Why is Twitter so confusing?

Posted on Apr 5, 2009 | 36 comments

If you’re a Twitter user, you can’t have helped noticing a rash of articles and media coverage of Twitter recently. You probably also decided very quickly that at least 80% of the coverage [1] is written by people who haven’t even a rudimentary understanding of what Twitter really is and how it’s used.

The usual content of one of these articles is:

  • Twitter is suddenly very popular and everyone’s writing about it.
  • This is what they’re saying: [Insert scathingly negative quote from a similar article.]
  • The purpose of Twitter is for people to post 140-character messages about what they’re doing.
  • So it’s like a blog where all you can blog about is tedious minutiae of your life.
  • Nobody’s interested in reading that sort of blog.
  • Therefore it’s pointless.

And there typically follows either a rant about shortened attention spans, reality TV, the decline in intelligent conversation and so on, or some very puzzled thoughts about what on earth people get out of it and why.

If you’re not a Twitter user, you’ve probably encountered a fair number of articles like that by now and become equally puzzled.

As a user, I’ve sometimes been tempted be puzzled about where the confusion and ignorance comes from. Actually the source isn’t hard to find. More of that later. For now, let’s look at what Twitter actually is. Not what the articles say it is; not what Twitter describes itself as; but what it really is.

What Twitter is

Twitter is a setup where you can

  • post short, publicly viewable messages, which remain available indefinitely. [2]
  • view a feed of the publicly viewable messages from a selection of other users, together with your own, with the most recent at the top. You choose whose to see.
  • address a publicly viewable message to a specific user.
  • view a feed showing the publicly viewable messages which have been addressed to you. These can be from anyone, not just people you’ve chosen for your main feed.
  • Send a private message to another user.
  • View the private messages sent to you.

There are other options too, such as searching the public messages for a particular phrase, viewing those from a specific user on their “profile” page, and viewing a snapshot of all the messages being posted at a particular moment. And there’s a widely-used unofficial system (“hashtags”) for labelling a public message by subject. But as far as the basics go, that’s it.

Also, rather importantly, you can do all this in a number of ways:

  • at the official website, http://twitter.com (not recommended, though you need to go there to sign up)
  • at the official mobile site, http://m.twitter.com/ (also not recommended, except for VERY basic use)
  • at other “client” websites, such as http://dabr.co.uk/ (highly recommended, especially for mobile phones: see my review)
  • by using various computer or phone applications, which often add functions not found on the official site
  • by sending and reaceiving SMS messages (for some functions, in some countries)
  • by Instant Messaging (I think).

So, what do we have? We have something like a speeded-up bulletin board or newsgroup, where posts can only be 140 characters long and you choose whose to see. Or a slowed-down chatroom where you can say 140 characters at a time and are heard only by the people who’ve chosen to be within earshot. Another user described it as “being a fly on the wall of 20 different conversations”.

You can of course choose to be the person in the chatroom who only speaks and never listens or replies to anyone; that would make it a bit like a blog of 140-character posts. But I, for one, probably won’t take much notice of you, because I enjoy the interaction. Like the people writing the articles, I mostly won’t see the point.

And there you have it. The basic idea of Twitter is actually very simple. A place for posting short messages, and a variety of ways of viewing them and responding to them. And not much like what the articles describe at all. Really, there are as many uses for Twitter as there are for a 140-character message.

So far I’ve carefully avoided using any of the official terms Twitter describes itself with. You’ll see why in a moment.

Why the confusion then?

How can something so simple cause so much confusion? I think there are three main sources for it:

  • The way Twitter describes itself.
  • The lack of any coherent introduction to the site when you sign up.
  • The impossibility of understanding Twitter from the outside.
Twitter’s self-description

When you first visit http://twitter.com/, you are told

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Well, that’s not true for a start. The messages—tweets— can be as frequent or as infrequent as you like. They can be about anything you like. Over 80% of mine are replies to other users. Only a tiny handful answer What are you doing? If my tweets answer anything, it’s What do you want to say? Yet, virtually all the articles quote What are you doing? to sum up what Twitter is for and why it’s not worth bothering with. Hardly surprising: the writers probably assume that Twitter’s description of what it’s for does in fact describe what it’s for.

Once signed up, you post a tweet by typing in a box which has What are you doing? above and an Update button below. Because, you see, in their terminology you’re not “posting a message”: you’re “updating your status”. So, public messages are officially called updates or statuses, even though you’re normally not updating anything or talking about your “status” (and anwyay, shouldn’t status mean your standing in the community, not a piece of text?)

The Update button confused me at first: I thought it was for refreshing the screen (updating the view) and optionally posting some text.

Next, it turns out that a tweet addressed to another person (by putting @ and their username at the start) is known as an “@reply”. Except that very often, it’s not a reply at all: it could equally well be “How are you today?” or a piece of news you want to tell them.

Furthermore, the various message feeds are not called feeds, but given the rather grand name of timelines, as though their primary purpose were to tell you the dates and times of events, or maybe the route you’ve taken through the site. But it isn’t: they’re there to let you view various different collections of tweets. They’re actually views or feeds.

In other words,

  • What are you doing? is entirely the wrong question
  • the update button isn’t for updating anything
  • a status doesn’t represent the status of anything
  • an @reply doesn’t necessarily reply to anything
  • a timeline hasn’t really got anything to do with times
  • Twitter’s description on its front page is almost completely misleading

Is it any wonder people get confused?

And one of the most depressing things to see on Twitter is a series of dutiful What are you doing? answers similar to this:

Signing up for Twitter! Everyone says I should. Excited!
Getting confused. Now what? Help!
Eating dinner. Still puzzled.
Going shopping. Why would anyone want to know that? Very puzzled now.
Thinking Twitter probably doesn’t have any point to it. Is anyone reading this? How would I know? Hello if you’re out there!
Giving up on Twitter.

Lack of help

[Note: Twitter’s sign-up process is now somewhat different from what I describe here and it sounds as though things may have improved a little; see Stuart’s comment.]

Clearly, for Twitter to have any point, you need some tweets to read and you need some people reading yours. You need to be able to interact.

You make a person’s tweets visible on your home page (NB: this is different from your profile page) by following them. Your tweets show on their home page when they follow you. Twitter doesn’t tell you this: you simply end up on a home page which contains no tweets. None from you, because you’ve not tweeted yet, and none from anyone else, because you’re not following anyone yet. I think this is the stage at which a new user feels most completely at sea. Quite understandably: all they’ve got is a more or less blank page and the question What are you doing?, which is no help at all.

Initially, having people to follow is far more important than having people follow you. It gives you a starting point. You don’t really find followers by sitting there being lost. Generally, you find followers by following them first and having something interesting to say; they then see you in their follower lists and come to investigate who you are, so as to decide whether to follow you too.

What Twitter ought to do at this point is to give you a message along the lines

You aren’t following anybody yet, so you won’t see any tweets except your own. Here are some ways to find interesting people:

  • Visit the public timeline to watch for interesting tweets
  • Search for users near you
  • Search for users whose profile mentions a particular subject
  • Search for tweets mentioning a particular subject
  • View the friends list of a particular user
  • Find new contacts using Mr Tweet
  • Import contacts from your address book

with links you can then click to follow up the suggestions. Sadly, Twitter doesn’t do that. It leaves you floundering on your own.

And if you want suggestions on how to find people to follow—well, they’re in that list. Once you find someone interesting you can reply to one of their tweets, or simply quietly follow them until they say something you want to answer, and you’re away.

One exception to this though: if the person you find is famous, or has thousands of followers already, or has social media expert in their profile, it’s unlikely you’ll get a reply from them. (Unless it’s @kriscolvin, who has acquired over 19,000 20,000 21,000 followers largely by being friendly and replying to people. [3]) You’re mostly best talking to people who have a sensible number of followers and who show signs of replying to people (e.g. ther profile page contains a lot of tweets starting with @).

Incomprehensibility from outside

Twitter only really makes sense once you’re following and interacting with a number of people. If you’ve not joined up, you can’t see this happening. [4] All you can really do is visit the public timeline—a cacophony of unrelated tweets from thousands of users—or visit profile pages like mine where you’ll see one person’s tweets but not the people they’re addressed to. (If WordPress’ Twitter widget is working properly, mine are in the sidebar of this page.) Either way, you don’t see Twitter as it actually is. The views you can access aren’t the one a user sees most of the time, but ones they only use occasionally. They might visit someone’s profile page for reference or to catch up on missed tweets, or visit the public timeline as a way of finding random people. But the views that make sense are your home page, filled with tweets from people you’ve decided to follow, and your replies page, filled with tweets from people who are talking to you.

Summing up

Maybe I’m overdoing the bullet lists in this post, but here’s another one anyway.

  • Is it any wonder that Twitter confuses people? No.
  • Does Twitter need to confuse people? No.
  • Has Twitter done anything to make itself less confusing? No.
  • Does Twitter care about the confusion? I don’t know, but fear the answer to that may also be No.

I think this is a great shame, because the changes that would make Twitter seem as simple as it really is are fairly straighforward:

  • use language that reflects what Twitter really is
  • drop the misleading question What are you doing?
  • give new users a little bit of meaningful help in getting started.

I honestly think that’s all that’s needed, but sadly I see no sign of it happening.

Another article to read

I’m not too keen on autopneumotrombics so I thought a while before linking to this article which says very nice things about my own. But you may wish to read it. In it, Nancy Friedman takes up some of my my thoughts here and develops them further—particularly Twitter’s misleading opening greeting and the fact that people stick with Twitter anyway for what it is. She also picks up a few additional language points which I missed.

Notes

[1] A wild guess. It’s a lot, anyway. Back

[2] Theoretically. Back

[3] 19,000 was corrrect when I first posted this three days ago. Now, 20,000 21,000 is correct . . . Back

[4] Unless you’re in the know about applications like Tweetgrid; but you won’t be unless you’re already familiar with Twitter. Back

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Another beautiful photo blog

Posted on Apr 3, 2009 | 1 comment

Ninebark Imagery has been on my blogroll for quite a while now, and I thought it was time I brought it to your attention. It’s the photoblog of Debbie Campbell, a web designer in Colorado who also describes herself as an “amateur nature photographer”. Here’s one of her recent photos:

Poudre River. © ninebarkimagery.com

Poudre River. © ninebarkimagery.comUsed with permission

One thing I like about the site, apart from the pictures which I find very restful, is the simple page layout with one picture to a page against a nearly-black, unobtrustive foliage background and minimal text. This lets the photos speak for themselves, one at a time, as they should. The mood of the photos is mostly quiet and reflective, with a feelling that a lot of care has gone into the composition. (And yes, reflections in still water do feel reflective mentally, so allthough I wasn’t trying to create a pun it’s quite an apt one.)

These aren’t photos for looking at quickly, in my opinion: one needs to linger and enjoy them, as you’d enjoy being in a peaceful place. I hope you’ll visit the site and see the others.

Thanks to Debbie for permission to use the one in this post.

1 Comment

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The bizarre similarity between money and quantum physics

Posted on Apr 3, 2009 | 8 comments

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found money very puzzling for various reasons. Especially when it comes to what the banks do with it. I’ve never been quite convinced that money actually exists: it’s a number that we do things with. If you pay me for something, your number goes down and my number goes up. If my number goes down to zero and my bank won’t let it keep going then I’m in big trouble, because people won’t hand things over to me in shops and so on. To do that, they want me to make their number go up.

And I’ve never really understood how “the money supply” can be increased. Coins and notes can be printed, sure, but whose are they and how do they get into circulation without somebody in effect “stealing” them? Is it actually valid to create it out of nowhere? All very strange.

The subject came up again when my friend PamBG, who once worked in finance and is now a Methodist minister, wrote a puzzled post about “quantitative easing”.

She didn’t get the answer to her question, some discussion ensued about the nature of money, the value of a company’s stocks, and the like. (The more I think about these things, the more convinced I become that money is really just a mental trick.)

As it happens, I had to study quite a lot of quantum physics at university, for my electronics degree. (This isn’t surprising, since quantum physics is the physics of the extremely small, electrons are extremely small, and electronics is based on their behaviour.) And in studying that, I had the same sense of things only just existing, or not quite existing. (I mean, an electron exists but doesn’t properly know where it is or how fast it’s going, or if it knows one it doesn’t know the other; that’s roughly what the Uncertainty Principle says.) It seemed very much like a game played with certain rules and numbers. A game which happened to predict very well what measurement you’d get if you did a particular experiment, but a game nevertheless, which simply dealt with the numbers and rules and was silent about the actual nature of the physical objects playing the game. All it said was that they obeyed the rules. (Scientifically, all that can be studied is the rules and numbers, since they can be observed; all we can say about any underlying reality is that if there is one, it’s one which fits them.)

And it also so happens that I find the ideas of quantum physics easier to “grasp” [1] than the ideas of finance, so the analogy that follows was a bit of a breakthrough for me. Here are some shortened extracts from the later part of the conversation:

Pam:

In some senses ‘money doesn’t really exist’ – which was people’s complaint when the West went off the gold standard in the 1970s. (Previously, all money printed had to have a certain value with respect to an ounce of gold.)

And markets are driven by psychology. Fear and greed. A very simple explanation: financial instruments are priced according what people will think that they will be worth in the future. So, if a particular company is expected to grow by 5% per annum over the next two years, and its assets are now £100, its stock price would be £110.25. (This is hugely simplistic for illustrative purposes.)

The problem, of course, is that you have to guess how much everything is going to grow [. . .]

Tim:

[. . .] I heard on a radio programme that the first time there was a real banking crisis after the Bank of England formed, people were very unhappy about paper money, complaining that it wasn’t actually money.

It’s interesting: atheists accuse us of basing our lives on something that doesn’t exist, namely God, but arguably modern society runs on something that doesn’t exist, namelly money! (I’m only half joking.)

ISTM you’re saying that the value of a piece of paper simply exists in the mind of the buyer and seller.

Pam:

Yes, I think it probably is. It’s a corollary of ‘something is only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it’ [. . .]

Tim:

Bizarrely, there’s a parallel with quantum physics, too [. . .]

In quantum physics—the physics of the ultra-small—a quantity generally exists in an “indeterminate” state until it is measured. The act of measurement forces it to stop being indeterminate and have a definite value.

Similarly it seems to me that a house, say, doesn’t have a definite value until you measure the price by letting somebody pay for it.

So in a way, the financial value of something is always in the future and hovering on the brink of existence.

Hmmm…

Pam:

Tim – Not only does that seem quite correct to me with respect to money and financial markets, but you’ve just helped me to better understand that principle in quantum physics.

And maybe that’s why money is so confusing. In quantum physics, you mostly don’t know things like the position or momentum of a particle; you only know the probability of it being within a particular range. And, according to the most widely accepted interpretation, the particle doesn’t “know” either. It really doesn’t have a precise position or momentum until it’s “observed” in some way.

Similarly with money: your house doesn’t have a precise value except at the moment of sale. All it has is a particular probability of lying in a particular price range. And the same is true of the the things in which your money in the bank is invested.

And it seems to me that this might be why the economy gives us so much grief: we’re dealing with things which have at best a shadowy existence, but much of the time we treat them like the most concrete reality there is.

Thoughts?

Note

[1] I think it was either Heisenberg or Schrödinger who said that if you weren’t confused by quantum mechanics you hadn’t understood it; hence “grasp” in quotes. Back

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Why are seconds called seconds?

Posted on Apr 2, 2009 | 5 comments

Minute minutes?

I still have a few snatches of memory from childhood about learning to tell the time, and learning how it was divided up. In particular I remember when I first learnt how long a second actually was (considerably longer than I expected) and that there were sixty of them in a minute.

I also learnt that minute wasn’t spelt minnit or anything like that. And I already knew that minute meant “very small”, which seemed odd, since really it was the seconds that were small, not the minutes. And I half-remember thinking it was strange that minutes weren’t called firsts. Why not?

I didn’t know, but it was fun that the words were like that. Evidently I’ve been interested in language for a very long time.

A prime example

In my teens, I got interested in reading popular mathematics books, such as Martin Gardner’s collections from his “Mathematical Diversions” page in Scientific American. (That started quite early too: I remember being excited in my last year at junior school, which translates as age 10, when our class teacher got us to make flexagons. These are like a sort of hexagonal origami conjuring trick which make an appearance in one of his books. I think the one we made was the hexahexaflexagon. Sadly if I tell you about them now it’ll be too much of a digression from this post.)

Sometimes in maths you’ve been using a symbol—say the letter a—to represent something, then find yourself wanting to represent a similar-but-different thing. One traditional way is to simply add a little mark to the symbol: a becomes a′, then maybe a′′ and so on.

From the popular maths books I learnt, somewhat to my surprise, that whereas at school we very logically called these symbols a-dashed and a-double-dashed, having added little dashes to them, the American books called them by the rather strange names a-prime and a-double-prime. What a strange word. How had they been primed? They didn’t have anything to do with prime numbers. How odd.

A degree of confusion

And there was another intriguing thing: when I learnt geometry—specifically, angles—it was apparent that it wasn’t just hours which were divided up into minutes and seconds: degrees were, too. Which was interesting, but the notation was puzzling: 33 degrees, 12 minutes and 3 seconds was written 33° 12′ 3′′ .

“How confusing!” I thought, “Surely 12′ 3′′ means 12 feet and 3 inches? It’s bad enough making them sound like times without also making them look like distances!

So what on earth is going on?

These questions niggled me for years, because although they were intriguing I never quite got round to looking them up.

The revelation

The answer appeared out of the blue about a year ago, and everything fell into place. Very neatly and satisfyingly. (Except it would be more satisfying if a foot had sixty inches in, but never mind.)

Thirty years or so after first wondering about minutes and seconds, I was reading a fascinating book about early mathematics. [1] Among other things it talked about the Babylonians who, as you probably know, were the ones who divided a day into 24 hours, an hour into 60 minutes and a minute into 60 seconds. In fact, they did all their calculations in base 60. (By the way, they were able to solve quadratic equations in 1700 BC, knew Pythagoras’ Theorem many centuries before Pythagoras even lived, and were able to calculate square roots so as to use it).

The Babylonians were the only people who had a decent system for representing fractions. For us, 1:23:45 means an hour, 23 minutes and 45 seconds; for them, the equivalent in their writing meant the number 1, plus 23 sixtieths, plus 45 sixtieths of sixtieths, and they’d have happily gone on adding smaller and smaller divisions, like we do with our decimal places.

The astronomer Ptolemy also featured in the book. He used some ingenious geometry to work out a trigonometry table in half-degree steps. [2] In his introduction he commented that by far the best system for representing fractions was the Babylonian one and that he’d therefore adopted it.

And now comes the Great Revelation. Ptolemy himself wrote in Greek, but once maths like his started appearing in Latin, what did people call their fractions of a degree? The answer turns out to be:

  • “the first small part”: pars minuta prima
  • “the second small part”: pars minuta secunda!

Look at that for a moment. Isn’t it beautiful? All my questions answered in those two short phrases. It’s obvious, but let’s spell it out anyway, and enjoy it all making sense:

  • A minute of time is the first small part, or  pars minuta prima, of an hour.
  • A minute of arc  is the first small part, or  pars minuta prima, of a degree.
  • A second of time is the second small part, or pars minuta secunda, of an hour.
  • A second of arc  is the second small part, or pars minuta secunda, of a degree.
  • The little mark you use for marking a minute—a pars minuta prima—is called a prime.
  • To mark a second [small part] you use two of them: ′′.  Presumably if we used sixtieths of seconds, we’d call them thirds and mark them ′′′.
  • Feet and inches are also first and second small parts of something, so they too get labelled with ′ and ′′.

So all those years ago, I was right. Minutes are “minute”. Seconds do come second! Minutes were called “firsts”, but in Latin.

In a way it’s a shame about the feet and inches, because they don’t quite fit the scheme. An inch isn’t a sixtieth of a foot. On the other hand, isn’t a fathom five feet (sixty inches)? or is it six? I can’t remember.

So I don’t quite know about the feet and inches. But I was stunned when I came across those two short phrases which made everything else fall into place. Isn’t language amazing?

Notes

[1] Asger Aaboe, Episodes from the Early History of Mathematics, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Back
[2] In our terms, what he calculated was twice the sine of half a given angle. Back

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Posted in language, science/maths

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Poll results

Posted on Apr 1, 2009 | 3 comments

This probably isn’t of great interest, but several people did use the poll to give feedback about their preferences for the front page so here are the results. I’ve excluded my own real vote, and the vote I did to test the Other option. Five votes is hardly a statistically significant sample, but never mind. It tells me what five people thought, at least.

What would you prefer
to see on this page?
Full posts, all the time 3
Full posts only if short 1
Other 1
Just introductions 0
No preference 0

So I’ll do what I originally thought: show full posts, but maybe very occasionally just an introduction if the post is a particularly specialist one or if I’m keen to keep an earlier one easily visible.

The one person who voted Other asked to see recent comments—meaning, I think, the actual text of comments left on the blog, as opposed to just a list of who’s commented. But I haven’t managed to find any way to do that, so if you know of one, please let me know.

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