Cutting out the Fluff

I've got a hypothesis about conversations on Twitter: the substance is exactly as good, mediocre, or lousy as conversations on the rest of the web. The difference is that it isn't wrapped in a lot of verbose stylistic additions.

Chat rooms, forums, e-mail groups, the comments sections on blogs--to varying extent these tend to suffer from the tragedy of the commons. That is, the activity takes place in a common space, which no one of the individuals involved controls. Everything written by someone else displaces something that you could have written there. Especially in forums and comments sections that lack threaded responses, one or two really motivated individuals can completely push everyone else out by writing up responses that are enormously verbose. A handful of these people can destroy the value of a blog's comment section; many a blog has done away with their comments section entirely once they've gained enough popularity to make it unmanageable.

Doug Millison once commented that Twitter was like e-mail listservs, but the 140 character limit made it better. I recently saw a striking example of this in action that drew me even closer to his point of view.

Twitter Search recently added the ability to "view conversation" when a tweet is directed at someone. Frustratingly, they don't have a way to link to these conversations yet, so I went ahead and took a screenshot of the conversation that caught my eye (zoom in and drag the image to read).

There's nothing particularly dazzling about the exchange in itself. Just another debate about politics and religion on the internet, business as usual for the most part. But boy do they get to the point right quick!

A 140 character limit will do that to you. It's not an unsurmountable constraint--if you really have more to say, you can put out multiple tweets. But it drastically increases the cost of responding in any great length. It is so much harder to posture, rant, or lecture than it is to simply state the substance of your point.

Earlier I had been impressed by the focusing power of Twitter from this Dan Gillmor post in which he quoted an exchange with someone from the New York Times. Of course, Gillmor concluded that "Twitter is probably the worst place to have a serious conversation" because "[y]ou can't do nuance in 140 characters". I honestly think that the conversation he posts is more useful than the rest of his (long) post; you can agree or disagree with the positions taken by him and the guy he's talking to, but it takes about five seconds to understand them.

I think people have greatly underestimated what you can communicate in 140 characters. And no doubt they have overestimated the "nuance" that they manage to pack into their more verbose pieces of writing.