Twitter and Viral Opt-In Networks
Despite my earlier, skeptical thoughts on the subject, I have been following Twitter (although not contributing a lot, I’ll admit) and starting to appreciate it.
Granted, it’s yet another time sink, and I haven’t found an actual productive use for it yet. But I still marvel at how spam-free it remains so far. Since you only follow people you want to follow, you don’t hear from complete strangers. Yes, a stranger can make a message appear in your feed by including @yourname, but that’s a one-to-one channel, not the one-to-gazillions type of channel that spammers feed on. It works as a way to say ‘hi’, but not as a way to mass-market.
We do need some kind of middle ground between the new proprietary walled gardens like Facebook, and the all-you-can-spam communications channels like email and Usenet. IM isn’t quite it, it’s too much hassle to set up anything other than ad hoc one-to-one conversations. IRC seems to have some kind of karmic “Geeks Only” sign on it, it hasn’t caught on in a big way.
Twitter has about the right social model: opt-in, but make it easy to make connections; but we need to supplement the microcontent format, and an economic model that can keep the servers running as the scale gets truly massive. And finally, it should not be tied to the fortunes and whims of any one company, no matter how enlightened they may seem.