GregHay.com

New York Talk Exchange

The February issue of Seed Magazine had a piece on the New York Talk Exchange project at the MoMA, which I saw. The premise of the project is that all the telecommunications out of New York City in a single day would be mapped to see how the city communicated with the country and world at large. The findings were as one expects; New York City makes a lot of calls and makes them to all parts of the country and world, sort of a no-brainer. But the interesting thing is the VOLUME of calls made per New Yorker relative to those of their small town counterparts. According to Carlo Ratti from MIT who conducted research for the project, a formula emerged; Communication increases according to population size scaled to an exponent of about 1.5*. Why is this interesting? Because conventional thinking would have it that New Yorkers should talk as much on the phone, per person, as the population in Syracuse, but instead according to the findings; on average a New Yorker will talk 30 times more that a Syracuse Townie (full disclosure, I am a Syracuse Townie).

Okay, so what does this have to do with Social Media, Mustaches or Antics? Well, it got me thinking about Twitter and scale of conversation versus other sites like Facebook and MySpace. Perhaps the answer to why Twitter works is not that it’s new, but in fact it is the same as why New Yorkers talk on the phone so damn much.

There is a theory around urban environments and their growth that puts forward the idea that as population size increases as well as population density increases, that people begin to move and interact faster at a subconscious level because survival and competitive instincts kick in. Therefore in New York, we feel compelled to chat on the phone more and walk faster because instinctually there are so many more of us competing for space and mindshare among our peers that the fear of losing drives us to use the phone more and briskly pass tourists on the sidewalk.

What does this have to do with Twitter? Think about it. What did we do on MySpace? I looked at your page, turned off the dumb song you picked and maybe checked out your pictures, but I was alone on the page. With Facebook I could chat with friends, tag the same pictures and the Feed of news kept reminding me that I was not on Facebook alone, so that same instinct that tells me to walk fast, also told me to update my status and make witty comments. I was competing for mindshare among my friends. Now with Twitter, the entire experience is a New York City sidewalk, I’m never alone at any stage of the experience. @thejames says something witty, I have to come over the top, @haynow gives an update to her house being built, I have to respond. That instinct that drives me to make a call while walking home “just because” is the same that drives me to Twitter every 2 hours all day. I believe Twitter’s success lies here, with our competitive drive, not that we all can produce 140 Characters or we really want tickets to a Sun’s games from Shaq.

Thinking about urban dynamics and Twitter has led me to thinking about its tipping point: it may not be when Steve Rubel bails on it, but it may be with the environment gets so large it can’t hold all the calls.

If each successive community we love gives us faster feedback on our peers and more reason to compete and make noise, is the next one a purely mobile experience? Will Google’s Grand Central transpose my calls into Tunblr pages? Will a Britekite / Timelines mashup tell me what is being discussed in the bar down the street from my house? I think it’s going to end up somewhere in the middle of all of that, the line between mobile and the desktop/laptop computing experience will be totally blurred to spur a faster platform for communication and more “people on the sidewalk” to compete with.

I can’t wait.

*SEED Magazine, “City Gravity”, Feb 2009