The Warm Glow of Twitter

There's a topic of discussion making the rounds in the twitterverse: How do we explain twitter to other people? This is not a new topic. Indeed, there is a very very common pattern for joining twitter.

FAIL

Everyone tells you to try it, so you do, and you use it, and you post a message something like "Everyone says I should use twitter, so I am. Trying to figure out what the deal is." And then: Nothing happens. Because none of your friends use twitter.

If you're lucky, some of your friends join, and you pull through, and everybody loves it. Or you find out about some famous people who use it, you follow them, build up your following list, and you see the light. But it takes time, and for everyone I know, there's a stretch where it's not working and you just don't get it.

Call it The Twitter Gap.

Answering the Wrong Question

Once you're in, you want everyone you know to be in. There is a direct correlation between percentage of people you know who twitter, and the pleasure you get in using it. So you give them the Pitch. You tell them how to use the service, how it works, and then you do the little song and dance where you compare it to other services. It's a mini-blog. It's like a forum. It's like a series of IM away messages. It's like public SMS. Whatever.

None of our analogies are convincing. We are talking about How It Works, and nobody cares about How It Works. Most of us who use Twitter right now are technical people. Understanding and discussing how technical systems work makes us all happy inside.

The Right Question

But what normal people want to know is "How will this make my life any better?" There's nothing obvious about publicly available 140-character messages. Nothing that screams "You must use this thing!" Nobody buys a car because it contains an internal combustion engine that drives four wheels, can be steered, and may have a radio.

People buy cars because cars make them feel free. Or because they can go to anything, in any weather, at anytime, with little effort. People own cars because it connects them to the people, places, and things they care about, without the physical strain.

LIkewise, nobody uses Google because you type a set of words into a text box and you get back (hopefully) relevant web pages. People use Google because at any time, you can access any information you can think of. Any question can be answered in about 10 seconds.

So the real question is: Why do we use twitter?

How It Feels to Use Twitter

We use twitter because of how it feels.

Let's assume you pull through The Twitter Gap. You have a healthy set of people you follow, and you are comforted to know that a bunch of people follow you. Most people using Twitter these days are pretty plugged in. So they probably have twitter on their phone and thus post and read regularly.

The end product of twitter is a long list of short messages from people you know, like, love, and/or admire. Think of the hundred little moments on your own on a normal day. Standing in line at the grocery store. Waiting for some form of transportation. Pausing at work. Waiting to meet somebody. Waiting for the S.O. to come back from the restroom. Waiting for a meeting to begin.

Now take those lost moments, and inject perhaps half a dozen comments, some witty, some interesting, some utterly boring, from the people in your life. Whether the comments are worthwhile or meaningful is secondary to the fact that they're there at all.

Further, no one is jostling for your attention. No bells ding (unless you want them too.) There's no phone to feel guilty for not answering. There's no email to carefully craft. There's no IM to coordinate. Twitter just sits there. When you're ready, it sends along your snippets of text.

Queue the Sappy Music

Twitter is a button you can push at any time that reminds you that there are wonderful people in the world doing wonderful things, some of whom you know and care about, and who care about you. It's like the notes your mother would leave in your lunchbox. You find the note, and you think of mom, and you think of her kindly assembling your lunch. And you feel Good.

Now imagine those little notes dropping in at any moment of the day, but only on command, and from everyone you know. It's like a sinewy thread, weaving through the day, connecting the moments between actual connection with little reminders that the connections are there.

So that's my twitter pitch. I think that nice little feeling is why we twitter users are always bugging you about it and blogging about it, over and over and over.

I promise not to blog about this again. If you're interested in tuning into Radio Andre, you may do so here. You don't have to join to follow along. It just makes things easier.