The Synthetic Librarian

I’ve got something negative to get off my chest: I’m not impressed by Twitter. There, I said it. I like a lot of web things: probably most web things. I really like Internet technology and I believe it has power to connect people. But, Twitter doesn’t draw my attention.

In this post, I’m not going to attack Twitter. Instead, I’m going to briefly explain what is and why other people like it. Then I will explain what libraries can do with Twitter including a few caveats. Finally, I will describe my own recent experience setting up a Twitter account and following other people. I have have some nice things to say about Twitter search, but I confess that I’m unlikely to tweet or follow tweets.

If you are new to Twitter and want to know how people use it, I recommend you watch the CommonCraft video “Twitter in Plain English”. I’ve embedded a copy blow for easy viewing. I’m going to assume that you know the basics: tweet, replies, follow, hashtag, retweet.

Twitter is Facebook’s most Popular Feature Opened up to the World

Twitter is often described as “microblogging“: blogging where the posts are really short. “Micro-blogs are social networks for broadcasting news with a very short character limit in the vein of text messaging” (Murphy, 2008, p. 375).

Twitter doesn’t attempt to define itself on its website. The Twitter “about” page says this:

Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

I would argue that Twitter has become popular because it takes the single most popular feature of Facebook and opened it up to the world. Twitter emerged in 2006, at roughly the same time that Facebook opened up to everyone (not just schools and corporations) and added “minifeeds” (short status updates) (Body & Ellison, 2008, p. 212). Twitter wasn’t that popular initially, but Facebook’s feeds were an enormous hit (after first being a privacy trainwreck).

The problem with Facebook’s status feeds, is that you have to be logged into Facebook to see them (or use SMS). Facebook’s “walled garden” approach works against them in some ways. The idea behind Twitter is to just do status updates and make them easy. In part, “easy” means providing more ways to get those status updates: RSS, instant messenger, on the Twitter website, via SMS, on your computer. Almost anyone should be able to find a way of following updates that is easy for them: not so true of Facebook.

With either Twitter or Facebook, making a status update is easy. With twitter, following updates is easier and more personal, so Twitter wins for people who like status updates.

Twitter has Five Winning Characteristics

It’s Easy

Twitter requires you to answer a simple question, “what are you doing?” The barrier to entry for using this technology is the lowest I’ve experienced. Similarly, following other twitterers is easy because you can choose the technology you are most comfortable with: RSS, mobile phone (SMS), and many others. Compare this with blogging which is writing and writing is harder.

It’s Real-time

Twitter works in real-time. This differentiates it from blogging. The advantage of blogging, especially when augmented with RSS, is that readers can choose when to read and are motivated to read often but not immediately. Twitter, on the other hand, encourages real-time updates: “What are you doing?” implies “What are you doing RIGHT NOW?”. This motivates readers to follow updates in real-time and Twitter supports technologies to do that (e.g. Instant messaging and SMS) so it works well for real-time updates.

It’s Organized/Searchable

Twitter messages can contain embedded descriptive tag (i.e. “hashtags” just as blog posts can contain tags. This makes past tweets searchable and organizable. Facebook status updates which are emphemeral by comparison. This characteristic has lead to Twitter becoming a substantial tool for trend research (Rowse, 2008) (e.g. M(Heil & Piskorski, June 1, 2009). See also HP Lab’s Twitter Research.

It’s Social

Twitter is a social media platform. The list of who you follow and who follows you defines a social network that can be used to discover new people with similar interests. For example:

I use Twitter to learn more about my particular intersection of interests and I seek out movers and shakers and writers and thinkers in the worlds of education, libraries, technology, edtech, journalism, and media. My Twitter network helps me grow as a professional and share as a mentor and teacher. (Valenza, 2009)

Libraries CAN put Twitter to Good Use

Organized, social, and searchable: What does that remind you of? These characteristics help us predict the types of uses that Twitter libraries might benefit from.

Lots of users implies a use in marketing

It’s no secret that Twitter has a lot of users, though nobody knows how many. This is important to libraries when they consider marketing services. A trivial outcome of this is that libraries must consider this as a medium in which they can reach some of their users. The non-trivial part is how best to use Twitter to reach them.

The CommonCraft video “Twitter in Plain English” paints of picture of how twitter can affect people: “the little messages from twitter painted a picture of her friends family and coworkers that she had never seen before. It was the real world” and argues that “Most of our day-to-day lives are hidden from people that care”. While this description is intended to talk about the inter-personal connections people, make it can apply to organizations as well.

Markets are Conversations

Searls & Weinberger (2001, chap. 4) argue that “markets are conversations” and that mass marketing has failed to deliver what customers want.

The product of mass marketing was the message, delivered in as many forms as there were media and in as many guises as there were marketers to invent them. Delivered locally, shipped globally, repeated inescapably, the business of marketing devoted itself to delivering the message. Unfortunately, the customer never wanted to take delivery. (Searls & Weinberger, 2001, chap. 4)

The example from the CommonCraft video shows what customers are looking for out of a converstation. Twitter represents an opportunity to let people see the hidden lives of libraries.

I would caution however that libraries must consider that people have a choice regarding who they follow and who they do not. If twitter is going to be used to help people discover the side of the library they never knew, then a library should be as authentic as possible. This means being part of the community and joining the conversation.

For example, identify five aspects of your library that might be relevant and desirable to communicate. Do not broadcast these directly. Rather, wait keep them in mind. Assign a library tweeter or tweeters to follow people in the local community. Use twitter search tools to track trends. When an opportunity arise reply to tweets by community members refering to library resources.

When using Twitter for marketing, Murphy (2008, p. 376) astutely observes that you should consider not only who is following you but who you follow: “The more friends you add or “follow” by subscribing to others’ feeds, the larger your community and the more visible your account will be.”

Libraries Organize Information

There are many search tools (a list is given at the end of this post) that can be used to search and visual tweets. However, it is also beneficial to have a person organize information in interesting ways. Libraries often establish pathfinds, guides, and other resources that collect together links to other information of relevance to their community. Often these are topical, but often they are simply timely. Twitters combination of social and real-time characteristics mean that librarians can leverage it to quickly put together lists of information of timely relevance to a particular social group.

Mastermaq provides an example of how Twitter had value in a real-time weather crisis for Edmontonians. While librarians are unlikely to be able to provide value on the kind of short time-span Mastermaq refers, to they could play a role in collecting information in longer, but still “emphemeral” time frames: weeks. If they combine resources and trends garnered from Twitter with local resources, they could become valueable to the community.

The commoncraft video argues that “real life happens between blog posts and emails”. For libraries, their value may be to organize information between the tweets about an event and the publication of the book about the event. Commoncraft also argues that the answer to the question “what are you doing?” “…makes us feel connected and part of each other’s lives.” Using twitter to identify what is relevant in that time-gap between immediate, emphemeral, and permanent could allow libraries to help people feel connect to local events in new ways.

Twitter for reference

One way that College@Home, in Twitter for Librarians: The Ulimate Guide (not so ultimate but still good) recommends “sharing references”:

Library patrons can get online help from librarians through a Twitter account. Patrons can send messages asking about specific materials and staff can get back to them when they have information. You could also use if for your own personal information sharing with friends and colleagues.

Better yet, are you answering a reference question and the user wants the link to the page you found? Offer to tweet it @them if that is what they want. This is a trivial offering that might be highly valued for twitter users and help patrons redefine their attitude toward libraries and their use of technology.

For a survey of libraries using Twitter in reference, see this blog post: Reference services and twitter.

Be wise in your use of Twitter

In the next section I describe my personal experience trying out twitter and I argue that social bookmarking and RSS readers are better choices for many of the things people use Twitter for. I would urge libraries to be wise in their adoption of Twitter. Ask, “Is Twitter the best tool to get this outcome?”

Similarly, be cautious of scholarly research reports on Twitter. I have not quoted many of the recent reports, some interesting ones that have come out just recently, because of their controversy. It takes time and circumspect consideration to really make use of this emerging literature.

For example, Heil & Piskorski (2009) is a preliminary report on research into gender differences among Twitter users. This research has been much linked to, in part because it comes out of Harvard Business School, and in part because Twitter is a hot topic. However, there is criticism of this from the library community (the respected voice of social network research Fred Stutzman).

Stutzman also draws attention to the recent Pew and Neilson studies claiming that teens don’t tweet as does Danah Boyd (from UC Berkeley School of Information) (see also the mashable article for the pro-teens-don’t-tweet research)

I’m aware of no criticism of Romero & Wu (2009), a report on research done at HP Labs but I needed additional explaination to make sense of it, and that makes me think that we must all take a moment to consider the research before acting on it.

In summary, I believe Twitter represents opportunities, but it is unclear how successful experiments with Twitter will be. Slightly more mature social media is likely to yield more consistent and impressive results. Don’t shy away from experimentation but set clear boundaries to prevent sinking too much effort in when you could be making bigger gains elsewhere.

My Experience Using Twitter

I have never used Twitter before, though I have used various twitter search systems. It’s one of the few social technologies that I have not explored.

Twitter is as easy to setup as the reports claim. In fact, the setup process is more light-weight than most sign-up processes. I created a Twitter account with my standard handle: clonedmilkmen. I made a few customizations: I added my standard picture, entered my timezone, and customized the background. I choose not to give them my mobile phone number (for SMS) or my email password because the first would cost me a great deal of money (receiving tweets at $0.25 per message, yikes!) and the second is bad news (never give anyone your password: no legitimate person or organization should ever ask for your password).

I skimmed through the help portal and the Getting Started guide to ensure I knew what I was doing. “Tweet”, “reply”, “retweet”, “hashtag”, “follow”: check, got it. Seriously, this is beautiful in its simplicity.

Next, I admitted to myself that I had nothing to tweet and tweeting that I had nothing to tweet is something I cannot bring myself to do. So, I turned to finding others to follow. I started with the Top 100 Librarian Tweeters and identified some libraries and librarians that I already know (from their blogs) and some I did not know. I also did a Find Peopel search for terms like “security” and “sysadmin” and “information security” and picked some people to follow from there.

I then I had to decide how I wanted to follow the posts of the people I choose. I already ruled out SMS as too expensive. I choose RSS because I use an RSS reader as part of my existing workflow. I was shocked however to find that I need to provide my Twitter username and password in order to add my RSS feed to Google Reader. I had assumed that the list of people I was following would be public, and therefore the RSS feed of tweets of those I follow would be too. Not so! That information is only available to those who are logged in: a walled garden like Facebook.

I choose not to give Google Reader my Twitter password, and opted to return, periodically to look at the list of new tweets from those I’m following. (deep sigh)

I was not impressed with what I was following. Here is a snapshot of what one 24 hour period contained:

• 72 tweets from 15 people I’m following
• 67 tweets were bookmarks: links to other sites
• Only 6 of these bookmarks didn’t use url shortening services
• 7 bookmarks contains information that would be valuable in real-time
• The rest were either news stories or bookmarked sites of interest
• 11 Tweets were personal: “what am I doing”
• One person posted, almost exclusively, links to their blog post

I use RSS Readers for News, and Delicious for Bookmarks

I could probably improve this through searching for more interesting twitter users. I looked around further but it looks like these patterns are very common. Lots of links to news stories are posted. Lots of people posting what they are doing right now. Lots of people posting bookmarks to interesting things.

Those are all valuable, and they are, in fact, the reasons why we use social software. However, I already have better tools for each of those things. I have no shortage of news articles, and in my RSS reader they are better organized. In twitter, because of the use of URL shortening services, I cannot perform triage on incoming items. I have to “go to them” to check them out before I know if they are any good. Similarly, delicious is already better at helping me discover interesting bookmarks than twitter.

Twitter Generates Interruptions

Twitter has something that other systems do not have however: it can interrupt me. This is both good and bad. If a news item can empower me to take action right now or help me make a decision right now, then I want to be interrupted.

The problem is, if I enable twitter to send messages to me by SMS, I’m going to a LOT more interruptions than I need. My summary above shows that I would be interrupted by an excessive number of items that I would not want to be interrupted for. That would lead me to stop paying attention and then I’m not going to see the important empowering interruptions in real-time. It’s a catch-22.

If I could identify a small number of high-value twitter accounts to follow that provided me with real-time updates of information that empowers my work, I’d use them in a heart beat.

Twitter Search has High Value

While I find that RSS readers and social bookmarking do a better job at helping me discover the same kind of information I’m seeing via twitter, I did find one useful aspect of twitter: search. There are a large and growing number of ways to search twitter and these can be helpful. I would go so far as to say that search is, by far, the most interesting thing about twitter.

For example, here is a question that has always plagued me in my career: Is the Internet down? I get asked that A LOT. What people really mean is, “I’m having a problem getting to one or more websites: fix it or take the blame” (I administer networks and systems on the Internet). The best I can usually do is offer and explanation. This problem occurs, when Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have outages. So, when I’m asked “Is the Internet down?” I ask, “is there an ISP ‘between here and there’ that is having an outage?” and “Is anyone else reporting wide-spread problems?”

I’ve never had a good answer, until Twitter. I can search twitter and quickly find out if TELUS or Shaw cable have an outage, or if there is a problem with Sprint in Seattle. When there is an outage, people tweet about it and in real-time. “Real-time” is a strength of twitter. I cannot search blogs this way. While someone *might* post on their blog about an outage, they are really not likely to do so. Blogs are not interactive in real-time, and so there is little incentive for people to share information in that way.

So, I like twitter search at face value.

Twitter is easy, and it is very easy to fall in love with Twitter search. I won’t give an exhaustive review of the multitude of ways, instead I’ll provide some links to different twitter search systems and mashups:

5k Twitter Browser

Visualize tweets and twitter networks. Search by username to see their network and most recent tweets, then drag and click to explore.

Twittervision

Google maps mashup that shows tweets by the geographical location of the tweeter. Let’s you select the language you want to follow. No search, just a map showing the location of the latest tweet. Also available in 3D!

Tweetstats

Lets you enter a twitter username and gets stats as a bar graph

Tweetnews

From their blog:

Basically this service boosts Yahoo’s freshest news search results… based on how similar they are to the emerging topics found on Twitter for the same query (hence using Twitter to determine authority for content that don’t yet have links because they are so fresh).

Twitgoo

A mashup that lets you twitter about what you are seeing right now. You take a photo and tweet it. Warning: when I first tried this, each of the first five pages contains pictures of people…. er… enjoying themselves.

Twellow

The twitter yellow pages. The grab all the public tweets and categorize them by content and create a yellow pages style directory. [Hmmm, maybe I can use this to find people that tweet stuff that I would actually want to read?]

Reference

• Boyd, D. M., & Nicole B. Ellison. (2008). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x.
• Honeycutt, C. & Herring, S. (2009). Beyond microblogging: Converstation and collaboration via Twitter. Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
• Heil, B. & Piskorski, M. (June 1, 2009). New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets. blogs.harvardbusiness.org: Harvard Business Publishing.
• Murphy, J. (2008). Micro-blogging for Science and Technology Libraries. Science & Technology Libraries, 28(4), p. 375-378.
• Rowse, A. (December 3, 2008). Twitter for Research: Why and How to Do It, Including Case Studies. TwitTip.com website.
• Searls, D. & Weinberger, D. (2001). Markets are Conversations. In The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual.
• Valenza, J. (March 1, 2009). Meet Mr. Tweet and more on applying the app. School Library Journal website.