Jeremey's Weblog

Why Twitter?

A friend recently asked me why I like Twitter. I find this a difficult question to answer, much like explaining Twitter is difficult. You can explain what is is in a couple sentences, but to explain why you would want to use it is much more difficult. That's not because there aren't good reasons and everyone on Twitter is just being silly... quite the contrary, I find it difficult because there are lots of reasons, but none of them are easy to quantify.

It's a little bit like "why do you like to hang out with your friends?" or even "why are your friends your friends?" Quantifying an answer may not be so easy, it's complex and involves more than simple logical thought processes.

Now, some people (a lot of people now, it seems) are on Twitter because it's "the next big thing" and they're in PR or media or "social media" and Twitter is just another channel to deliver a message or content. That's not me. I'm not there to promote anything, and I largely ignore those who are.

I started on Twitter in part because there was a growing population of Houston folks, across a bunch of my interests (start-ups, software, photography, music, etc.), getting on Twitter. The majority of the people I follow are local, and Twitter has been a catalyst for networking with good people on both business and personal levels, and continuing to interact with them.

I've tried to describe Twitter as "social networking at the right speed", meaning it's "faster" than Facebook, MySpace, or email, but "slower" than IM. You don't expect to have a conversation like you would on IM, but you do expect to have conversations. They're just slower and more fault tolerant.

Part of what makes Twitter work is that it's perfectly flat. You don't join the right groups, friend the right bands, etc., you're just you. Everyone is just themselves (except for those in the PR camp, but we're ignoring them). People don't get silo-ed into buckets, you just get the people, with all their interests, all their comments on the world. The same people will be talking about photography one minute, programming the next minute, music after that, etc. You get a picture of a whole person, and discover that people are pretty interesting.

And on the other end of the spectrum, Twitter is global, so I have occasional interactions with people from all over the world, again in this flat space that's just a bunch of people. The "just a bunch of people" flatness and connectedness seems to have fostered a culture of respect and openness, vs. the somewhat flame-war-ish culture that has developed (to a certain extent) around blogs.

Twitter is direct. I can work out lunch arrangements or a meeting about a business opportunity very quickly, with multiple people, from anywhere, as long as I have at least SMS access. This gets at the heart of what Twitter is... Twitter is another level of indirection (for you C programmers), or another layer (for you networking people), for connecting people, and that, combined with its simplicity and ease of operation, makes it very powerful. It's a big lever and a light touch is all you need.

Twitter is casual. Most of the conversations I have on Twitter are the kinds of conversations I might have with friends. They aren't stuck in some "virtual" reality, they extend into day-to-day life. Most people on Twitter are real and they share mundane things right next to big things, and that's part of what makes it refreshing. Humans "do life" in little moments, in ordinary activities. Real relationships come from sharing those things, and the flatness, immediacy, and simplicity of Twitter allow that kind of sharing to actually work on the Internet.

Finally, Twitter is a powerful tool for "grass-roots" information. All of that connectedness and genuine interaction leads to a lot of real-time information sharing, everything from restaurant criticism to traffic reports to emergencies, with real results. Real people help each other, inform each other, etc. This is what the media have picked up on and part of why they now can't speak a sentence without saying something about Twitter.

To really "get" Twitter, you need to really use it and follow people and interact and grow your "network" enough to where these things start to happen. So there is some intentional effort involved. Maybe I hit it at the right time, but it has really been worth whatever effort I've put in. My life is significantly enriched because of the people I know on Twitter.

So that's some of what I love about Twitter. Maybe it answers the question. You can follow me on Twitter if you like. I follow real people back most of the time.

Also check out @BrentO's Twitter FAQ.

Technorati Tags:
love, twitter

Twitter, Then and Now

Then: "Hey, everyone... cool to hang out!"

Now: "Will someone tell Ashton Kutcher and Oprah to get off my damn lawn?!"

Watching Twitter "evolve" is sorta like watching the Internet "evolve" in time-lapse.

Sigh. :)

Technorati Tags:
twitter, oprah, devolve

Get Lisp? Not So Much

The Lisp function has called itself again, it seems. Or maybe it calls itself often, and I have just failed to notice it until now (see http://xkcd.com/297/). In any case, Lisp is the programming language that programmers are taught to venerate. Ogle its perfection, its code and data dual nature, its simplicity, its elegance, and so on.

I wholeheartedly support bashing new concepts into programmer brains using Lisp. However, I fail to see its appeal for writing real software. Part of developing software systems involves programmers typing in code, reading that code, and re-reading that code 6 months later. Other programmers are going to come along and read that code, too. If you've ever looked at the source code for a large Lisp system, you may notice that its syntax does not lend itself to being understood. It is difficult to read, and even more difficult to interpret, because there is SO MUCH LIST PROCESSING GOING ON (Lisp = List Processing).

Lisp is difficult, in part because it represents new concepts to most programmer brains, but also in part because it's just tedious. Very nice that you can represent every data structure as a list or list of lists, but that doesn't mean you should. Just because it is possible to treat all things as exactly the same and have no keywords doesn't mean it makes for better software. I think it just makes for easier compilers. Lists just aren't a natural way to represent data to humans.

All that list processing produces code that is syntax-heavy (parentheses and list processing) in a language that essentially has no innate syntax. It's difficult to read, just like almost every Perl script is difficult to read. There's a lot of syntax happening. Why? Because it makes the compiler's job really easy. Ummm, why do I care if the compiler has an easy time of things? The compiler should work hard to make my life easy, and to make it possible for me to write better, more maintainable, more legible, simpler code. In Lisp, the programmer is responsible for constructing the entire AST himself.

Programming doesn't have to be difficult to be powerful. I reject that notion as the supposition of lesser programmers who've bought into a culture that worships Lisp and its kin. Learning Lisp may grow your brain (a good thing), but deploying real software in it seems like less of a good idea. To think that we've failed to come up with any more good programming language ideas in 40 years is ridiculous.

The Lisp culture reminds me of the "if you only knew what we knew" arguments that get trotted out by "national security" people every so often.

Tell you what... let's have a contest. You (hypothetical Lisp worshiper) implement a Twitter clone in Lisp, and I will implement it in a language of my choice (NOT Lisp, probably Erlang). You must provide an HTTP-based API in addition to a pleasing web UI. Both must support username/password authentication. You must be able to demonstrate support for 500,000 concurrent users with sustained message rates over 1000 messages/sec. You must store all messages. 50% of the users will have 50 followers. 35% will have 200 followers. 10% will have 1000 followers. 5% will have 10,000 followers.

When both systems are complete, we will note how many hours (roughly) it took to build each system, and how many lines of code (this is not always a good metric, but we won't abuse its relevance), and what deployment requirements there are to reach the scalability goals.

Then we will take a good programmer who has not programmed extensively in either language, and ask him to understand each set of source code and ask him to make some modifications. We'll subjectively analyze how things go in each system.

I think we will find that the non-Lisp system is less code, more intelligible, easier to extend, faster, and easier to deploy.

Lisp as a religion needs to die. Lisp as a set of interesting ideas worth learning should stay.

Technorati Tags:
programming, software, lisp

Programmers and Philosophies

Dear programmers of the world: take your pet "philosophies" and shove them where the sun don't shine. You're building an app that you want to SELL and your "philosophy" prevents you from implementing a major feature that many users want? You can rot.

You want a philosophy? How about this: build great apps that people actually want to us and that solve real problems for people.

For instance, Twitter clients. I love Twitter. I hate Twitter client developers (except TweetDeck). Why? Because they don't bloody listen to users. TweetDeck has how many users? Despite the mega-suck AIR UI? Why? Because it solves a major problem (grouping Twitter users), and solves it well. Is it perfect? No. Is is 100,000 times better than every other Twitter client because it makes a decent attempt? Yes.

Would I buy TweetDeck? I might. Would I buy a fantastic Cocoa app that had a similar implementation of groups along with a nice UI, low memory footprint, etc.? Absolutely. I would pay $40 for a high-quality Cocoa Twitter client. Is there one? Nope. Not even one.

Tweetie looks fantastic, but it is DOA without groups. I love everything else about it, and it pains me to shut it off and start TweetDeck, but that's what I gotta do, because a beautiful interface to an un-grouped Twitter feed is like the most perfect baseball bat ever made when I need to chop down a tree. Sorry, it doesn't work. It's dead.

If you want to implement what people need and then make it perfect by beating Twitter into implementing groups and transition from your local implementation to an API-based implementation, fine. Just do it. What a waste of an opportunity.

Technorati Tags:
twitter, tweetie, programming, philosophy