Internet Experiment, Twitter Edition

We end our foray into empirical internet studies with the following research question: Does over-eager reference to inexplicable youth trends result in inexplicable web traffic among those participating in inexplicable activities? The world may never know…

This month’s WIRED magazine features a hand-wringing article about growing pains at Twitter, allegedly a company worth millions (or is it billions?) on the basis of a service that reportedly allows its users to post 140 character messages (we’ve already exceeded that limit in this post) to people who are said to sign up to receive them. Legend has it that over 1 million people have “subscribed” to the 140 character musings of Kelso, from That 70s Show, apparently while I have been watching reruns of That 70s Show.

It is said, in an effort to realize some revenue from this  concept, the masterminds behind Twitter have been making what sound like minor (but admittedly difficult to parse) changes to the service that have upset its users, allowing the author for WIRED to enter into arcane explications of various (said to be extremely intelligent) persons’ use of @ and # (I think…) and their extreme significance to what is supposed to be a lot of people (whom I have never met).

Prompted (out of a strange form of curiosity) to read the article by a friend for whom Twitter is avowedly a large part of social life, I was relieved by the following:

It [Twitter] rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. … Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called “What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?” the mission statement is still a work in progress. “If there are three sentences I’d use to describe Twitter,” Stone says, “one of them would be ‘I don’t know.’”

That makes me feel better because the people who use Twitter claim to know what it is, but I don’t understand it and neither do the guys who made it up, according to the article (which sheds no light on what it is either). But I sense a certain kind of magic here, and today’s experimental efforts are designed to wield it fiercely for the benefit of crix crax crux.

Twitter! I beseech you! #! @! GROW my PRESENCE!