Read at Joe’s

Waiting to be seated for what turned out to be just elegant sushi at Haruki East in Providence last Friday night, Hilary Mason and I were chatting about my current interest of trying to create an open and distributed Twitter-like microblogging design. “I’m concerned that might destroy the Twitter community”, she said. I was somewhat taken aback by that notion, having not thought much about the unintended consequences aspect of what I was doing. But I see now that that concern is well-grounded.

Twitter is a place and a culture, a “scene” you might say, as much as it is a tool or an application. There are norms of behavior, customs and vernacular all of which foster a real sense of community amongst Twitterers. We think of ourselves as belonging to that scene, and we’re proud of it. We have bonded with it and each other and silly as it seems, we are drawn closer together by the shared hardship of dealing with Twitter’s many outages, slowdowns and bugs.

I’m giving a talk this Saturday at BarCampBoston about Distributed Twitter, and hope to recruit some developers and perhaps designers to work together to create one or more prototypes. But it seems I have to add an item to my agenda now, which is “how to maintain the Twitter sense of community” even when people by design will be using different UIs and server implementations to connect into the microblogging cloud, as it were.

This should cause us to ask some really interesting questions. What causes people to have such allegiance to a community? Twitter isn’t just one community, it’s thousands of overlapping sub-communities of friends and friends-of-friends. Could those sub-communities break off and form their own microblogging server center? Could there be another “community” site that just kept track of the binding -together of people and left the status updates, SMS interface, and database crunching to the “medium”?

Kinda makes you say, “Hmmmm”. Thanks, Hilary, for the whack upside my head on that one.

Tags: distributed twitter microblogging HilaryMason community