What Twitter Says About Human Nature-->

I haven’t done any posts about Twitter. But, I really like twitter because I think it encapsulates what the new movement in software development is really about. People always bitch about them not adding new features or being slow to add new features but that’s not what Twitter is about. When you are thinking about what features you would add to Twitter think about what features you would add to a piece of notebook paper to make it better at being paper. The answer is you can do very little to a piece of paper to make it more useful than it is for it’s purpose. Twitter has an open API which anything can be built on just like I can fold a piece of paper and make this amazing origami bird.

But this article is about what Twitter says about Humans and not about what Twitter is so let me get back on track. What do we do with a piece of paper to make the writing on it more understandable? Well, there are social conventions created over time that in Western culture writing goes from left to right in a straight line across the paper until you get near the edge and then the next words go to the next. There are also other social conventions for writing of all kind… such as signature at the bottom of a letter, address at top left, greeting on first line, indention on each paragraph, so on and so forth. These social conventions came about so things would be easier to read. There aren’t laws about how to do it as much as it’s just a commonly accepted convention that makes things easier to read.

In Twitter you have hash marks # to identify a tag such as #news would be related to the news or #eventname would be related to an event. This is not functionality that came about because of a feature but it came about from the community using it. Same goes for @twitter_username which was born out of use. The use of small website addresses in place of large ones was the same as well. They came out of necessity and were born of the community to represent a function. So, if you give a sufficiently large enough group a canvas they will agree on the method that makes the most sense in order to use that canvas. It seems many times these rules will be born without saying but they will be born of use. That use will then reach a tipping point where the masses will identify the use as the most efficient method to get the idea across. The networks inherent to the internet drive this much, much faster than other mediums in the past but the result is the same. Left to our own devices and given a blank medium we will generate the most efficient conventions at the given time. I added that part ‘at the given time’ because many times we create conventions which are not overturned in a timely fashion when the ability for better conventions come along. The speed at which a convention is overturned is slower than which a convention was created but is still much faster with a network like the internet.