Leave the great indoorsnotes on the journey

When journalist Steven Johnson used Twitter to announce his TIME Magazine cover story about Twitter, and I heard that they would use the tweet as the cover of the print copy of the magazine, I thought it was pretty clever.  Or way too cutesy, depending on how you look at it.  Either way, I was very interested in the article, but I practiced rare restraint and waited for my print copy of the magazine to arrive in the mail (the postal kind) so that I can read it on paper.  You know, like in the olden days.

I think my expectations may have been a little too high.  Since so much has been written on Twitter, I thought that a TIME Magazine cover story on the subject would have a lot more depth on how it is changing society and the people who use it.  Instead, it was a fairly standard summary of familiar arguments that have been made countless times before — how user-led innovation changed a product beyond what the creators intended it for, turning it into a real-time search engine and broadcast medium for the instant web.

And that’s fine if this is meant to be an introduction piece for people who don’t know Twitter well.  However, I thought 2 sections in particular missed the mark a little bit, and I wanted to write a quick response to that.  Make sure you read the full article first so you have the proper context.

1.  How Twitter is not changing search

First, Mr. Johnson says this about how Twitter is changing search on the web (my emphasis added):

As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google’s approach to the search. If you’re looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you’re looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.

There’s only one problem with this argument.  Searching on Twitter does not just include the information provided by your network or even your extended network.  Searches on Twitter includes every single tweet ever written, and it gives you the results in reverse chronological order with no measure of actual relevance.  This means that if you do that search for Benjamin Franklin, you’re going to get a combination of completely random pieces of information about the guy.  Go ahead, do the search.  How many “essays shared by historians” do you see…?

I really don’t think Twitter is changing information search for the better.  Twitter is changing real-time search for the better.  One of the most recent examples is of course how quickly the Hudson river plane landing got out as soon as it happen — long before CNN picked it up.  But if I needed to write an article about Benjamin Franklin, I’d stick with Google.

2.  It’s not really about two-way conversation

The article ends as follows (my emphasis added):

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

New ways to talk to one another?  I think he is giving us way too much credit.  Because let’s be honest, Twitter is all about hearing the sound of our own voices.  Why else would there be this obsession with who has the most followers?  I think Twitter is best summed up by this Venn diagram, courtesy of Despair.com:

Yes, we sometimes reply to each other’s tweets, but let’s just call ourselves out on this one — we do it only so we can get noticed more.  Look, I’m a blogger and a Twitter user.  I’m not pointing fingers at you, I’m including all of us in this assessment.  I just think that Twitter is not really about two-way communication, it’s about one-way communication that happens to go in millions of separate directions.  I do find it incredibly useful as a source of information and finding out what my friends are up to.  But in the end, isn’t it all about getting other people to notice how smart/funny/quirky/special we are?  Just asking…

But I really shouldn’t be so hard on Steven Johnson.  I did enjoy the article, and let’s face it, I’m not the one who just had a story published on the cover of TIME Magazine.  I do hope he decides to follow me on Twitter.