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.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but haven’t taken the time to put it into words. Most recently, a post by Jennifer Jones nicely sums up why Twitter is important, and I think it goes even further than that.

Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But - the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates.

But, why is this important? I think this brings the real, visceral connections that are an essential part of a vibrant community (whether online, offline, or blended) into the forefront. I can tap into my Twitter contacts and ask questions, float ideas, or just shoot the shit. Things that are largely outside the domain of a traditional “online community” resource. The always-on nature of Twitter, and the strong sense of vibrancy and vitality, are what make it so compelling to me. At almost any time of the day or night, my Twitter stream is active, with people posting tidbits on a stunningly broad range of topics.

Sure, many of these are purely banal things like “I’m bored” or “heading out to the pub” - but those are important if only because they help reinforce a connection. I may not care that someone is going to a pub (especially if they’re in another city/country/continent and I can’t tag along), but by seeing their status update, it makes me mindful of them. I think about that person, even if briefly, and the sense of community is strengthened.

So, Twitter is valuable for so much more than simple “nanoblogging” - which is how I initially perceived it. It is important to me because it makes the sense of community and connectedness more tangible. And Twitter isn’t the only tool to help on that front.

One of the reasons I’m a raving, rabid Flickr addict is that I can follow the photos from my contacts. If they do something and post a picture, I see it. I may not have bothered to go hunting to find the picture, but the fact that Flickr streams it to me helps me keep up to date on what dozens of people are doing. I am more mindful of these people, and feel more aware and connected.

Tools like Flickr and Twitter are powerful because they are informal. It’s much quicker and easier to post a simple status update for something that wouldn’t warrant a full blog post. It’s simple to shoot a photo and hurl it up to Flickr - even if it’s not a great photo, it’s an easy way to share what’s going on in a person’s life.

One thing that newcomers to these tools often mention is how simultaneously noisy and empty they seem. Viewing the public Twitter update stream is a confusing and uninteresting activity. It’s not until you find the people that you care about - in real life - that these tools really start to get interesting. It’s not about “contact whoring” or trying to collect the most “followers” - it’s about finding the people you care about and maintaining a state of mindfulness. Something that is surprisingly easy to do with these various banality broadcasting engines.

I’m still thinking through how these tools compare with Facebook. I do know that Facebook has a decidedly different “feel” to it - with the endless flow of zombie-bites, pokes, application requests, and the like. Facebook has become annoying enough that I might check in on it once per week. I usually have Twitter and Flickr open in tabs all the time.  Facebook is evolving into a monolithic environment - the “applications” are so tightly integrated that they might as well be compiled into the kernel of FB. Small Pieces Loosely Joined is basically thrown out the window. Although I can integrate other resources, they become awkwardly sucked into FB, often providing redundant information or functionality (do I post status updates to Twitter, or to Facebook? do I post photos to Flickr or Facebook? etc…). I should be able to do these activities in one place, and one place only, and have the information pulled seamlessly together. Facebook just ain’t it.

While chatting with Scott at ETUG, he commented that he was frustrated with Twitter. Both because of the constant flakiness, and the negative effect it’s having on many people’s blog posting activity. I’m definitely posting less frequently since getting bitten by the Twitter bug.

At first, I didn’t see the problem, but then he explained it. If people are pumping their content and energy into Twitter, something that is by nature largely ephemeral and transient (both in server uptime and lifespan of content) then the blogosphere is effectively losing out. Yes, there are benefits - the conversations and serendipitous connections that happen via the always-on and always-shifting nature of Twitter streams are compelling because they are some of the most highly social public interactions on the internets. And that has helped me feel more closely connected with the 40-odd people in the strange, distributed, cosmopolitan set of folks I consider friends.

During ETUG, we tried to shift to Jaiku. The UI of Jaiku sucks, compared with Twitter. It’s too busy. It’s got ads. But it stays up and never eats content. And it’s got almost nobody on the network. The people are on Twitter. I gave up on tilting at that windmill in less than a day. It’s not worth fighting with cranky software, but it’s also not worth abandoning the community in the relentless pursuit of uptime…

Where Jaiku was like a cold, lonely walk, Twitter’s like a family gathering (with all that entails).

vs.

I've been posting to my blog far less frequently than ever before, in the entire history of this blog. Why is that? I'm still busy doing stuff. I'm still active in all the same places. The only shift lately is that I've also been much more active in social networking sites, specifically Twitter and Facebook.

Now, both Twitter and Facebook are essentially social networking systems. They are about forming and building connections between people, rather than publishing content. So, that shouldn't have an impact on my posts here.

The only thing I can think of is some kind of defusing effect that activity on social networking sites may have - I post there, and it satisfies the social component of posting here. Posting here doesn't affect posting there.

So, I'm starting to think about the relationship between social networking and blogging. They're definitely related, partially overlapping activities, but they also have their own subtle difference. Blogging is (for me) about personal knowledge management. Capturing the content and context of what I'm doing. Social networking is about context more than anything. Which looks at first blush to be purely banality. And yet, it affects me on a deeper level.

I was in Vancouver for an "eCOP" pathfinding meeting, and found that I flipped open the MacBookPro during breaks. What did I check first? It wasn't email. It wasn't my blog (or blog stats, or blog referrals). It was Twitter. I felt more connected to my distributed community of edubloggers (and others) because they're always there with me, no matter where I am. That's powerful stuff. Now, how to better make sense of that? Or does making sense of it suck the soul out of it? 

Until last week, I hadn't heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They're looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities.

Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) - stuff that is more of a quick "I'm doing this right now" kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of "friends" and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they're up to. Right now.

Cole's investigating this from the perspective of "how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization" I'm not doing anything quite so lofty, I'm just playing.

What's kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I'm doing, so when it's time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates.

I'm not sure if there's any value in Twitter per se. Other tools have been doing this, from full-on blogs to tools like Facebook and MySpace. Do we really need a separate tool for this? Maybe it's a good thing because it's so tightly focussed…

The design of Twitter might be a bit overly simplified though. There's no way to define the audience for an update, although you can set a global flag that affects all of your updates. It'd be handy to have a private/friends/public distinction, so I could track stuff that nobody cares about, only my Friends, or everyone else. Also, the ability to tag updates, either as categories/keywords, or even with contexts ala GTD, would be handy, along with an interface to filter by tags (show me all things done @Work wih the tag "drupal" in the last 2 weeks) 

The Twitter website needs some serious love, too. The UI is painful (tiny icons for "friends" and the only way to get a name is to rollover and wait for the tooltip. ick. etc…) and it's often really…. slow….. but it's usable with the addon tools like Twitterific.

Regardless, I'm dnorman on twitter. Like that's the first time I've been called a twit.