Update: please note this and the Ten Commandments were written firmly tongue-in-cheek, that I’m biassed, but I’m OK for Twerps to be Twerps, and recognise we all tend to be a bit of both at times. Please also note in UK English “Twit” and “Twerp” are equally derogatory, and both are often used as an affectionate mild rebuke, mother to son. Enjoy!
Ruminating on Twitter constraints, I see two kinds of Twitterers emerging: Twits and Twerps.
A Twit sees Twitter as a presence service. Twits love the ambient intimacy twitter affords with their friends, and tweet to build a meaningful permanent record. They strive to entertain, to be profound. Twits are often interested in adding metadata such as tags, plusplus and locations which may be farmed, searched and annotated later. A twit uses an @reply primarily to reference a user for the benefit of their other followers, and use a direct message to communicate with someone where their followers are unlikely to be interested in the conversation. A twit is always considerate to their followers, knowing that each message may potentially be SMS’d to hundreds of people. Twits always think about the question “What are you doing?”. A good twit will make you laugh, make you cry but above all feel connected. Exemplar Twits include @hicksdesign, @arielwaldman, @ev, @missrogue, @factoryjoe and @natbat, and most everyone I follow. Canonical Twit tweets:
- contractions, more contractions, ouchie!, but still no baby 12:20 PM November 23, 2007
- impressed by the genteel taste of @roessler’s train ride/coffee sipping/music as I crank bass-ass ROCK! and drink cold coffee for breakie 07:01 AM December 21, 2007
- #foodporn happy ‘cos I is eating lard. Well, lovely big fat hot fish n’ chips from “Rock & Sole Plaice” L:47 Endell St, WC2H 9AA about 6 hours ago
- Thinking about buying stock in ibuprofen and vitC companies. Wading through 1000’s of emails from the past 5 days. But happy to be better. 22 minutes ago
- Just watched The Manchurian Candidate (2004 version). Liked it. Didn’t realise the original was just 1 year before JFK’s assassination 32 minutes ago
- Figuring: If I’m in writing mode, I should just keep writing. 36 minutes ago
See, you probably don’t know these people, but you can’t fail but empathise with them. Fun, isn’t it?
A Twerp sees Twitter as a conversation. It’s irc, only with free SMS thrown in. Most twerp updates start with an @ and are meaningless unless you too are a twerp. Twerps often follow 1000’s, because that’s the best way of dealing with other twerps and seeing their asynchronous replies. A Twerp will reference someone whose updates are locked with something like “@BigTwerp cool!”, which is like “the f-ing letter K!” [video, 17:34 in], only it’s twitter and 100’s of people around the world paying. Really inconsiderate twerps use services such as seesmic to pump noise at their followers, repeatedly trumpet blog postings, endlessly muse on how they rock. They see twitter as just another way to “up their ante”. Twerps often fail to embrace twitter’s 140 character limit; they’re writing memos when they should be writing Haikus. To a twit, a twerp’s updates are just intrusive line noise. Phil put it well when he said:
Following @gapingvoid and @Scobleizer is like listening to one end of a phone conversation. When they’re on a conference call.
As a result it’s much easier to be a Twerp following a Twit than vice-versa. As you will have realised, I aspire to be a good twit, but am OK with twerps because I prefer to live and let live and have a simple rule: don’t follow them! I also feel twerps are inevitable given Downey’s first law of protocols which states:
any message path which abstracts away underlying transports is doomed to have them reinvented in extensions
Witness SOAP which by processing messages regardless of how they are delivered led to WS-*, and Twitter, not having a way of conversing spawned the @ reply, the power behind the twerp, leading to Downey’s first law of social networks:
a conversation may indeed leak onto any channel good enough to carry one
So the rise of the twerps was inevitable. however, other twits feel differently, formulating The Twitter 10 Commandments. Ignore these and you are most definitely a twerp!
Update: 10 commandments are now here, in stone, as a twitter user, so you can “follow tencommandments“.
Technorati Tags: Twitter
Bravo. We definitely needed a name for them! I think twerps are probably redeemable with some perspective. I try to be a good twit, but am often too prolific. I’m trying to be better, honest.
Stop writing brillaint posts - I can’t f*cking finish my own!
Damn - I twit and twerp in alternation. May have to improve the twerp side.
I could come up with another term: Twatts.
Excellent post, psd.
(Do I owe you anything for featuring one of my twits in your list? :D)
Having been on Twitter for less than 2 weeks this was actually quite useful. Thank you. And thank you to @jonnygoldstein for posting the link on Twitter.
Chatting your post with a friend we came to the idea that you might add one type of behavior the Twam.
A Twam is someone using tools to tweet automatically when he updates his blog, adds links to del.icio.us, etc.
Most of them (and I’m one of them) use htt://www.twitterfeed.com to do so.
Usually the Twam also try to update his status on Facebook using his twitter account.
Some Twams are fair enough to add a small piece of text to clearly indicate that the twam update is not posted to expect a reaction.
Thanks for your link Paul, the results are in, have been counted and double checked, and can be seen here!
“Ambient intimacy”, as a phrase, gives me the creeps. If twitter, flickr, and similar services were about anything that would merit the term, I’d probably run. What I (and I know I’m not alone in that) put up there certainly are carefully considered views into my life.
tlr: of course it’s not true ‘intimacy’, that would be creepy, but I love the way flickr, twitter etc together give me an insight into what my friends are doing. I really like the phrase and Leisa who coined it, is well worth watching.
I agree with tlr that most tweets’ contents are carefully weighed in terms of their suitability for the public.
So maybe something like “ambient familiarity” would be more accurate - but “ambient intimacy” just makes for a better buzzword…
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I made some comments here:
http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/wordpress/2008/01/06/in-my-second-month-on-twitter-i-reject-your-commandments/
nice post and some confused comments here:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/01/spell-my-twitte.html
you can track the use of the word “twerp” on twitter, here:
http://terraminds.com/twitter/query?query=twerp&submit=search+in+updates
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Great Post, Paul. I heard about it last night and looked it up right away. I summed up my current Twitter philosophy on my blog as “If you can’t be useful, be funny.” I guess that puts me more on the “Twit” side of the house. :-)