It was in March 2009 when I came across The 14 Types of Twitter Personalities - trying to find myself there. Since then I was fascinated by the idea that "these personalities and how we present them to the world define our uses and intentions on the Twittersphere."

But 14 types? Too many!

Inspired by this article I started to find my own types of Tweeples - with the target to reduce them to 5 or at least 10. Here are the results:

1. Livestreamer – representing more than the classical answer to a stupid Twitter question: "What are You doing?" Liverstreamer consider themselves that important that they are livestreaming even the uninteresting parts of their personal life. The more follower people have the more they start livestreaming: I call it the "celebrity issue".

2. Livestreamer with Dating Ambitions – Tweeple who already lost the ability to be just for themselves - making a social movement out of every private cause. Typical: "I'm sitting in the train to Vienna. Who else is there? Shall we meet?"

3. Mindstreamer – livestreaming the poetic/cognitive/political/etc. aspects of their personal experience. These Tweeple are kind of Twitter columns - rebounding the stupid Twitter question "What are you doing" into a meaningful one: "What are you thinking about?"

4. Journalists – classical and important position in times of (natural, economic or political) crisis - complementing and threatening the monopoly of classical news media. Observing the world without rulebook.

5. Beta-Journalists – tweeting just Re-Tweets. The secret power of Twitter.

6. Tastemaker – pseudo-journalists with more opinion than fact. With this very special viral impetus. The vain side of Twitter governance.

7. Talkmaster – always faking a dialogue. "Good morning fellowers! What are you up to today?" These kind of Twitter-Gurus act very suggestive and think that the community needs their healing words.

8. Spammer – you can also call them SEO-Marketing-Gurus which is the same. They can not wait 5 seconds before the tell you how to make #Followers #Money etc … There is no reason to make a distinction between these Semi-Spammers and the real ones. Both produce unfiltered garbage.

9. Troublemaker – always attacking others’ Twitter behaviours. Accompanied by an aggressive/aggrieved undertone.

10. Metablogger – tweeting about #Twitter and mirroring Tweeple. Important position, but sometimes overstressed like everywhere new cultural techniques emerge.

What kind of personality or better: what sample of personalities are you?

O Reilly and Twitter credo #140conf: So I try to restrict the amount of O'Reilly content.

And, instead, I say, "How can I actually start to build the team, the people who I follow?" So I say gosh, if you're interested in venture capital, follow Fred Wilson. So I retweet Fred. If you're interested in the financial crisis, follow Paul Kedrosky. So I retweet Paul. If you want to follow energy, follow Chris Nelder, @nelderini. And so I retweet him. What I'm effectively doing is, I'm building a team. And I'm actually handing out assists. If you think of me, I'm a little bit like a point guard in basketball.

I'm trying to identify the best people in a community of whom I'm following, and I try to use my tweets to build their following so that the news I care about gets broadcast more widely.

Because I can't retweet everything they do, but I want to make sure that they're in the rotation; that they get the ball. And so in some sense, I'm trying to become the voice of the communities that I care about and to find an audience that cares about me, not about me, sorry -- about the same things that I do.

And I think that [is] one of the lessons here for anybody involved in Twitter, and particularly anybody who's thinking that Twitter is going to lead them to the next media empire. You see these people saying, "I could have millions of followers and have such an impact." That's really not the point. The point is to figure out how you can add value to the community that you're a part of. That's really the secret of social media. It's about amplifying a community.

There's a great example of this in some social network analysis that was done of congressional Twitterers. I forget who did it, but it was somebody in the UK. And they found that a relatively obscure Texas congressman named John Culberson is the central node in the congressional Twitter network. Now why is that? Turns out he's the guy who engages in the most conversations. He responds to his fellow congress people versus the ones who just broadcast themselves. And it was kind of interesting, I went to see Culberson. Politically, we're incredibly far apart. I'm quite liberal, Democrat in many ways. And he's an amazing Jeffersonian Republican. But I really warmed to the guy. We started talking, and we just had this immediate mind meld. I saw the connection between what he does and how he does it and Jefferson's vision of America. He waved under my nose this letter of Jefferson in which he talked about the delegation of authority between levels of government all the way down as it ends up to each man on his own farm. Okay. Well, we're not each on our own farm anymore. But the idea is that each of us matters and there's this nervous system effectively that extends from the center of our government out to each of us. And that our role is to be active synapses in that nervous system I think is central to a vision of how we can remake America and remake the world today.

We have to connect with each other. We have to build on each other. And we have to take the time and the effort to weave a community of people with common interests. We have to take the time to build up the people who we care about. I use a phrase at O'Reilly as a motto, which is, "Create more value than you capture." That is, if you're trying to think of what you do as a media practice, think about it as creating value for your community and eventually that community will create value for you. Thank you very much.

Dieses ständige Berichten über das, was man gerade tut, hat leider auch einen Nachteil: Man kommt nicht mehr dazu, etwas zu tun. Deswegen benötigen die Twitterer unter den Juroren auch wesentlich länger für die Juryarbeit als die Nichttwitterer. Ist aber auch gut so: Die Beschleunigung des Alltages, die uns die technische Revolution gebracht hat, wird nun durch die gleiche Revolution wieder Schritt für Schritt zurückgenommen. Bald wird die Beantwortung eines Mails wieder so lange benötigen dürfen wie früher ein Brief.

gelesen im Standard am 21.6.2009

I swear, I was just there to see what they offer. Put in USERNAME and PASSWORD and then realized this stupid chain-letter-concept of twittertrain and logged out again. But this is not the end of the story. About 12 hours later I was confronted with this Tweet below I never did!!! What one can do about this???? I think this should be prosecuted as a crime!!!

Wir sollten nicht enttäuscht sein, dass die, die Twitter erfunden haben, eigentlich nichts zu sagen haben. Die Reflexion muss von anderen kommen, wenngleich ein bisschen Einsicht in Dinge hätte ich mir schon erwartet. Egal, ob er "social aspects" erwähnt, oder "news aspects", oder "commercial aspects" - its just the speed that counts ...

Ein Beispiel? 4:46"Getting information somewhere quickly is one of the most valuable things you can do on the planet!" Kein Wort darüber, wie diese Information aussieht, kein Wort über kritische Größen im Informationsmonitoring, kein Wort über Verarbeitungsressourcen, kein Wort über Qualität und was Echtzeit bedeutet, kein Wort über das Verhältnis von Ereignis und Kommentar, kein Wort, nirgends.

Biz Stones Denken ist pupertär und gehaltlos. Versöhnlich sind am Ende nur die letzten 15 Sekunden. Man sieht Menschen aneinander vorbeigehen und spürt, was intelligente Kommunikation verändern könnte.

Owen Thomas macht sich Gedanken über Twitter und zitiert Jean Baudrillard, den vor 2 Jahren verstorbenen französischen Philosophen der Simulation: "That's the grand irony of Twitter: Even the real people on the service are fake. They are their own simulacra. No one actually lives their life 140 characters at a time. What we do is turn ourselves into works of fiction. Who's real? Who's not? Who cares"

In Baudrillards Buch The Vital Illusion finden sich ein paar sachdienliche Hinweise zur Lage der
Online-Nation:

Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social.

Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.

Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present.

Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real.

Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex ...

Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by
verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication ...
Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its
own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the
instantaneity and omnipresence of the event.

Ecstasy of identity: the energy. More personal than the personal.


Der letzte Twitter-Eintrag kommt nicht von Baudrillard, sondern von Nicholas Carr - als Reaktion auf Steve Gillmor, der im Zusammenhang mit meinem Erdbeben folgendes berichtete:
This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter ...


Nicholas Carr merkt dazu folgendes an: Now at first, I have to confess, this struck me as kind of odd. Your spouse calls you to tell you about an earthquake at your house, a potentially catastrophic natural event, and the first thing you say is, "Was it on Twitter?" But then I realized I wasn't thinking of it from a fully realtime perspective. (I still find myself drifting back to real time now and then.) As soon as I recalibrated my mindset, everything came into focus: In realtime, nothing ever happens firsthand. Reality becomes real only after it has been mediated, encapsulated into an electronic message and shot through a network into a virtual community. The unstreamed life is no life at all.

Twitter heißt die neue Einheit für Gedankenlosigkeit. Alles, was Sinn macht, beginnt ab 140 Zeichen. Früher war das anders. Da gab es Sätze, die hatten Gewicht. Heute reicht Online-Sein nicht mehr aus. Wir wollen uns selbst dabei zuschauen, deshalb publizieren wir, was das Zeug hält. Der Inhalt ist unwichtig. Entscheidend ist, dass wir uns begaffen können oder dass uns jemand folgt. Natürlich gibt es auch in diesem Fall positive Beispiele für einen intelligenten Technologieeinsatz. Aber diese machen sich rar.

Dank an Georg Holzer für sein brillantes Anschauungsmaterial.


Dank aber auch an Hannes Treichl für sein Background-Video von Evan Williams, dem Twitter-Gründer.