social doing

I know no-one needs another blog post about twitter but here's one anyway.

I've been playing with all sorts of little social things recently - friendfeed, brightkite, etc - and they're all good, they're just a bit confusing. Although twitter seems pointless to many the point of it's pointlessness is clear. There's a big simple question - what are you doing? - and you answer it.

The verbiness of this question is it's genius. Where are you? provokes no poetry, what are you doing? is profound and playful. And when you play the verby game it forces you into thinking about the language, into doing something pleasing circumlocutory. Like this lovely tweet from Helen:

And it's all the verbs that make tweetclouds so interesting.

I know we're all supposed to be thinking about social objects, but social doing seems to be potentially potent too.

Comments

[Stefan]

Hi Russell, I stumbled upon your blog with a friend showing me your Speak and Spell post and have been flicking through it for a little bit. I saw you spent a fair bit of time at W+K. I just graduated design school in San Francisco with a year of copywriting for electives and am looking into Portland. You got any advice about the area or W+K? I'll also be in London soon if you'd like to have beer with a stranger from the west. Couldn't find an email address, so I figured I'd drop a comment.

[Suzanne Portnoy]

I agree. Twitter is brilliant for its simplicity. I use a Twitter plug-in on my blog to 'tweet' and I enjoy trying to fit all my current thoughts into those 160 characters. It's a challenge although sometimes I fail and end up without a full stop at the end of the sentence.

On a separate note, saw you speak at Widgety Goodness and found your talk positively inspirational and so absolutely spot on. It was great to see someone cutting through all the BS to just get to the heart of what we really want from the web or technology in general.

[Tony]

@Stefan: Portland is a beautiful city and W+K Portland are very nice, approachable people. A good bet would be to be in Portland for a visit and ask to drop in and chat to someone in the department you’ve got an interest in. You know they have their own bar and half basketball court in the building? It’s ten years since I’ve been in Portland, but to get the feel of the city in one quick afternoon, drop by Reading Frenzy, Powells bookstore and one of the McMenamins theatre pubs for a movie and a beer. Generally speaking, it’s a very European (or maybe Scandinavian) feeling place. Big on DIY culture, craftiness and making.

Russell, you’re definitely on to something with regard to verbiness. I reckon a lot of Facebook’s success over the past year was down to the simplicity of it’s status field. That one little form field made it fun, frivolous, and popular … all because of the way it forced you to start your updates with “is”. It forced verbiness.