Andrew Chen

Adventures in Twitteronia
I’ve been using Twitter a lot more often recently, especially after hooking up Google Reader shares to it, and exploring what makes the product so compelling. So first off, if you aren’t following me on Twitter, please do so here: http://twitter.com/andrew_chen.

Now on to a quick observation on public and private spaces in Twitter’s product design.

Public versus private spaces
One of the most important concepts in product design for social apps is public versus private spaces. I have previous written about this topic, relating the topic to the Dunbar Number and awful quality of YouTube comments.

Ultimately, the tradeoff is the following:

• Private spaces are better for scaling across different demographics long-term, since it keeps different audiences segmented from each other. The downside is that you need to conquer the critical mass problem over-and-over again
• Public spaces are better for getting to critical mass once, and generating fun. But the downside is that if you randomly get a bunch of Portuguese-speaking members, then your entire site might become known as “that Brazilian social network.”

Ideally, you’d like to do all private spaces, but the downside is that it’s very hard to get momentum going. But if you win, then you win big, since it’s likely your product will be adopted by a very horizontal audience.

Twitter’s public/private space design
The design of Twitter makes it clear how you can fit together components of public and private spaces to make an engaging product.

The entire Twitter social graph is public, since I can go around moving from one profile to the other (although arguably they discourage this by making the pics really small). This makes it so that I can just go around following people like BarackObama and THE_REAL_SHAQ and newsycombinator and other “public” media feeds. This means arguably that they only need to get enough interesting public feeds together (probably in the dozens?) to become useful.

Yet at the same time, by following lots of people, I’m able to create a private space of only people that I’m interested in – and no one has the ability to “butt into” my feed without me opting in to follow them. This means that maybe my homepage is pretty empty until I start to follow enough people for it to change often enough that I’m constantly checking it. That’s a critical mass issue that they’ll need to solve using suggested friends and addressbook importing.

You’ll notice that a lot of successful social applications share this design, which combines:

• Central homepage with info “pushed” to me by my connections
• List of people I’m following or Friend list or Addressbook
• Searchable (but maybe not browsable?) central directory of possible friends/contacts/connections

In a way, applications like email, Skype, social networks, Twitter, and others all share common components of this design. I think that ultimately this is a great communication-centric design pattern that can be reused in any social product.

How to find girls on Twitter
OK, and finally the section we’ve all been waiting for

Twitter doesn’t allow you to search by age and gender, nor do they collect that information. As a result, they are able to avoid, to some degree, the pickup scene nature of many social networks. For my followers, I would say that certainly 80-90% are dudes. But what if you’re looking for women on Twitter?

The easiest way I can find is to search conversations for topics or language that might be more likely to come from that demographic.

For example, try these:

• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22gossip+girl%22
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=cutee

I’m sure there is actually a fun game of finding lots of niche demographics, like librarians or rednecks or college frat guys or whatever on Twitter, just by guessing what they might say in a tweet.

And I will leave that as an exercise to the reader

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