Twitter's Visit to the Shrink

(MoneyWatch)  At a dinner party with several close friends recently, the conversation turned to Twitter, and a debate ensued over whether the micro-blogging service had any value beyond serving as a narrow marketing outlet for people with something to promote.

Those of us at the dinner have extensive backgrounds in media, academia, and communications. One of us uses Twitter frequently, another episodically, one rarely, and two not at all. No one in this decidedly unscientific panel fits even remotely into the desirable 18-34 demographic, except as parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles of people in those age ranges.

Our conversation was hardly unique; all over the thinking universe, people are scratching their collective heads over Twitter's meteoric rise, speculating whether it is simply a fad whose time is quickly passing. (As we first reported here on Monday, Twitter's traffic flat-lined in May, ending a spectacular series of growth months that had been projected out to hit ~1,200 percent on an annual basis.)

Still, if Twitter is to transform itself into a successful business, it needs to establish a business model. And, in order for that to happen, the people running the company have to grasp the nature of what has driven the core group of users who have embraced the service to date -- on a social-psychological level.

The emotional needs Twitter addresses, of course, lie in the realm of connection and communication. Dr. John M. Grohol at PsychCentral, puts it like this: " Twitter acts as a new public, global conversation medium...(that brings) conversational chat out of the dark back rooms and into the public light. This is a key point, because humans are inherently social creatures who engage primarily in conversational talking. Most of us aren't authors and don't write books, articles, or even blogs. We simply know how to talk, and Twitter is the first text service to adequately mimic this behavior in an online medium."

Grohol's fascinating articles on "The Psychology of Twitter" notes a number of "cons" that balance the "pros" that have made it so successful so fast:

• Twitter can make you feel like you're "missing something" if you are not continuously monitoring your Tweet feed. "Normal human conversations have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Twitter has none of these things -- it's continuous and nonstop, even when you're gone."
• Twitter makes it extremely difficult to find out whether you have indeed missed something important. "This not knowing if you've missed anything 'important' in the Twitterverse is a characteristic of the increase in information overload many people are beginning to experience."
• Twitter encourages public conversation, for good or ill. "Once you tweet something, it's out there in the world forever." (Twitter does, however, enable users to delete their accounts, and therefore their Tweets.)

Grohol notes that understanding Twitter on a psychological level is complex and that none of the analogies to previous interactive services can be accurately applied. "Twitter is unlike any other previous human experience with technology. There's never been a time in human existence where people could be in a group, socializing, and at the same time, actively socializing with an entirely different group of people who were not in the room." (The italics are his.)

At a basic level, this is why establishing a business model is going to be a hard task for the Twitter execs. How to monetize a global stream of ephemera?