on Twitter, IRC, and the history of Internet chat
When I first got online in 1993, there wasn’t a whole lot to the web. In fact, I remember that year or shortly thereafter, buying a book called the Internet Yellow Pages. This book basically listed all the best sites on the web in something like 300 pages. Imagine how ridiculous this concept is today–yet in the early/mid 90’s, the web was actually a fairly finite space, capable of being captured in a book whose authors no doubt thought they’d be releasing yearly editions, and apparently did until 1997. Today, the web contains at least 27 billion pages according to http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/. Good thing those authors gave up in 97.
In the dawn of time–before blogging, before social networking, when under construction pages ruled the web, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat was an amazing place where you could talk to anyone about anything. Of course cybersex and software piracy were the dominant topics, but in this primordial soup were the beginnings of true Internet communities. IRC channels offered people a way to socialize around a particular topic, even if this was taken rather loosely. Often plagued by trolls and script kiddies, channel operators would act as police, kicking out the unwelcome elements to make life better for everyone else. On IRC, it was not uncommon to share cool links, talk about new ideas, get help from the most knowledgeable people, or just goof around and waste time.
Looking back on those days now, I took a guess that the userbase of IRC must have been in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. It seemed like the whole world was online. Of course, the Internet being so new then, I should have realized that I was one of just a couple million people online, and just a tiny sliver of those new netizens had enough know-how to run an IRC client. IRC was an echo chamber of geeks, nerds, and wizards. As it turns out, one of the larger networks (EFNet) boasted a userbase of only 50,000 people by the year 2000.
By that time, I was already off of IRC, visiting only occasionally to tap specific user groups for help. Devastated by DDOS attacks, political squabbles, and the skyrocketing popularity of the Web, IRC servers began to go the way of the dinosaur. While IRC channels still survive today, their tiny userbase is eclipsed by the many forms of socializing happening predominantly on the web.
Enter twitter. Because you choose who you follow on twitter, you create a channel for yourself that doesn’t contain any of the trolls, bots, spammers, and script kiddies that plagued IRC. You can even create custom ‘channels’ by subscribing to keyword feeds on services like summize and tweetscan.
Having only 140 characters to express yourself forces you to write creatively and concisely, leading to a higher quality of content than most other forms of communication. It’s limiting, but it’s also liberating. There’s also a sense of responsibility that comes with having followers. While IRC was a room where anyone could shout random nonsense, knowing that my update will be delivered to hundreds of people who follow me, I now feel responsible to produce something worthwhile and valuable to retain my followers and gain new ones. And followers are the name of the game. Whether it’s building a network that can get you out of jail or simply having people to poll or bounce new ideas off of, creating social capital is increasingly important in today’s Internet-driven society.
So twitter is my new IRC. I’ve been hanging out on twitter more and more. I’ve got a desktop client (twhirl) fetching the latest tweets from people I’m following, and I’m actively participating in conversations. Because twitter is still a very small early adopter minority, the quality of thoughts and ideas expressed can be very high, if you can figure out who to follow (this is where things like summize, hashtags and twellow can be useful). And even though twitter adoption is still a tiny minority of the Internet population, it’s growing rapidly and is already much bigger than IRC. It’s going to be interesting to watch the twitter community transform as it gains mainstream adoption.
Want to join the conversation? follow @skwp on twitter
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