biotech companies whose names begin with A and include a V. http://is.gd/r5Mr
Sighted in Peet's, Piedmont Ave.: Seventy-ish guy in NRA Life Member cap reading "Kali: The Feminine Life Force."
How long before a high school sports team names itself the Fighting LOLcats?
As you see, none of these little reports is about "what I'm doing." Rather, they're about what I'm reading, observing, or thinking. And I haven't even included all the replies I've sent, or the private tweets ("direct messages," in opaque Twitter lingo), seen only by their recipients.
Other misleading or meaningless Twitter language includes:
- Update. On Twitter.com, this is the word that appears below the "What are you doing?" text window. The first time I saw it, I assumed it meant "refresh the screen." But in fact it means "send your tweet." Oops.
- Status. What are you updating when you press Update? Your "status," even though (says Tim J) "you’re normally not updating anything or talking about your 'status'—which ought anwyay to mean your standing in the community, not a piece of text." That's not how Twitter explains it in the company-origin story on its About Us page: "Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept." That's three misleading concepts right there: friends, what they're doing, status.
- Timeline. This is the dumb Twitter term for any collection of tweets—your own, or those of you and the people you follow, or those of the entire Twitterverse (aka "public timeline"). A more logical metaphor would be "stream," because the input is constantly changing and time is only one of its dimensions.
- Profile. On most sites, a profile is a biography or set of preferences, but not on Twitter. Here it's your personal feed: the tweets you have sent. For the usual profile information—your time zone, your location, your one-line bio—you must go to Settings. And there, confusingly, you'll read this tip: "Filling in your profile information will help people find you on Twitter." So a profile is this thing, and also that other completely different thing. Gah!
- Replies. You can address a tweet to another user by placing the @ symbol before that user's Twitter handle (for example, @Fritinancy). But this action isn't always a "reply." I can, for instance, write, "Do yourself a favor and follow @wisekaren." In that tweet, @wisekaren will be a link to Karen's Twitter page, but I'm not "replying" to anything. Twitter finally caught up with this one and changed "@replies" to "@mentions."
- Connections. This is a tab on the Settings page that has nothing to do with the people you're connected with or the devices on which you connect to Twitter. Instead, it's about "the applications you've allowed to access your account." My Connections page shows that I've allowed access to something called WeFollow. I had no idea it would appear there. In any event, the page should be titled Access.
- Nudge. No one I asked knew what this command was for. It seems to be an analogue of the ultra-annoying "poke" on Facebook: a reminder that "I haven't heard from you in a while." Twitter says a nudge is "a friendly note sent to a friend's phone" (suppose your service doesn't include a text plan?) "reminding him or her to update your Twitter profile." Actually, that should be "update his or her Twitter profile," not yours, and remember: a profile isn't a profile.
There's other Twitter lingo that just irks me, such as the "Hey there!" greeting that appears when you click through to the page of a new follower. I'm sure Twitter thinks this salutation is friendly and informal, but to me it's like an elbow in the ribs.
Usually when a brand gets so much of its vocabulary wrong the business either fails or undergoes a dramatic overhaul. Yet Twitter has succeeded. Why? Because Twitter is much more than the Twitter.com web site. In fact, there is almost no reason to ever use the Twitter web site. Instead, most users, myself included, choose from a panoply of third-party applications—all free, like Twitter itself—that are built on the Twitter API and display the same content (or timeline, or stream) in very different forms. Once you've registered with Twitter, I recommend you flee the site for the much better designed TweetDeck or iTweet or any of the applications for mobile phone. I used to recommend Twhirl, but its developer, San Francisco-based Seesmic, just last night launched Seesmic Desktop, which is far more sophisticated and legible, and which may become my preferred Twitter "client." Seesmic and the others have taken healthy liberties with the official lingo: Seesmic says users can "listen, reply, share, and organize," which is a lot more accurate than "update your status on a timeline." The Twitter alternatives also incorporate many conveniences lacking in Twitter.com: instant URL-shortening—of no consequence when you're "updating your status" but vital when you want to direct people to, say, your latest blog post—easy retweeting, auto-refreshing, and no-brainer uploading of photos.
Before I read Tim J's post (and I encourage you to read it yourself; it covers far more than I've been able to here, and is very well written), I had identified another cause of Twitter confusion. It's what I call the geographic fallacy. In the 15 or so years since the launch of the first web browser, we've internalized place-based metaphors for our Internet activity: We talk of web sites, we go online, we search. But Twitter isn't a fixed place on the web like Facebook (which is restricted to Facebook.com) or LinkedIn (which is restricted to LinkedIn.com). It's more like a moving sidewalk, or a cocktail party with multiple interesting conversations that can be joined from multiple vantage points such as TweetDeck or iTweet or your cellphone.
Changing the geographic metaphor to a social/conversational metaphor proves to be harder than you might think. And Twitter isn't helping. It hasn't crafted a useful narrative about itself ("What are you doing?" ain't it) or come up with accurate, meaningful language to tell the story. In the meantime, its users have shown immense creativity and flexibility in devising their own definitions.
UPDATE: Twitter's language problem, one year later.
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Image: the Twitter Fail Whale, displayed whenever Twitter experiences an outage or is overloaded.
I'll grant you most of this post except that "direct message" is the exact opposite of "opaque". It's a message that goes directly to another user. What more do you want?
Granted, I think this ties in with my own observation that much of the frustration and bewilderment surrounding Twitter comes (for better or worse) from people who have little or no experience with older forms of internet communication. In this case, "direct message" is borrowed from the terminology of message boards and chat rooms, some of which software allows users to communicate privately in a form similar to email but without having to divulge email addresses. This is exactly what the makers of Twitter have adopted here; except that they have imposed the ubiquitous character limit, it's a direct lift.
So, really, it's "private tweet" that would be opaque. To echo a thousand technophobic journalists, what the heck's a tweet? "Message" is an established part of the internet's vocabulary -- witness message boards and instant messaging, and users of MySpace and Facebook can send messages to one another as well. Twitter's proper context isn't just social media or networking; it's the whole spectrum of internet communications that came before it. Twitter simply infuses the new identity sensibility of social media into an older type of activity.
Posted by: jfount | April 08, 2009 at 12:02 PM
@jfount Your point is well taken. Speaking for myself, although I've been online since the early Pleistocene, I've had limited experience with chat rooms and bulletin boards. My understanding, however, is that Twitter was modeled on SMS (short message service) and texting, which accounts for the 140-character limit (allowing up to 20 characters for the Twitter "handle," to arrive at the SMS limit of 160). I have very limited experience with IM and texting, too, but I don't see why I should need to understand these legacy platforms and their lingo in order to understand and enjoy Twitter. Clearly, a lot of people are coming to Twitter as social-media virgins.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | April 08, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Two things I learned from interviews/articles:
1. Biz & Ev came up with the whole idea of Twitter when they noticed that people were being creative with their IM status messages -- instead of just "away" or "available," it might say "out getting sushi" or "cranking out this report" or "back at 3pm." That's why it's called "status," and also why it was originally meant to answer the question "What are you doing?" It's obviously grown way beyond that.
Biz & Ev never included the @ part in their original conception of Twitter. Users more versed in online chat life started implementing it on their own, so it was added later. (Same with hashtags, for the record.)
Posted by: Karen | April 08, 2009 at 12:50 PM
@Karen: Thanks for that very helpful background! For those of you not versed in Twitter lore, Biz (Stone) and Ev (Williams) are co-founders of Twitter; the third co-founder, Jack Dorsey, created Twitter while he was a student at Cornell. Biz's full name is Christopher Isaac Stone.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | April 08, 2009 at 01:02 PM
Just dropping in really, to say thanks for the link to my article and I hope people find it useful.
If you find one or two discrepancies between what it says and the quotes here, that's just because I've done a little editing to make the language more concise.
I think one of Twitter's practical problems has been that it's grown so unexpectedly fast and seems to be permanently on the edge of overload (or just over the edge, as evidenced by the Fail Whale). Result: all available effort has to go into keeping the servers functioning, and not nearly enough into making twitter.com more usable.
Posted by: Tim J | April 08, 2009 at 01:32 PM
Thanks for explaining the wider usage of Twitter - I am one of the people who went to the web site expecting to want to sign up, and then after reading about how it's for telling my "friends and family" my "status", deciding, why bother. Now I know the real reasons people sign up!
Posted by: Kim | April 10, 2009 at 09:49 AM
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Betty
http://desktopmemory.info
Posted by: Betty | April 12, 2009 at 09:38 PM
I like how Laura Fitton says in her Webinar on Twitter [http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-for-business-101-webinar/], "Twitter is the stupidest application you’re ever going to see." Because it's true -- if you take Twitter's self-description at face value, it does sound eye-rollingly dumb. When I talk to people who know about Twitter but don't use it, inevitably their reason is some variation on "I don't care what a bunch of people are doing right now."
Of course, the name of the application itself doesn't help.
I notice that Tim is using the term "feed," which has been my tendency (influenced by blog feeds, I suppose), but I think "stream" is better.
To (mildly) defend the site's originators, probably the vocabulary made a lot more sense in their original conception of Twitter as, as noted, an expansion of something like IM status. It's an interesting issue ... if you create an application with one use in mind, but its user base sort of takes it over for something different than what you conceived, do you change the application to accommodate this? In shrink-wrapped software you do, but it's not so clear for Web-based applications, perhaps.
Posted by: mike | April 15, 2009 at 10:11 AM
Brilliant insight, Nancy. You captured many grievances I hadn't articulated, but harbored.
Posted by: Ray Beckerman | April 30, 2009 at 12:46 PM
That is exactly what i wanted to say. I googled "twitter language" in hopes to get more of an insight into the different tasks we can perform. I came across your blog and felt relief that I am not a total moron. The truth is, i am usually quite good at figuring out most websites but twitter - not so easy. Thanks for your perspective. Also you are a great writer... my new twitter page is @storyexperiment. Would love it if you could follow it. Every week, we will make a new story, 1 comment at a time. Would love to have you involved!
Posted by: tlc | May 28, 2009 at 08:06 PM
Twitter's original "what are you doing now" focus does seem to have gotten last somewhere. I notice they've shortened their slogan to "what are you doing" and I predict they'll eventually drop even this part. Maybe they should call it "Twitter: We have no clue what it's for, but everyone's using it!"
I'm very interested in the use of language on Twitter and other microblogging services. You might be interested in checking out FillUs.in - http://fillus.in (disclaimer: I'm the developer of this service).
It's a microblogging service like Twitter, with a twist: instead of typing in complete sentences, you just fill in the blanks in answer to a couple of questions. I'm interested in recapturing the "what are you doing now" purpose, but in a more focused way, with specific questions about things you might be doing now.
Posted by: David | June 09, 2009 at 06:58 PM
Most of the comments cover what I myself would have said. One thing to add: Tivo once suffered from this exact same problem. "Why do I need Tivo when I have a VCR?!" Look at it now!
Really I agree with you completely, and you're exactly right about the need for Twitter to fix its language.
People think that this stuff doesn't matter, but I've noticed when I'm in a foreign country I all of a sudden don't know whether to push or pull the door to open because the little sign that tells me (many doors have them!) does not register in my subconscious.
Why oh why after so many books have been written and we've gone through so much Internet failure do companies still get it wrong?! I would love to study this, and perhaps some day shall.
Posted by: Dave Kaye | June 10, 2009 at 12:27 PM