One of my favorite clients, Fab­rice Grinda, believes that Twit­ter is all hype. Call it Twit­ter Skep­ti­cism — the kind of unwar­ranted hype asso­ci­ated with Sec­ond Life. I con­sider this a fine chal­lenge, so I left a com­ment — well, I left an entire rant, and didn’t even get into talk­ing about organic SEO, PageR­ank, and the like. Tell me what you think:

Long story short, Twit­ter is light, cheap, open and per­ma­nent where Sec­ond Life is heavy, expen­sive, closed and ephemeral.

Twit­ter does every­thing right where Sec­ond Life failed.

Sec­ond Life is amaz­ingly heavy, requir­ing lots of com­puter, lots of band­width, and a com­mit­ment to client soft­ware. Sec­ondLife is a closed sys­tem, a walled city, com­pletely invis­i­ble to serendip­ity and coin­ci­dence. Sec­ond Life is greedy, push­ing avarice and com­merce. Sec­ond Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, mean­ing that all of the work and all of the energy one spent on Sec­ond Life invari­ably went away the moment peo­ple stopped invest­ing time and money into the plat­form. While there was a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, a script­ing lan­guage, and lots of room for cre­ativ­ity, Sec­ond Life was not nearly as agnos­tic and open a plat­form as it could have been.

On the other hand, Twit­ter is open and has a fan­tas­ti­cally gen­er­ous API (open API as opposed to a closed API). Twit­ter is highly tex­tual, highly “con­ta­gious,” and very much real time.

Google always wants to know it is up to date, that it is on top of every­thing. They’re con­stantly inse­cure that they will lose the war to upstarts, and when it comes to Zeit­geist 2.0 — real-time trend track­ing and trend recog­ni­tion, Twit­ter moves even faster than “break­ing news” scrawls and updates.

The most famous exam­ple is the rapid­ity with which the Twit­ter­sphere responds to tragic events like earth­quakes, tor­na­does, and ter­ror­ist events like the shoot­ings in #mumbai.

For a sec­ond, let’s for­get www.twitter.com and look at how dif­fer­ently peo­ple access and engage with Twit­ter. Not only can one inter­face via the Web or via 40404 via SMS, as a human, but there are hun­dreds of desk­top clients, iPhone and smart phone apps, and through hun­dreds of third-party mashup and rehash­ing sites and services.

That’s what’s funny: A large pro­por­tion of the API calls to Twit­ter these days aren’t even made by humans twit­ter­ing all day long. A large pro­por­tion of calls to the servers are made by third party search engines, are made by third party ser­vices that offer sundry ser­vices: find­ing friends, track­ing news, graph­ing con­ver­sa­tion, track­ing searches, plot­ting trends, col­lect­ing met­rics, fol­low­ing peo­ple, unfol­low­ing people.

In many ways, the Twit­ter plat­form has become almost a fun­gi­ble INPUT / OUTPUT flow of data, like IP or like tap water, or like the elec­tri­cal mains — all the cre­ativ­ity and all of the devel­op­ment is hap­pen­ing as a result of this rel­a­tively fea­ture­less and struc­ture­less raw platform.

Every­body admits that the ele­gance of Face­book’s inter­face does an amaz­ing job of hand-holding the diverse lev­els of tech­no­log­i­cal prowess that Face­book users pos­sess. How­ever, Face­book shares many things in com­mon with Sec­ond Life: It is a walled-garden, is very cliquey and very hard to cross-pollinate. And finally, Face­book works very hard at defin­ing what the user expe­ri­ence is to the best of its abil­ity in a world where open­ness and open access can often work for you instead of against you.

The biggest prob­lem that Social Net­work Ser­vice and Online Vir­tual Com­mu­ni­ties make is being too invested in the out­come of how the com­mu­nity will grow and develop. To be suc­cess­ful in com­mu­nity devel­op­ment and com­mu­nity cre­ation, one must be com­mit­ted to the com­mu­nity and meet­ing their needs ver­sus being com­mit­ted to giv­ing them what the com­mu­nity pro­ducer thinks the com­mu­nity wants and needs — often very dif­fer­ent things.

At the end of the day, Twit­ter has always been more like the card­board box hold­ing the toy than the toy itself. Twit­ter seems to have built the per­fect box to play in and with until you decide what sort of toy you want to build — and then Twit­ter makes it pos­si­ble for every­one and their brother to take a go at build­ing the toy in the box, always just focus­ing on being the most amus­ing, easy-to-use, scal­able, and com­pelling box possible.

Then and now

To me, Twit­ter is a lot like IRC from back in the day. When you install Inter­net Relay Chat, there are no rooms and there are no mem­bers. Only by engag­ing and by cre­at­ing rooms and groups (Twit­ter and IRC share the same con­ven­tions in terms of using the hash, #, to indi­cate a self-organizing group that only exists as long as peo­ple choose to use it.

Peo­ple who don’t get Twit­ter really have not spent enough time with it. There are tons of ways peo­ple can use Twit­ter: Many peo­ple use Twit­ter as an alter­na­tive to an RSS feed news reader, fol­low­ing the Twit­ter feeds of news orga­ni­za­tions and news alerts, includ­ing links and so forth. Twit­ter doesn’t care how you use it: pas­sive read­ing or active conversation.

In fact, Twit­ter is such a neu­tral solu­tion that you might very well for­get that you’re a mem­ber, which is why there might be a per­cep­tion that over 60 per­cent of all of the users who reg­is­ter never go back: Twit­ter doesn’t want to be too much trou­ble.Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

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