What are we doing when we Twitter?
I came across a post by J.P. Rangaswami, whose blog I quite like, and he was talking about Twitter and what he gets out of it. You can read the full post, but in essence he says that he gets something different from the people he follows on Twitter …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mathew Ingram picks up a year-end reflection from J.P. Rangaswami on what following people on Twitter actually yields — a question the corpus has been circling all year, from March's argument for why twitter matters to Scripting News asking how basic the service really is. What has changed since spring is scale and stakes: by mid-December Twitter was driving over 2,000 referrals to blogs in 30 days, and ReadWriteWeb's Tweeterboard piece was already probing the etiquette of who follows whom.
The reflection lands against a rough fortnight for the service itself — a confirmed 12-hour outage on December 15 and a December 19 warning that many-to-many messaging threatens corporate information protection. Rangaswami's answer, that different people deliver different value through the stream, frames Twitter less as a toy and more as an ambient professional network whose costs and benefits are still being mapped.
First-order effects
- Rangaswami's post gives practitioners a vocabulary for Twitter's value — differentiated signal from chosen follows — which bloggers like Ingram amplify to their own audiences, extending the service's reach beyond early adopters.
Second-order effects
- With Twitter already a top blog referrer at 2,000+ referrals in 30 days, writers have a concrete incentive to treat the stream as a distribution channel, and third-party tools such as Twype.exe (tweets piped into Skype mood updates) show an ecosystem forming around that behavior.
Third-order effects
- If ambient many-to-many messaging keeps spreading into work contexts, the structural questions are governance and infrastructure: how firms control leaks from confidential meetings, and whether a service that has already suffered a 12-hour outage can be depended on as a basic communication layer.
The trend: Microblogging is crossing from novelty status tool to ambient professional network, with its value debated by users while reliability and information-governance risks accumulate underneath.