The Angry (and Twittering) Revolutionaries

Twitter is helping opposition street protesters, and is receiving their help too.

Almost all the reports from or about Iran have one thing in common: a mention of Twitter. Technology-savvy Iranians, especially in Mir Hussein Mousavi camp, used the "micro-blogging" service during the campaign to make the case for their candidate.

Then Twitter became more important as opposition supporters took to the streets protesting against what they believed was an undemocratic reelection of President Ahmadinejad, and as the government responded with more restrictions on the freedom of the media.

That is when "tweets" from inside Iran became a principal source of information on the unfolding events. And opposition leader Mousavi's Twitter feed became a must-read for commentators and analysts on Iran.

Of course Twitter isn't the only web service that gained from the events. Other "social networking" services like Facebook and Youtube have also been used as channels of footage and personal accounts from Iranians on what was happening.

It was Twitter alone, however, that received a particularly high-profile recognition when the US government asked the Web site managers to delay a scheduled maintenance, as the site was one of the main channels of information that provided uncensored and "real-time" information about how the situation was evolving in the Islamic Republic.

The question then is: Is Twitter another Web fad or is it a worthy addition to our communications arsenal that is here to stay?

Swept by the Tweet

To answer, we need to start by looking at what could be Twitter's "killer" features. Essentially, Twitter resembles blogs, but with a few twists. First, a post ("tweet") can be as long as the user wants, given it does not exceed 140 characters.

And you can write as many, or as few, tweets as you please, only so long as your "followers" can endure it. Secondly, real-time is a central character of the service, not that it wasn't available for blogs through RSS feeds. But with Twitter real-time appears to be the real core around which everything else was tailored.

Politicians, movie stars, athletes, and authors are all members of the new twittering class.

What you write is immediately available to your followers. And what those you follow write instantly flashes on your page. That page could grace a glorious 17-inch screen laptop or cram a 3-inch display of a Web-enabled mobile phone.

And if you don't consider time a particularly scarce thing, you can spend a good many hours finding out which of your followers, or those you are following, is following whom, or is followed by whom. Things can get a little complicated.

Complicated or not, though, Twitter is winning new converts every day. Politicians, movie stars (through ghost writers), athletes, and authors are all members of the new twittering class.

And lest anyone should be in doubt about the extent of Twitter's popularity with readers, the New York Times -arguably the world's best newspaper - has recently started a service called the Times Wire, featuring tweet-like dispatches.

Still, to many newcomers the conversion is only skin-deep. And not before long they go back to their old ways. A report published late last April by Nielsen, a consultancy, says that 60% of Twitter's new users (or Twitterers) quit after a month with the micro-blogging service.

The Website's "retention" rate per year (the percentage of users who tweet for a year or longer) is about 30%, the report concludes. To put things in perspective, a similar report by Nielsen in July 2007 put Google search engine's retention rate at 79% and Yahoo's at 69%.

Which Twitter?

So which one of these "Twitters" is likely to win out: the one that street activists employ to bypass government filters and censors and get their word out, or the one that some use to dutifully document the frivolous and ephemeral before they get bored and move on to the next hot Web thing?

So Is Twitter a Fad?

When blogs splashed onto the scene in the early years of the new millennium (first with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then with the 2003 war on Iraq), many started to wonder around the year 2004 if this kind of "new" media was going to replace the "old" or traditional media, such as the newspapers.

Now we know that the story turned out to be more nuanced. The new has not replaced the old, only borrowed from it. For example, today's best blogs, or the blogs that remain popular over the years, are the ones with high-quality writing and insightful analysis, think "Baheyya" and "Instapundit."

The old, on the other hand, couldn't co-opt the new. The New York Times has lured to its pages many popular writers/bloggers (for example, authors of Freakonomics). But still out there in the cyberspace wilderness there exist many blogs, unaffiliated with any large "old" media that enjoy the loyalty of large congregations of followers.

Perhaps most relevant to the Twitter phenomenon is that it revives the "fad question" that blogs have raised. Economist Arnold Kling tried to resolve the question by using a thought experiment: One way to distinguish a fad from a trend is to ask what would happen if you reversed the order in which technologies were invented," he wrote.

To illustrate his point, Kling used, as an example, books versus distance-learning technologies. If books were invented after distance-learning applications, Kling explained, and people found them more accessible and easier to carry and read and overall more efficient, then distance-learning is a fad, not a trend.

As for blogs, Kling argued that blogs can serve as a "filtering" mechanism. If individuals pass on to colleagues and friends only the links of blogs most relevant to their interests, this would mean that everyone received "high-value" information and avoided "low-value" information. That being an advantage that pre-blog technologies didn't provide (or at least not as much), blogging, Kling concluded, was not a fad.

So Is Twitter a Fad?

Now let's apply this same logic to Twitter. Consider, for example, Twitter versus mobile phone text messages. Were text messages to appear after Twitter, would we have considered them an improvement or a step backward?

Here the answer is less clear-cut. On the one hand, they would be a step backward. Twitter (given Web access availability) is free; text messages are not. Twitter can broadcast your messages to hundreds or thousands or, potentially, millions around the world; mobile phone text messages can't do that.

But there is reason to think that text messages would be an improvement. First, unlike Twitter, text messages don't require Web access. And since individuals with mobile phones outnumber those with Internet connections, this could be to text messages' advantage.

Secondly, text messages are targeted to their intended recipients whereas tweets are pitched into the cyberspace in the hope that there will be catchers. But there are no guarantees, unless of course you are someone of note. For example, an opposition leader in an election with contested results.

Which brings us back to the Iranian elections and its aftermath. In situations when the world's attention is focused on a constantly evolving event, Twitter commands clear advantages.

Its real-time, pitch-in-the-cyberspace, feed-the-hungry-attention would almost be impossible to match by any other Web application. And here the Iranian "revolutionaries" would be serving themselves well if they continue tweeting to keep the outside world updated.

But then how often does the world see a country as important in its neighborhood as Iran, go through a disputed election, followed by a spiral of street clashes and government intent on maintaining control of what the outside world sees? Not every day.

This probably explains Twitter's low retention rate. In normal days, when the helmeted riot police are not the dominant scene and when street protesters are not shot at, Twitter is probably a real-time overkill. Why would I want to know, in real-time, that your breakfast cornflakes were off and upset your stomach.

Why would you want to know, in real-time, that I'm very much enjoying the scorching summer in Aswan? Put more bluntly, who cares? When "who cares" keeps popping up in the heads of newcomer Twitterers, they call it quits.

By contrast, for street protesters on the receiving end of the state's heavy hand, to quit tweeting does not appear to be an option at all.

Waleed Al-Shobakky is a science and technology journalist based in Cairo, Egypt. You can reach him at w.shobakky@gmail.com.