I realized over the last few days that Twitter is reaching an apex of sorts and will start devolving from this utopian paradise of geekdom into a normal online community. This means that the Twitterverse will start having TwitterSpam (happening already), Twitter Trolls (happening now, just witnessed one today), TwitterFits (saw one this weekend) and TwitterFlames (likewise, see TwitterTrolls).
I wonder how this community will self-correct, considering the focal point of the community is on individuals rather than common topic. This makes it a much more scale-free and complex network than say a message board about a band or a community around one topic, but I do wonder if the edges of the graph will start segmenting themselves into logical clusters.
When I did graph analysis of discussion boards, we found that “me too” posts would orphan themselves if you kept the edge weight inline with attention (ie, edges were tighter if people traversed them more). Without attention they died. Will it be the same with Twitter?
Comments 4
Please tell me this was not inspired by me (finally) joining Twitter today.
Posted 30 Mar 2008 at 11:33 am ¶nope, inspired by the TwitterFlame I got
Posted 30 Mar 2008 at 3:52 pm ¶I think that while “devolve” may unfortunately be accurate, Twitter is likely to devolve into something other than a normal online community as we’d currently define it: the follow-based structure means that Twitter lacks a central “there” to be flamed, spammed, and crapflooded into irrelevance in the traditional manner, so some fresh hell must be looming.
Most likely scenario seems like everybody completely ignoring @replies from those they don’t follow, turning off those “X is now following you” emails, and following only a small number of people. Now that I think about it, seems like I’m describing Twitter devolving back into its original formulation of sharing what you’re doing with a small, pre-existing social group. Huh.
Posted 31 Mar 2008 at 7:36 am ¶Hi Ethan,
interesting observations. Twitter is actually just going through the normal motions of a hijacked brand I would say. The Brand (twitter) was first accepted by early adopters, (which by the way put their own meaning into it). From there on it gets accepted by a much bigger user base. It might devolve in geek cooldom, but it will clearly evolve in user numbers (weather that’s bad or not is up to everyone to make their own opinion).
@whiteneymcn: Why does twitter lack a “central there”? Did it ever need one? It never claimed to have one. I really hate when “online communities” evolve from their original idea (what made them so cool) to the myspace death. Had myspace stuck to their original purpose or idea, it might actually still be worth using. Same thing could happen to twitter.
I hope twitter never get’s a “central there”, because that’s pretty much the reason why I use it.
Cheers, Hans
Posted 11 Apr 2008 at 7:25 am ¶Post a Comment