drucker.ca

I’ve become fas­ci­nated with the new web appli­ca­tion called Twit­ter. It’s a way of sim­ply and tersely updat­ing oth­ers on your sta­tus: This makes it kind of like a cross between a blog, instant mes­sag­ing and per­haps SMS (cell phone text mes­sag­ing). Twit­ter is like a blog, because it broad­casts your thoughts, moods, impres­sions, and other per­sonal mum­blings to the world at large. It’s like instant mes­sag­ing because it con­sists of short mes­sages, no more than 140 char­ac­ters in length. It’s like SMS mes­sag­ing because twit­ters (or is the sin­gu­lar a ‘tweet’?) can be recieved on a cell phone (and I believe you can update your own sta­tus via a cell phone, although this is much eas­ier and cheaper in the US than Canada or over­seas). Oh, and your twit­ter sta­tus updates only go to the peo­ple who choose to ‘fol­low’ you (and like­wise, you only get updates from those peo­ple who you know and want to be updated about. Your posse is your update audi­ence, and you get their updates as well.

To use twit­ter, you bring up the Twit­ter web site, and if you have an account and have left a cookie that logs you in auto­mat­i­cally, you make a twitter/tweet by typ­ing your mes­sage into the form. To help you stay under the 140 char­ac­ter limit, there is a count­down javascript that tells you the num­ber of char­ac­ters you have left. It’s not that incon­ve­nient or con­fus­ing, but I keep won­der­ing if there’s a bet­ter way.

I sup­pose that using an SMS cell phone to update my sta­tus would be best, but even then, typ­ing is a prob­lem. Per­haps there could be a spe­cial twit­ter appli­ca­tion for phones and PDAs (or both, like my Treo or a Black­berry), with set phrases that you could use by press­ing but­tons or the option to insert your loca­tion, if it knew you were near a par­tic­u­lar place that you are often located at, like Work, Home or a friend’s res­i­dence. The key here is that twit­ter has a dif­fer­ent User Model than the web, or Instant mes­sag­ing, or even per­haps SMS.

A User Model, as I define it, is every­thing about a given sit­u­a­tion that a user expe­ri­ences when they are access­ing or oper­at­ing soft­ware or hard­ware, includ­ing their pos­ture, how much time they have, their level of com­fort (or dis­com­fort), what else they might be busy doing, the amount of atten­tion they can/want to ded­i­cate to the activ­ity, etc.. A lot of soft­ware assumes that you are sit­ting in a task chair, have a key­board, mouse or track­pad and a mon­i­tor of decent size, that you have a block of time to ded­i­cate to the activ­ity you are engaged in and you can devote nearly your full atten­tion to the task at hand. Some soft­ware assumes that you are con­nected to the Inter­net, but other (non-web, of course) pack­ages don’t. In con­trast, Instant Mes­sag­ing always assumes that you are con­nected con­tin­u­ously to the Inter­net, are a pretty fast typ­ist, and can devote all or per­haps part of your atten­tion to the con­ver­sa­tion you are hav­ing. A web appli­ca­tion called ‘Do I Need a Jacket’ (or www.doineedajacket.com) is designed to be used just as you are just leav­ing your home or office. You look at it for a sec­ond, per­haps from a stand­ing posi­tion and peer­ing over at your screen, and it remem­bers the last place you put in for it’s ‘set­ting’ (you can also change the thresh­olds for cold, chilly or wind speed that trig­ger a yes or no answer for the ques­tion of whether you need a jacket or not). One click is all it needs once this is set up. SMS assumes only that you have your phone or Black­berry with you and that it is turned on. It also assumes that you don’t have a full key­board (although the remark­ably good key­board on the Black­berry has begun to change this a bit).

Twit­ter needs only a lit­tle bit of atten­tion (like IM), but it is required spo­rad­i­cally, like an incom­ing SMS or IM. Like a blog, it requires that you think about your­self, or at least what you want to say, but unlike a blog, you don’t have to be a writer (or even be able to write a full sen­tence!) Twit­ter can serve some very use­ful pur­poses, like let­ting a bunch of friends know where you are if you are meet­ing up later, or receiv­ing con­stant sta­tus reports (even from RSS feeds, like the local weather), or per­haps even some appli­ca­tions we haven’t thought of yet.

At any rate, this is a new kind of appli­ca­tion, with some very inter­est­ing chal­lenges related to the User Model as well as the role that online mes­sag­ing can have in our lives. For a ver­sion 1.0 it’s crude, but then again, IRC (Inter­net Relay Chat) was also pretty crude as well, and look what that gave rise to (AOL chats, Mini­tel, AIM, Gtalk, iChat AV, Meebo, and who knows what else?!)