On its homepage, Twitter cycles various blurbs about Twitter. One of them – “Twitter is the telegraph system of Web 2.0” – is attributed to me. I have absolutely no memory of writing that, but I’ve no doubt that I did. And what do you know: a correspondent today pointed me to one of my ancient posts, from early 2007, in which that line appears. What was most amazing to me, though, is how neatly that old post fits into my current “The Realtime Chronicles” series. I even mention Baudrillard! It seems like an affront to the whole notion of realtime to recycle a two-year-old post, but – fuck realtime – here it is:

Twitter dot dash

March 18, 2007

And so at last, after passing through Email and Instant Messaging and Texting, we arrive in the land of Twitter. The birds are singing in the trees – they look like that robin at the end of Blue Velvet – and the air itself is so clean you can see yourself in it.

Twitter is the telegraph system of Web 2.0. Like Morse’s machine, it limits messages to very brief strings of text. But whereas the telegraph imposed its limit through the market’s will – priced by the word, telegraph messages were too expensive to waste – Twitter imposes its limit through the iron law of code. Each message may include no more than 140 characters. As you type your message – your “tweet,” in Twitterese – in the Twitter messaging box, a counter lets you know how many characters you have left. (That last sentence wouldn’t quite have made the cut. It has 146 characters. Faulkner would have been a disaster as a Twitterer.)

Only on the length of each message is a limit imposed. Because there’s no charge to send a message and no protocol governing the frequency of posting, you can send as many tweets as you want. The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it! (If you’re sending or receiving tweets on your cell phone, though, you best have an all-you-can eat messaging plan; Twitter is, among other things, a killer app for the wireless oligopoly.) You can also send each tweet to as large an audience as you want, and the recipients are free to read it via mobile phone, instant messaging, RSS, or web site. Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives. The moment-by-moment answer to what is, in Twitterland, the most important question in the world: What are you doing? Or, to save four characters: What you doing? Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin. Quicksilver turns to amber.

Are you exhausted yet?

Dave Winer has succeeded in creating a New York Times feed through the Twitter service, as if to prove that everything is equal in its 140-character triviality. “All the news that’s fit to twit,” twitters Dave. The world is flat, and so is information.

my dog just piddled on the rug! :-) [less than 10 seconds ago]

Seventeen killed in Baghdad suicide bombing [2 minutes ago]

Oh my god I cant believe it I just ate 14 double stuff Oreos [3 minutes ago]

A conflicted Kathy Sierra explains why Twitter is so addictive. Boiled down to a couple of tweets, it goes like this: using Twitter presents us with the possibility of a social reward, while not using it presents us with the possibility of a social penalty – and the possibility of a reward or penalty is a far more compelling motivator than the reality of a reward or penalty. Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?

Tara Hunt says, “Twitter is a representation of my stream of consciousness.” What used to happen in the privacy of the mind is now tossed into the public’s bowl like so many Fritos. The broadcasting of the spectacle of the self has become a full-time job. Au revoir, Jean Baudrillard, your work here is done.

Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We’re not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We’re tweeters twittering tweets. We’re twitters tweetering twits. We’re twits tweeting twitters. We’re Tweety Birds.

I did! I did taw a puddy tat! [half a minute ago]

I tawt I taw a puddy tat! [1 minute ago]

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we’re allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self’s bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that I’m real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I’m walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

It’s not, as Scott Karp suggests, “I Twitter, therefore I am.” It’s “I Twitter because I’m afraid I ain’t.”

As the physical world takes on more of the characteristics of a simulation, we seek reality in the simulated world. At least there we can be confident that the simulation is real. At least there we can be freed from the anxiety of not knowing where the edge between real and unreal lies. At least there we find something to hold onto, even if it’s nothing.

I did! I did taw a puddy tat!

“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that “banner and text ads are old news.” Today, “the new tactic is to blur the lines between marketing and social networking” by introducing commercial messages into “the stream” of realtime status updates exchanged among friends.

Intimacy, whether real or feigned, is gold in the ad world, and it is the impression of intimacy that Facebook and its competitors look to deliver, to both members and advertisers.

In a blog-gloss on her speech, Sandberg gamely tried to convince Facebookers of the value of “the stream” as a means of greatly expanding their friend-set:

Think about the ways you communicate with your friends – whether on or off Facebook. The communication likely falls into one of two traditional types: reciprocal communication or direct communication. Reciprocal communication is a conversation where messages are exchanged back and forth … Direct communication occurs when you send a message to someone specific, with or without the expectation of a reply …

On Facebook, there’s a third and new way you communicate – through the stream. Every time you log into your home page you see a running timeline or stream of the information being shared by your friends and the other things you’re connected with on Facebook. The more people share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections.

This stream communication, rather than reciprocal and direct communication, forms your active network. Whenever you interact with a story in the stream – whether you “Like” a piece of content, comment on it or simply click on it – the person sharing it becomes part of your active network.

Because the realtime stream broadcasts all interpersonal communications among the members of one’s “active network,” Sandberg says, it leads to “greater connectedness” across the network, which also greatly expands “the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency.” By “people,” Sandberg means, of course, “advertisers.” She explains: “Our Engagement Ads on the home page allow you to take common activities like commenting, RSVPing for an event or giving a virtual gift directly in the ad. If any of your friends have already taken an action, that appears in the ad as well. We’ve found that interaction with those ads increases 50 percent when someone sees a friend’s action, such as a comment.”

ReadWriteWeb’s crotchety Marshall Kirkpatrick finds this all a little bit “creepy”:

Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be … Isn’t there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, “thumbs up” and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What’s the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising! … That’s the highlight of all this that Sandberg points to – formerly free-thinking individuals [using] Facebook to turn themselves into players in an advertisement.

So far, the Facebook multitudes seem more baffled by “the stream” than enamored of it. But Facebook’s intrusive-advertising strategy has long been one of taking two steps forward and then, when the members rebel, apologizing profusely before taking one step back. Do that enough times, and before long you’ll arrive at your goal.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.

As the physical presences formerly known as “human beings” undergo transmutation into electronic avatars on the realtime social network, the ability to automatically track and analyze their “movements” and “relationships” becomes an increasingly attractive value-mining opportunity. This opportunity exists today, but what’s required to exploit it is the connection of the rich data collected on avatars’ activities with data collected on various salient economic variables. Such a connection of datasets would allow much more precise estimates of the economic value of, for example, “friends” and “followers” in the context of both consumer markets and labor markets and, in turn, the ability to better measure, incentivize, and in general manipulate interactions on the so-called social graph.

A new report from an industrial-academic team of MIT and IBM researchers begins to give a sense of the historic scope of this social-engineering opportunity, at least in the labor context. As the researchers note, in their introductory remarks, there exists “a large body of literature on social networks and organizations that describes the benefit of social networks on work performance in various settings,” but “little research leverages the ample data that are created by people’s interactions, such as e-mail, call logs, text messaging, document repositories, web 2.0 tools, and so on.” The “gap,” they note, is “problematic.” Fortunately, “recent empirical work has started to capture real-time communication between people in various settings.” For example, “recent advances in information technology give researchers the opportunity to solicit real-time email communication data. Since email archives record detailed communication logs, such as who has emailed whom, the exact time of the interaction, and the content of the exchange, using email archives to construct social networks allows researchers to eliminate any errors and bias that are introduced through self-reports.”

But the automated mining of email communications is only the tip of a much larger iceberg of opportunities for analyzing personal data sources on the realtime network. One “privacy-preserving” system for “organizational social network analysis” has been “deployed in more than 70 countries to quantitatively infer the social networks of 400,000 employees within a large [consulting] organization. It uses social sensors to gather, crawl and mine various types of data sources, including content and properties of individual email and instant message communications, calendars, organizational hierarchical structure, project and role assignment.”

The research team analyzed the data collected by this system in order to “examine the effect of network characteristics on revenues for both employee and project networks” as well as on “individual employee productivity.” The researchers discovered that “having strong connections with contacts in the network does not necessarily have any significant impact on performance,” but that having contacts with an “additional manager is associated [with] $588 additional monthly revenues,” pointing to the importance to value creation of “having strong connection to people in the position of power.” The fact that, in business, it’s “who you know” may not seem startling, but the ability to precisely quantify, in dollar terms, the value of instances of “friending” gives a powerful hint of the future benefits that will accrue to those institutions able to pursue the automated collection and analysis of data, with or without “privacy-preserving” controls, on the behavior of “people” as they navigate the vast and radically transparent avatarian realm.

As Stephen Baker notes, in reporting on the MIT-IBM study, “Users of social media rack up LinkedIn contacts, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers by the hundreds, if not thousands. But figuring out how big a difference all those contacts make in a person’s life, financial or otherwise, is a far murkier matter.” Thanks to powerful data-mining software deployed by corporations and other interested parties, the murk may at last be lifting. Baker concludes: “more companies are sure to study the company we keep – and even attempt to calculate how much each friendship is worth.” The creation of the social graph, it’s clear, was only the first step in a long process of economic optimization.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.

One of the goals of the software coder is parsimoniousness. Because every line, even every character, of code places a demand on the computer processor, the pruning of instructions to their essence makes for faster, more efficient programs and an optimized system. The art of the coder, like that of the aphorist, is one of compression.

Twitter, it has become clear, was “never about what you’re doing for breakfast,” as Steve Gillmor writes. It was about creating “the realtime universal message bus.” It was, in other words, about building an electronic conduit, a “bus,” through which the people on the network – the human nodes – can efficiently exchange what have come to be called “status updates.” The use of engineering terms to describe social relations is both apt and necessary. The social network is a computer network, a platform for programming in which man and machine enter a symbiotic, or cybernetic, relationship.

In Twitter messages, or tweets, the use of the “@” sign is a means of denoting a specific address on the computer network at which a human operative is stored. The human operative receives the realtime message, the instruction, and is activated, usually resulting in the issuance of another message. The 140-character limit on messages is a means of imposing parsimoniousness on a lay audience who, without the limit, might revert to their natural human loquaciousness and gum up the system. The realtime human-machine network is able, as a result, to operate with a high degree of efficiency, leading to an optimal deployment of cybernetic resources.

In his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener provided the context for the social networking systems that are becoming so popular today:

… society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and … in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness goes I am aware of the order that has gone out and of the signal of compliance that has come back. To me, personally, the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages has gone through a machine rather than through a person is irrelevant and does not in any case change my relation to the signal. Thus the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages …

The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information [exchange] than ever before … To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

Wiener was writing a half century ago. Today, the complexity is much magnified and the need for efficient messaging all the greater. Hence man’s rapid embrace of the realtime messaging bus, not only via Twitter but via other increasingly realtime social networks such as FriendFeed (which today announced that realtime messaging “will underlie everything about FriendFeed from now on”) and Facebook (which also recently rolled out a new “realtime” design for its site).

The human benefits are real. The enforced introduction of parsimoniousness into social messaging relieves the pressure of worldly complexity and can provide the sense of well-being that often comes from radical simplification. Vanessa Grigoriadis gives eloquent voice to the benefits of our new cybernetic social system in her cover story on Facebook in the new issue of New York magazine:

On Facebook, I didn’t have to talk to anyone, really, but I didn’t feel alone, and I mean “alone” in the existential use of the word; everyone on Facebook wished me well, which I know not to be the case in the real world; and, most important, there was nothing messy or untoward or unpleasant—the technology controlled human interaction, keeping everyone at a perfect distance, not too close and not too far away, in a zone where I rarely felt weird or lame or like I had said the wrong thing, the way one often feels in the real world. This is the promise of Facebook, the utopian hope for it: the triumph of fellowship; the rise of a unified consciousness; peace through superconnectivity, as rapid bits of information elevate us to the Buddha mind, or at least distract us from whatever problems are at hand. In a time of deep economic, political, and intergenerational despair, social cohesion is the only chance to save the day, and online social networks like Facebook are the best method available for reflecting—or perhaps inspiring—an aesthetic of unity.

It might at this point be suggested that our new transcendentalism is one in which individual human operatives, acting in physical isolation as nodes on a network, achieve the unity of an efficient cybernetic system through the optimized exchange of parsimonious messages over a universal realtime bus.

This post is an installment in Rough Type’s ongoing series “The Realtime Chronicles,” which began here.