Twitter, Human Attention and Moore's Law

Ahh, Moore's Law. Thank goodness for it. Moore's Law says the speed of chips and storage capacity double as they get shrink in physical size and get cheaper. Therefore, everyone benefits. This includes consumers/users and developers/producers (which frequently overlap in this new era). It gives rise to new services like Twitter.

However, there's a serious catch. Your brain does not obey Moore's Law. It's aided by it, for sure. But the truth is. there's only so much you can pack in there. That's why David Allen sells so many Getting Things Done books.

Typically, new media doesn't replace old. Media consumption is an additive process. We still go to the movies. We watch TV. We IM. We email. We read blogs. We listen to podcasts. We micro blog on Twitter. But sooner or later it's all going to hit a wall. Ask anyone who received 100+ SMSes this weekend as Twitter tipped the tuna at the SXSW conference. This influx was on top of all of the usual barrage of calls, feeds, IMs and emails that already fill every nook and cranny of our lives.

To cope, we've developed a defense mechanism - what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. The content industry has responded by chunking things down for us into snacks that complement the meal. That's smart.  I told marketers to do the same. However, something at some point has to give. The only way out is perhaps with tools that make things easier for us.

That brings me back to Twitter. Despite it's lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It's brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my "followers" (as they call it). If things have seemed a little quieter over here, it's because I have been busier over there. (Here's my Twitter feed)

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Will people spend less time writing or reading blogs and more time Twittering? I posed this question on Twitter and got a resounding no. I am not so sure.

What about one's Technorati link authority? It feels far less relevant now given the newfound pulls on our attention. All of these networks measure friends and connections, not links. This is the emerging currency of influence, just as it is in the physical world.

All of these are big questions with lots of grey. What I believe, however, is that our attention span will hit a wall. It's why people migrate from site to site and few have staying power (Geocities, Friendster? Exactly). If Twitter continues its meteoric rise, then we may well be witnessing a changing of the guard. That doesn't mean blogging as we know it will go away. But it will surely morph in Twitter's wake if a big shift is underway.

Comments

[Rex Dixon]

Strangely, I find myself also blogging more because of twitter. hahaha..

Rex

[Connie Reece]

How did I learn about this essay? Your six-minute-old tweet. The tinyurl link clicked me directly through to the blog, bypassing my feed reader. Now that I'm here, I might as well leave a comment. :-)

I found over the last ten days that the number of undread blogs is stacking up in my Google Reader while I've had Twitterrific always running in the background. I'm only following 55 friends, so I haven't approached the volume of top bloggers who are adding all of their followers as friends.

What is your take on the value of using Twitter as microblog that can drive traffic to your main blog? That's how you got me to visit and comment, and that's why I've been experimenting with leaving my Twitter username in the URL field for comments. I've claimed my username on Technorati and this will add another incoming link.

[Mike Krempasky]

I'm going to have to play and think a little more. At first glance, the greatest utility for Twitter was both event-based and SMS heavy.

Downside? If you're a blackberry user - twitter notes flood your inbox and obscure email. Perhaps it's about which kinds of inboxes you keep sacrosanct. Not sure yet.

I do know that Twitter cost me about $10.00 in SMS fees over and above my allotment of 200. I've never used that many before in a quarter, let alone 12 days of a month. It's been fun, especially here at SXSW - but it seems to me that while most networks increase value as they increase size - Twitter's value may actually diminish as you get 20-50-100+ friends.

[Connie Reece]

Mike, rather than using SMS, I use the Blackberry browser for Web access to Twitter. (I have an unlimited data plan from Cingular but did not sign up for text messaging.) No clutter in the inbox and Twitter displays beautifully on the B'berry browser.

[Steve Rubel]

Connie, I do think that Twitter can drive traffic to your blog. However, it needs to be used for more. The Top Twitterers (dare I say Twits?) are going to use the medium to do stuff that's unavailable elsewhere.

[Tac Anderson]

The best description I have found to describe Twitter to my less-tech-geeky friends is that's like tagging your off-line life. I then of course have to go into an explanation of what tagging is.... I need new friends.

[andre]

What will happened is we'll have a wordpress plugin that will sync up twitter, facebook and all other sites at once. At least that's what I'm hoping for, maybe like a "command center", that is also portable.

[Nicole Simon]

It would be interesting to know how many text messages US users usually do - it is my feeling that they are much behind Eurpean usage which is why twitter may be so addictive like SMS is here - just through different ways.

[Ilya Lichtenstein]

Do you seriously think Twitter's short blurbs can displace blogging? I seriously, seriously doubt that. If anything, Twitter is not much more than customized hyper-RSS on steroids, certainly not fit for quality in-depth posts like the ones here.

Tac: The way you explain Twitter to your non-geek friends is that it's like an AOL away message or Facebook status message, except one you can put on your website. As I've written, my generation has been doing this for years(as long as I can remember IM existing, in fact). It's the fact that Twitter has been discovered by the blogging A-list that gives the glorified away message the Web 2.0 feel.

[MWD]

A web based version of text messaging that I can use to annoy the whole world. Lovely. I get the paradigm. I really do. I'm just a bit too productive to want to be interrupted with all the noise and the people I want to stay in contact with--we seem to do an adequate job with IM and text messaging.

[francine hardaway]

Twitter is compelling in the same way the Internet is. I can spend hours following everybody, learning small tidbits and not doing any remunerative work. It won't replace blogging.Blogging actually involves the ability to write.

[Eric Eggertson]

I haven't seen the "The Death of Twitter" story yet, but there have been a couple of nudges in that direction. The half life of our technology toys seems to be shrinking. A month ago everyone was nattering about what a great community-builder MyBlogLog was, but all I got out of it was a bunch of comment spam: "Thanks for dropping by. Please join my community."

[Thomas Hawk]

@steve rubel. trying to decide whether to have potato chips or ice cream for late night snack.

[blabto]

Is there the case that, in the same way as letters used to be the form of communication, internet and email took over. The telephone changed communication and the introduction of SMS further. Is the microblog the new blog? ie People writing in under 200 words what they used to say in 2000?

www.blabto.com

[blabto]

Is there the case that, in the same way as letters used to be the form of communication, internet and email took over. The telephone changed communication and the introduction of SMS further. Is the microblog the new blog? ie People writing in under 200 words what they used to say in 2000?

www.blabto.com