A recent post by Mar­shall Kirk­patrick, How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twit­ter (And Why It Could Cause Prob­lems), makes some inter­est­ing obser­va­tions and raises ques­tions about the direc­tion of Twit­ter based on the way Twit­ter staff use it:

We’ve exam­ined the post­ing and fol­low­ing habits of peo­ple on the company’s staff and found that Twit­ter team mem­bers don’t fol­low very many other peo­ple, they aren’t fol­low­ing many of the top devel­op­ers in their own com­mu­nity and they don’t even Tweet very much.

Mar­shall sug­gests — to per­haps over-simplify his thought­ful post — that these behav­iors may not lead to deci­sions about Twit­ter func­tion­al­ity or the company’s busi­ness model that serve the inter­ests of the greater Twit­ter com­mu­nity, or at least the com­mu­nity of ded­i­cated Twit­ter users. He cites the recent black­eye over uni­lat­eral and unan­nounced changes to replies func­tion­al­ity (gen­er­ally referred to as #fixreplies on Twit­ter) as one exam­ple of how dif­fer­ent pat­terns of use might lead to design deci­sions that run counter to the wishes of the Twittosphere.

He also posted a response by Ev Williams, Twit­ter CEO, to an ear­lier draft of his post. Ev says, among other things, the following:

As you know, there are lots of dif­fer­ent ways to use Twit­ter. Many peo­ple fall into the trap that you should fol­low all or most peo­ple back out of a sense of polite­ness or so-called engage­ment with the com­mu­nity. But the fact is, hav­ing more fol­low­ers does not give you more time in the day (as much as I’d like to sell that). At a cer­tain point, you’re not actu­ally read­ing any more tweets by fol­low­ing more peo­ple — you’re just dip­ping into the stream some­what ran­domly and miss­ing a whole lot of what peo­ple say.That’s fine, but I believe peo­ple will gen­er­ally get more value out of Twit­ter by drop­ping the sym­met­ri­cal rela­tion­ship expec­ta­tion and sim­ply curat­ing their fol­low­ing list based on the infor­ma­tion and peo­ple they want to tune in to.

I fol­low almost 1,000 accounts. Among these, yes, there are celebri­ties (because I’m inter­ested in how they’re using Twit­ter as well as what some of them have to say). There are Twit­ter devel­op­ers. (You men­tioned a few I don’t fol­low — there are sev­eral that I do.) I try to fol­low all Twit­ter employ­ees, some poten­tial employ­ees, indus­try lead­ers, friends, fam­ily, and other peo­ple I care about, peo­ple (or orga­ni­za­tions) who make me smarter, or peo­ple who make me laugh. It’s hard to know if this is the *right* set of accounts to fol­low. And I’m con­stantly curat­ing my list. (In fact, I’m now fol­low­ing @atebits since you pointed it out. Account dis­cov­ery is some­thing we need to work a lot on.)

1,000 feels to me cur­rently to be about the right num­ber — but I still miss a lot. And other peo­ple (like Biz and other folks in the com­pany) are com­fort­able with a much smaller num­ber because they don’t want to miss as much.

Also, keep in mind that a fol­low­ing list does not reveal, nec­es­sar­ily, what one is pay­ing atten­tion to. Hun­dreds of peo­ple give me feed­back by men­tion­ing @ev — which I check many times a day. I also have saved searches for “twit­ter” and other related terms.

I agree with Ev that the asym­met­ric fol­low model has ben­e­fits, and the knee­jerk ‘fol­low every­one back’ eti­quette is unwork­able and unscal­able, espe­cially for those with more than a few hun­dred fol­low­ers. How­ever, nearly every­thing else he says doesn’t add up for me.

Ev is right that we have inher­ent lim­its to the num­ber of Tweets we can read (or the amount of time we want to spend in Twit­ter), and it is hard to know who to pay atten­tion to, in Twit­ter and in the greater world. But fol­low­ing peo­ple is a pri­mary mode of remain­ing con­nected with peo­ple on Twit­ter since this leads to their tweets appear­ing in front of you in a nat­ural way. I mean, after all, that is the thing that makes it a stream­ing appli­ca­tion: that is the core dif­fer­ence between Twit­ter and other com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools.

While we can use Twit­ter to directly mes­sage some­one — either pub­licly with @username or pri­vately with d user­name — this shares more in com­mon with email and instant mes­sag­ing than the open stream of updates. It may well be that Ev’s mode of use relies more on @ and d mes­sag­ing than fol­low­ing, and this may be true for the other Twit­ter staff: they see it more as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool and less of a community.

The com­ment that Biz and other staffers fol­low a rel­a­tively small num­ber of peo­ple — and not the lead­ing exter­nal devel­op­ers work­ing on Twit­ter appli­ca­tions — because they don’t want to miss things seems com­pletely back­wards. Isn’t it obvi­ous that you will miss what these other folks are say­ing if you don’t fol­low them? Unless the pre­sump­tion is that some­one will direct impor­tant things to your atten­tion, explic­itly, with an @ or d. Like email.

My take is that Ev and the Twit­ter staff are not using Twit­ter the way that I do, and the way that many other ded­i­cated users do. I will call their style of use the Right Hand Path: its a tool to com­mu­ni­cate with a small col­lec­tion of co-workers, real-world and busi­ness con­tacts. The Left Hand Path, on the other hand, expe­ri­ences Twit­ter as a large, sprawl­ing and mul­ti­di­men­sional social sys­tem, pred­i­cated on the open, asym­met­ric fol­lower model and shap­ing a cul­ture grow­ing within it.

If they weren’t so cen­tral to the future of Twitter-as-a-tool I would say the Twit­ter guys (and The Right Hand Path­lings as a whole) don’t get Twitter.

Of course, the cul­tural rel­a­tivism of our time will lean to agree with Ev, that there are a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways to use Twit­ter, and none of them is right. I agree in the small — mean­ing that no one should be com­pelled to use Twit­ter in a way that doesn’t make sense to them — but I dis­agree pro­foundly in the large, sim­ply because I per­ceive that cer­tain ways of using Twit­ter pro­vide ben­e­fits that are dif­fi­cult or maybe even impos­si­ble to gain else­where. This is partly due to func­tion­al­ity, but increas­ingly it is due to the com­mu­nity that has devel­oped on the Twit­ter bedrock, and the cul­ture emerg­ing there.

And therein lies the root of a seri­ous ques­tion, one sig­nif­i­cantly more prob­lem­atic than the ques­tion of prod­uct direc­tion that Mar­shall raises, although his con­cern over­laps with mine: as Twit­ter has become the bedrock under­ly­ing a grow­ing and dynamic neigh­bor­hood of the web, how will it be governed?

From one point of view, Twit­ter is an appli­ca­tion owned and oper­ated by Ev and his col­leagues, and our use of the app is con­trolled by the terms of the ser­vice agree­ment we all checked ‘OK’ to. From this point of view, they are free to do what­ever they want, and we have the free­dom to take a hike if we don’t like it. Or gripe, or write a peti­tion. But oth­er­wise we have lit­tle recourse if in fact Twit­ter Inc. decides to screw up replies (the #fixreplies mess has *not* been resolved yet, by the way), or makes other changes to func­tion­al­ity that degrades our experience.

It may seem that we have no grounds for any sort of com­plaint. After all, it can be argued that we aren’t pay­ing any­thing, just free­load­ing on their largess, and they have borne all the costs.

On the other hand, their astro­nom­i­cal val­u­a­tions — what they are using to pull in hefty amounts of paid-in cap­i­tal from investors — is directly related to our par­tic­i­pa­tion. With­out us using Twit­ter, by the mil­lions, Twit­ter would just be a bunch of soft­ware cogs in a card­board box. It is our ani­ma­tion that makes Twit­ter worth a bil­lion dol­lars, not just the clev­er­ness of the devel­op­ers and the ope­ness of their APIs.

To a great extent, Twit­ter is ours, like the air we breathe.

So, how will Twit­ter be gov­erned? As a tool owned by a com­pany that is owned by the inven­tors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalien­able rights?

The enter­tain­ment busi­ness tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are arti­facts pro­duced by our cul­ture, which we share with the artists, and the con­trols that the enter­tain­ment busi­ness thought they had — copy­right and DRM — have failed with the dig­i­tal and web revolution.

So, here we have the same rev­o­lu­tion, come home again. Twitter’s world — its con­ven­tions, mean­ing and use — is our arti­fact: we have built it, 140 char­ac­ters at a time, just as the Twit­ter devel­op­ers have been build­ing the plat­form under­neath our feet. But it is our danc­ing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes.

It is us that makes Twit­ter alive, and not the code.

This post orig­i­nally appeared at Stowe Boyd’s /Message.