one simple question
Twitter is a social Web app that encourages users to post status messages in real-time. In addition to posting through a Web interface, users can tell Twitter what they’re up to via SMS or through Jabber and IM chatbots. I often use LiveJournal’s Jabberbot to post to my Journal, because it allows quick postings of passing thoughts, so Jabber’s chat interface was an obvious draw for me. Unlike LiveJournal, users only respond to the question “What are you doing?”, which reminds me of an atypically funny Budweiser ad from a few years back. Like Adam, I think it would be nice if there were a way to propagate responses to instant-messaging accounts. Twitter generates RSS feeds; how hard would it be for Adium to scrape an RSS feed for setting user status?
I joined Twitter in November after the tool was used to embarrass Michael Arrington during a panel, but it only seems have hit critical mass in the last month or so. A few weeks ago, my usual crew of Austin-based blogger joined at once, and what was once a soliloquy became a conversation. After a woman in labor shared her status on Twitter this week., I was sure the service was snowballing. Right now, the site is running very slowly, which only confirms my suspicion.
Twitter leads users to use language interesting ways. Although you can just post a standard status message like “out to lunch,” the design of the aggregated pages encourages you to write about yourself in the third person, in complete sentences. I think each post used to include the word “is,” so every post started like “McChris is.” The presence of “is” sort of forced users to use language in specific ways, starting posts with either a participle (”McChris is going home”) or a location (”McChris is at TIPI”). Even without the “is,” I find myself straining to make grammatical sense with the current design.
Twitter has also had me thinking about speech-act theory, although mostly what I’ve been thinking is “I wish I knew more about speech-act theory.” I’ve been doing a lot of “thinking,” “explaining,” and “wondering” on Twitter, and my sense is that others are as well. I’m sure that the use of speech acts in this way is not new to Twitter; I was never a MOO user, but from what I know of MOOs, it seemed like they relied on speech-acts for their communication. Does anyone know of studies that have applied speech-act theory to MOOs or other online spaces? Sandy Stone is the obvious person to ask about this perhaps I’ll pose the question when I see her next. Still, speech-act theory could provide a useful analytical framework for understanding some Web 2.0 sites and CSCW applications.
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