Twitter = Babble 2.0
Comments: 3 - Date: November 20th, 2008 - Categories: Design, Innovation, Social Tools, Teams, User Experience, Visualization, Workplace
When I initially heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded crazy and way too mega-ego and, hello, why would I care that you just got a haircut? Now that I have been using it, oh, every day, for the past 6 months, I guess I have to admit that I find it is kind of useful and appealing. I finally put it together what is so appealing about it. Twitter is a persistent chat room. It is Babble!
Babble is similar to a multi-channel textual chat system except that its conversation persists over sessions, allowing both synchronous and asynchronous talk. Its aim is to support everyday, opportunistic interaction among members of a workgroup. [link]
I never used Babble (it was built in 1997 and used internally at IBM before I joined), but it is one of the projects that inspired my thesis research. Its key concept is social translucence:
Social translucence is the idea that we should make some (but not all) cues about the presence and activity of users of digital systems available to one another. [link]
Twitter fits this criteria and has a lot of the same features as Babble:
- you can communicate either synchronously or asynchronously (txt, mobile, browser, etc… )
- you can see who is present (Twitter’s following and followers pictures)
- you can see who is active (Twitter’s time-sorted list of who said what)
- you can selectively determine who sees your posts (direct messages, @ messages, broadcast)
The main differences between Twitter and Babble are:
- Babble has a graphical visualization showing who is currently engaged in the conversation
- Twitter’s “groups” are not bounded. Even though you and I might be following each other, my group is probably different than your group. It is possible there could be 0% overlap, but we could still communicate.
- The cultural norms of Twitter are pretty distinctive in that people use “tweets” to give casual updates on their latest thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. The updates are not solely focused on workgroup interaction, like Babble was conceptualized to be for. But I see this as Twitter’s unusual strength.
It would be great if Twitter had some social visualization capability. (Maybe it does? Anyone know?) Then it really would be Babble, adapted for the flexible, ad-hoc type of collaboration and communication we do in this post-2000 world.
If you haven’t read them already, I highly recommend these papers on Babble and social translucence:
Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of “Babble”, by Thomas Erickson, David N. Smith, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, John T. Richards, Erin Bradner. In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI ‘99. ACM Press, 1999.
Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg. In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.
Comment by Jamie Rasmussen - 20 November 2008 @ 8:13 pm
Have you seen this list of Twitter visualizations?
http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/
Comment by Tom Erickson - 20 November 2008 @ 8:14 pm
Very nice post, Joan.
I think the most significant difference between Babble and Twitter is what you call the boundedness of the groups: Babble is a traditional online community in that if you are in my group, everybody else in my group is also in yours, and vice versa… this gives rise to powerful social effects that arise from mutual awareness. (That’s not saying it’s good or bad — the fact that my Twitter followers don’t entirely overlap yours also gives rise to powerful social effects such as propagation of communications across group boundaries).
The cultural norms are not so different, at least in that in Babble people, as in Twitter, people produced lots of social talk and brief upates. In Babble, the default “room” was called the Commons, and it functioned sort of like Twitter — other rooms were devoted to focused work topics, and still others rooms — a genre that developed in a number of Babbles and was called either “offices” or “personal places” functioned a little like blogs.
I’d certainly love to see some social visualization capacity for Twitter…
Comment by Joan DiMicco - 21 November 2008 @ 8:47 am
Jamie, Thanks for the link to all those visualizations. I hadn’t seen those (except the map) before!
Tom, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Hope I am doing Babble justice!
Not sure how common this is, but I have 2 twitter ID’s where my private one functions as a chat room between a small group of friends. It is a little awkward to navigate between my two “rooms” but it was jumping between these two IDs that got me thinking about the persistent conversation aspect of Twitter.
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