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It’s been just over a week since I decided to make Twitter a read-only medium. I haven’t posted a single tweet, and have only scanned Twitter a handful of times in that week.

And I haven’t missed it one bit.

I’ve been having many more IM chats with the people I care about. I’ve been conversing more via email. I’ve been writing more blog posts. I haven’t dropped offline. I haven’t disconnected. All I’ve done is lengthen the feedback loop - no more constant reloading of Twitter.com to see if there are updates. No more composing tweets while offline. Just a healthy balance, and a reconfiguration of the social connections.

This is going to sound bad, although it’s not meant to. But most of what happens on Twitter - I just don’t care about. People I don’t know. People I simply don’t care about. Not that they’re not good people, or smart, or funny. Just that they are not people I know. And as a result, I simply don’t care to hear constant updates and jabber from and about. There is a strange distortion that I noticed on Twitter, where I was spending a fair amount of time reading updates from people that I don’t know. I’ve never met them. I don’t read their blogs. So why am I bothering to read their tweets? It sounds bad, and goes against the spirit of 2.0 - being connected to everyone all the time - but pulling back to a closer, tighter, more important (to me) group of people just feels right.

Here’s the crux of it for me. Overextension of social connections dilutes and devalues them. Hyperconnectivity negates the connections I care about. If everyone is a “friend” - what does that mean to my real friends? If I spend as much time reading updates from strangers as I do from the people I really care about, that’s not fair to the people I care about, nor to myself.

I’m turning twitter into a read-only medium (for me). I’m not deleting anything. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to cut down on the noise and shallow superficial connections that just aren’t real. Twitter’s just a website. It’s not like it’s real, or important.

If anyone needs me, I’m really easy to get in touch with. And I’ll periodically monitor summize to see if anyone is sending stuff to my now-silent (but still active) account…

Twitter has been bugging me for some time now. No, not the single-digit uptime. No, not the constant “Down for Updates” notices. No, not the slow unresponsive website and throttled API.

I just realized that Twitter is actually dangerous. Harmful. Damaging.

It has changed the way that I think, but not for the better. I find I am thinking more superficially when I’m active in Twitter. I think in shorter 140 character bursts. With little to no depth.

Now, Twitter is a really amazing environment - it’s been by FAR the most powerful social amplifier I’ve used. I’ve felt closer to the people that I care about online because I’ve been let in to their every day lives, just as they have been let into mine.

Although the things that get posted to Twitter are mostly banal and boring details of every day life, that is one of the things that makes it so addictive. So powerful. It’s not a “content managing system”, nor is it “publishing” - it’s a way to reinforce a personal connection. Every time I read an update by someone that I care about, I think about that person - if only for a second - and my sense of connection is strengthened.

But, I fear that the strengthened social connections are not worth the cost borne in superficial thinking. Being more closely connected is an extremely valuable thing - and Twitter is somehow able to make my connections to people online feel almost tangible, almost real - but not at the cost of shallow thinking.

When I catch myself offline, in the mountains with my family, wondering what people are posting to Twitter, and how I would describe what I’m doing in 140 characters, it’s become damaging. Distracting. Dangerous.

I’m not going to sign off of Twitter. I am going to try to experience it differently. Without the Twitter Tab constantly open and refreshed. Without any Twitter apps on my iPod. I don’t want to lose the sense of connectedness, but I need to repair and restore my ability to think more deeply.

Twitter’s been flakier than usual this week, and supposedly the twitgineers are busy fixing database borkage and scaling stuff up and twiddling bits and furiously adjusting the machine that goes PING!

And yeah, they’ve had investors temporarily filling bank accounts to pay for the lavish web 2.0 drug binge parties development of a more robust and scalable nanoblogging platform.

But… Where is the money really coming from? It’s not advertising. It’s not subscription fees. The only other reasonably viable option is that they’re building it up to hope to sell it to some web 2.0 behemoth. And I can’t see why Yacrosoft! would pay $millions for it. Or anyone else, for that matter.

So, where will the money come from to pay for the server farms, pool tables, and cocaine parties growing workforce?

Twitter’s been a pretty stellar example of the power of community momentum. Even though the software is technically and demonstrably inferior to its competitors. The Twitter community stays put because nobody wants to be the first rat to jump ship, in case it doesn’t sink after all. Twitter works JUST well enough, and JUST often enough to keep us all coming back. “maybe it’s working now… how about… NOW! hmmm… now?  or… now? YES!” The power of intermittent reinforcement in action. And none of the alternatives are dramatically better - they all suffer the same lack of clear business model that reeks of profound inability to scale sustainably.

A viable business model doesn’t look like this:

I’ve been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like? Then, this morning, I see a post by Clarence Fisher describing Tweetwheel. It’s a cool little web application for generating a display of the people in the Twitter Network for a given account. Here’s mine:

Very cool.

I’ve been struggling with what feels like a Twitter addiction for awhile now.

On the one hand, I love and value, even need the sense of community and connectedness that Twitter enables. I feel almost viscerally connected to the core group of people whom I consider my close friends, as well as those who are merely acquaintances and even strangers.

On the other hand, the constant sense of connectedness and the endless stream of updates became a source of discomfort - I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t turn it off. I was constantly “checking in” to see if anything new and interesting had been posted.

That seems entirely strange. One way of perceiving of Twitter is as a river of updates, and you just sample the flow when convenient.

But, there’s the added complexity of intermittent reinforcement. the whole @dnorman (or other) effect, drawing me to check more frequently. Heaven forfend I should miss an @dnorman update and not respond as soon as is conversational! Sure, 99% (or more) of the times I “checked in” there was no @dnorman update waiting for me. But that 1%… Even if there was no @dnorman waiting for me, it made me smile to see traces of what my friends were doing.

I was starting to feel that my Twitter addiction was revealing some kind of deeply rooted character flaws. Why was I so compelled to “check in” even when spending time with my family. When enjoying watching my son play at a playground. When listening to an interesting presentation. I was beginning to feel quite dejected, that I was so weak that I couldn’t control my need to constantly access the stream of updates.

And then it hit me - I had conditioned myself to respond, like a drooling Russian dog after some dork in a lab coat rings a bell. The tools didn’t inherently compel me to check so frequently. The people in my network certainly didn’t want me to be such a junkie. I had done this to myself. But why? Perhaps some strange form of ego boosting? It’s possible that I was using @dnorman as a form of positive feedback? Perhaps as a way to feel connected and not alone? That’s unlikely, because I had the urge to “check in” even when enjoying quality time with friends and family.

I now believe that I had become conditioned to being overstimulated as a result of this sustained level of hyperconnectivity - and that I was needing to maintain this overstimulation to feel calm. And that this overstimulation is entirely artificial - an internally generated response to external stimuli. If so, it should be possible to recondition myself to not require the constant level of stimulation, to feel calm when actually calm. To not have to spread continuous partial attention across various networks and services.

And it’s not just Twitter that draws continuous partial attention. While writing this post, I have checked Flickr for new photos from my Contacts (twice. there were new ones!), I’ve checked my blog’s comment inbox for new comments or spam (no new comments, but 4 spams caught by Akismet and waiting to be nuked). I’ve also checked my email (something about Drupal 6.2 - that can wait for Monday).

When I started my MSc program, my supervisor went on and on about “artifical urgency” - how we seem oddly compelled to check email and respond immediately, even though there is no real need to do so. The sense of urgency is completely manufactured, and only exists if we let it. At the time (now, over a decade ago - even before Web 1.0 had really taken off) I thought this was nonsense. Now, I’m seeing what he was getting at. I suppose there’s a kind of zen motif - connectivity is what we make of it. If I choose to make it something that needs to be responded to immediately, it will consume my time and energy. If I choose to not let it control me, to just be a part of my environment, then it should be a more healthy and positive experience.

Now, to go check out those new photos on Flickr…

I tried to go offline from Twitter all day yesterday.

I failed. Miserably. Wound up posting all kinds of stuff.

I hate that I feel so compelled to constantly “check in” - just in case someone posted something.

I hate that I couldn’t just stop, as I said I would.

It’s not like any critical information came through the pipe. It’s not like I found out anything, except that a few of my friends have similar twittercrack habits.

I just decided to shake the habit outright. Here’s a new stage for Alan’s curve of adoption.

I just modified my /etc/hosts file thusly:

127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 m.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 hahlo.com

Now it will take a deliberate act of intervention for me to break my twitterfast. I’ll be surprised if I actually miss anything though. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, you either already know how to do it, or don’t need to.

Also, I realize that this post will be broadcast to Twitter as soon as I hit “Publish.” Irony, much?

resulting in this:

Apparently, my Twitter account became the primary stress test for the cool Tweetcloud service, which crunches through every tweet posted for a given account, and generates a cloud of words ranked by frequency. Although I’ve been posting to Twitter like a madman today, they were actually able to get it to crunch my account:

One thing that surprised me: I was sure “fracking” would be the #1 word, followed shortly by WTF. Surprise!

Thanks to John Krutsch and Jared Stein for their work on beefing up Tweetcloud to be able to handle the sheer scale of my self-absorbed banality.

I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.

I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 - nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users - it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.

But it was annoying.

Every once in awhile, I’d try to debug. I’d use Terminal and navigate to /Users. I’d run ls -l and I’d see this:

$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel     238 23 Mar 15:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x  13 demo     demo      442 14 May  2006 demo
drwxr-xr-x@ 47 dnorman  dnorman  1598 31 Mar 18:12 dnorman

The other user directories had either a + or no symbol after the file mode section. My directory had a @. WTF. I’ve tried looking through man. man ls. man chmod. Couldn’t find any mention of @. Try googling for @. Not helpful. This is where the gaping holes in my *NIX geekery are exposed. I was completely stumped.

Finally, I decide to try checking with the LazyWeb. I posted a tweet to roughly describe the problem - as best I could in the 140 character limit - and…

Waited 3 minutes before @thepatrick responded with a hint, and another one.

So, a few seconds later, I was running a new (to me) command via the command shell, finding out about xattr to list extended attributes about files.

$ xattr -l /Users/dnorman
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ........@.......
0010   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................

Bingo. There’s some funky bit set. So, how to nuke it. I ran man xattr and found it has a -d flag, which is used to delete attributes by name. So I ran this:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/dnorman

Done.

My home directory now properly shows up in Finder. Everything’s hunky dory.

The power of my Network, harnessed with a simple LazyWeb plea, solved in 3 minutes what I’d struggled for 5 months to solve on my own.

I love my Network. It’s the people.

Thanks, Patrick. I owe you a $beverage.

This post is in response to Chris’ Twitter Condom post.

I’ve been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I’ve actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.

Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren’t indexed by Google, and they’re essentially part of a private conversation.

The problem is that the public/protected flag is a global setting for an account. Either all of your tweets are public or they’re all protected. There is no middle ground, or ability to change this on a per-tweet basis.

So, why set an account to be “protected”? One of the things that strikes me about Twitter is how much it feels like a conversation in a pub. It’s informal, loose, and sometimes a bit more unfiltered than would be otherwise advisable. A common type of tweet (of which I am probably more guilty than others) is the rant/vent. Bitching about meetings. Letting off some steam in little 140 character puffs. Probably not something that should be indexed by The Goog. To be really honest, probably the kind of thing that shouldn’t be online in the first place, but that’s probably another post.

If a twitter account is set to be “protected” then it becomes a bit more safe to open up a bit more (too much?). The pub conversation becomes more intimate and real.

Why set an account to be “public”? It makes it easy for people to follow you.  Your social network/graph can grow without obstruction, and you will likely find new people who are doing things that interest you.

But, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I currently follow 70 people. That’s about the maximum I think I can follow. There are 318 people following me. It’s just physically impossible for me to reciprocate. Am I missing out? Possibly. But anything important will trickle through various conversations and I’ll see enough to make sense of it. And anything really important will likely exist outside of Twitter.

And I doubt anyone would really miss anything by being unable to follow my tweets. Sure, they’d miss out on some extremely witty banter, but anything important would show up in other conversations, and eventually outside of Twitter.

To me, twitter isn’t a publishing platform. It’s an informal hangout. If I want to publish anything, I’ll put it on my blog, or as a comment on someone else’s.

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