Comments on: Emerging science and technology at 700 characters per day – how was it for you?

By: Twitter: changing your perspective on reality, 140 characters at a time

Twitter: changing your perspective on reality, 140 characters at a time — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:15:22 +0000

[...] I became an avid “twit” after the rather naive Emerging science and technology at 700 characters per day experiment back in December. I can now be found adding my banalities into the mix of relative [...]

By: Clif H

Clif H — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:06 +0000

Interesting experiment Andrew. I never understood the Twitter phenomenon myself until I saw it in action by some West Coast uber-twitter friends. It was clear to me then how a conversation over beers at bar in Boston soon became a global discourse on the state of technology. So while I agree with you that Twitter is not the place to flesh out an extended thought in single burst, if you view the intent of the tool that way you’re missing the point. Twitter is to blogs like IM is to email. Twitter is conversation, not lecture. And, like Facebook, a way to have an open, ongoing, global conversation with all of one’s friends/followers/colleagues/etc at the same time, in the same place, in the same public forum. Another way to maximize network response by permitting both global and individual conversation at the same it – put it out there and see what comes back from the network. Look at the quantity of folks integrating Twitter to Facebook statuses and the concept becomes quite clear.

By: Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:33:11 +0000

I’m actually thinking of a counter-experiment (or at least a post) on “slow blogging” (not sure that is a real term – will have to Google it). i.e. going back to the old art of using what space it takes to get an idea across with clarity, elegance and persuasion

By: Phil Stiff

Phil Stiff — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:32:38 +0000

The twitter character limit, for me, obliterates the ability to communicate effectively. The posts made me feel really on edge because they had to jump on point so fast and get crafted like a huffpost headline or a fortune cookie proverb. I must be getting old. It does look like a good practice exercise for trying to form concise thoughts and positions.

I think Facebook allows a little more leeway for this kind of thing, but I don’t really know the demographics/user counts of twitter or facebook users. I’m seeing more and more 40something friends join fbook lately.

By: Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:17:56 +0000

Thanks Ruth,

The difficulties surrounding side conversations sparked off by the tweets and keeping them together as a coherent stream on the screen were pretty big ones. One work-round would be to use tags (precede each message with #scitechexpt or something, allowing searches to pick up the relevant messages) – but it does eat into the character limit.

And Drew Endy – he is a leading synthetic biologist, but an ability to explain that would have been useful

By: Ruth Seeley

Ruth Seeley — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:29:51 +0000

Since I was following your experiment from the beginning and since Opinions ‘r’ Us, here are some of my thoughts:

You could, of course, have crafted your messages all at once and then only Tweeted at intervals, 140 characters at a time – that might have made it easier (and wouldn’t have been cheating, honest. It would merely have been strategic.).

Writing short but meaningful messages is always much harder than writing long. It’s a wonderful exercise though.

I was hesitant to interrupt when I wanted clarification – I puzzled over ‘info gen’ for quite a while before concluding (rightly or wrongly) that you meant the generation of information. I had other questions as well: who is Drew Endy? Why can’t we program inanimate things too, like the kitchen floor, the mop and the bucket, so the floor gets washed without my intervention?

Even though I can read quite well upside down and backwards, in order to follow your train of thought I found I had to separate your Tweets out from the several hundred others I was getting – otherwise I would be scrolling back down to reread the previous one and became distracted by links to local shootings, Sudanese war criminals, the latest media outlet to announce it was no longer going to publish or was laying off staff, etc.

In the week prior to your experiment and the week of, I saw two cases of people live Tweeting events they were attending – one was Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at the Rotman School of Business in Toronto as part of the promotional tour for his new book, Outliers; the other was a Wally Lamb reading at a bookstore. I found them pretty easy to follow (again, when separated from all the other Tweets I was reading), but others didn’t seem to have thought of that workaround and were very puzzled by what was going on.

I think a few probably quite simple tweaks to the Twitter user interface could solve those problems, as well as others posed by time zone differences when you’re following a lot of people – on the west coast of North America, for instance, a lot’s gone by already when you’re following folks in Europe and the UK. Paging back through 20 pages of Tweets isn’t really viable, nor is clicking on the icon of everyone you’re following.

And no, you didn’t embarrass yourself or miss the point. I’m delighted to see a scientist using Twitter in such an innovative way. You’ve got most of the social media gurus beat by a mile – I’ve diagnosed ADHD amongst several of them; it’s the only explanation of why they’re telling us what they had for lunch and which tarmac they’re on.