A Twitter Taxonomy
In which DLB takes a moment to extemporize on what you can expect from the Twitter service, and to provide a categorization schema for the users thereof.
I lurked on Twitter for a long time, trying to figure out how best I could use it in the service of DLB. What is it useful for as a “tweeter”? A follower?
As far as I can tell, there are two distinct values that Twitter can provide you as a follower, and unfortunately, they are mututally exclusive. You can either (1) follow everyone you ever encounter and grow yourself a massive reciprocity-driven follower-base, thus boosting your social networking gravitas while subsequently ensuring that you’re never going to cut through the fog of uninspired self-promotion-cum-egomania and find good, useful tweeted content, or (2) you can just follow really interesting and awesome people, and get some real content-value out of the service, but sacrifice a "gimme" at boosting your personal PageRank.*
On the other hand, as a tweeter, the most common use for Twitter is as a tool for self-promotion - indeed that’s what it is there for. After some time in a spectator role, I’ve noticed four major ways that people tend to do this, which I will now order into a deeply scientific taxonomy, whose schema dictates that archetypes be ranked in order of my personal least favorite to my personal favorite.
* I find myself compelled for anecdotal reasons to indicate that it would have taken four tweets to post that sentence to Twitter (even without this footnote).
The Four Five Twitter Archetypes
The celebrity is the Twitter archetype that self-promotes by posting as if everyone cares (or at least should) about the excruciating minutae of his or her day-to-day existence. This will work (and this should be no surprise) only in the case that the person in question already has a devoted following, in which case, he or she is free to post about what music they just downloaded from iTunes, what they just ate for lunch, how they just took an asprin, etc.
The bot is a Twitter archetype that self-promotes (or doesn’t) by creating a "character" that spams non-original content as part of a larger kind of humorous or pithy zeitgeist. Among my favorites: Eric Meyer’s Excuse of the day, IE6, and Marshall McLuhan.
The aggregator is the Twitter archetype who reads the internet all day, and self-promotes (and self-legitimates) by filtering his or her massive content input in a compelling way. This archetype can be excellent, when you find it, because this is a way of actually using your Twitter to provide a service. Alternatively, this archetype can be used somewhat more lazily to simply mirror-blog your own blog posts (which is the way I am leaning).
Finally, the aphorist is the hardest Twitter archetype to attain (I only know about one, though I am sure there are more [if you know any, let me know!]). These pithy, intelligent people leverage Twitter as a method of dropping their pearls of wisdom on their eager followers, offering spectacular insights in compelling, koan-like packages. They are truly masters of the art of Twitter.
Update: October 6
The long-elusive fifth type of Twitterer has been found: the conversationalist utilizes Twitter like a public IM session, replying back-and-forth with several people either in a purely social manner or to discuss a topic or question in a roundtable fashion. Thanks Nick!
Comments on this post
1.
I’ve been chewing over this wonderful post every time I observe another Twitter user and another archetype occurred to me: perhaps we should add the conversationalist?
This is a person who utilizes Twitter like a public IM session, replying back-and-forth with several people either in a purely social manner or to discuss a topic or question in a roundtable fashion.
2.
Also, what’s up with our timezones? Are we on Zulu time here?
3.
“On the other hand, as a tweeter, the most common use for Twitter is as a tool for self-promotion - indeed that’s what it is there for.”
Wow. That is completely and wholly divergent from my view and usage of Twitter.
Twitter didn’t start getting used for self-promotion until the ’social media experts’ showed up. Before then, we used Twitter to chat with our friends (as a group) and when it used to work with cell phones, to coordinate places to meet. Ask someone who attended SXSW 2007, where Twitter really took off - there was no self-promotion going on back then. We used it to find where the cool parties or best panels were happening.
The ’social media experts’ hopped on Twitter fairly recently, and in my opinion, came very close to breaking it. Your view - and the SMEs who share that view - of Twitter being for self-promotion is something that has only recently come into being.
We used to talk to each other on Twitter - it was about conversation, not promotion. But even with dropping the people who share your view that Twitter is primarily about promotion from our lists, we’ve kind of moved on. Oh, we still Twitter now and then, but there are other channels out there that haven’t been overrun by the shameless hype of self-promotion. And so I suppose you’re right - Twitter is primarily for self-promotion, but only because the people who use it for conversation and camaraderie have gone elsewhere.
4.
@Nick - Good point, another needed Twitter archetype. Also, this seems to be what Laura is talking about. I’ll add it to the list.
@Laura - I am glad to see that at the end of the day, you agree with my assessment, despite your clear and I am sure warranted desire for a less cynical Twitterverse. Personally, I have my suspicions about whether or not any kind of public internet publishing can be undertaken without some desire for self-promotion, but they’re neither here nor there.
As to whether or not Twitter is “broken”, this is less clear to me than it apparently is to you. From my point of view, it seems that there are as many legitimate uses for microblogging as there are for blogging in general: a set which includes both personal and business uses. I am personally particularly interested in what might constitute less “shameless” business uses; hence the content of this post.
In the meantime, luckily for yourself and other Twitter conversationalists, it remains easy to protect one’s updates from, and to ignore the updates of, those no-good hype-sters.
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