Twitter Considered Harmful

You may have heard about Twitter, a new Web 2.0 application that has been getting good buzz over the past several weeks and exploded into geek and hipster fashionability during SXSWi last weekend.

What is Twitter? Quoth Webware's Rafe Needleman:

Twitter is an online service that lets you broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.

Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert. You can't say much in 140 characters. That's part of Twitter's charm.

In effect, Twitter is like LiveJournal for cellphones. You can broadcast messages to everyone who follows your message or to a restricted list of friends. The messages are retained on the user's Twitter page, functioning as a very terse blog. It also interfaces with instant messaging programs, and one's Twitter page also has an RSS feed.

Things Twitter is useful include: tracking contacts at a conference (like SXSWi), tracking friends while clubbing, staying in touch with a cluster of people over the course of a day, and so on. People who use it and get over its learning curve (which, as much as anything, consists of discovering what it is good for) are liking it a lot.

Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is asking the question "Is Twitter TOO Good?"

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic — contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

Sierra states that her view is very much a minority one, saying that opinion about Twitter seems to run 100:1 in the other direction. But her criticisms ring true to me.

I am especially concerned about what Sierra says about Twitter's potential addictive qualities, because Twitter is far from unique in this regard. I would say that this feature is common to many commonly used Internet applications, from email to LiveJournal to instant messaging to message boards to.... The intermittent reward of reading or seeing something new has shaped my own Internet surfing habits in ways that are less than constructive.

Sierra's third point, on the importance of interruption-free time to getting into the flow seems familiar and obvious to me, and at the same time it is something that I need to be reminded of over and over again.

When I first heard of Twitter, I was a little hesitant to get into it, on the basis that I wasn't quite sure what it was good for. I now have a better idea of what it's good for, but now I'm afraid of it: Internet junkies don't need a new form of Net Crack.