By John Dimatos (January 25, 2009) (Question 1)

I’ve become an avid user of twitter as of late. I’ll spare the gushing accolades, and get to the grievances. At some point in the last month I reached a critical mass of people i follow, and as a result switched twitter clients. My original app was Twhirl, a single window scroll application that displayed my entire twitter feed indiscriminately in a simple time line. at 140 characters max per tweet, it was easy to zip through the average of 50 tweets a day I was receiving with a quick stop or two throughout the day. When I added a few twitter as the bullhorn users to my feed, (Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble) and my immediate social circle began using twitter as forum for ongoing asynchronous conversations, my average tweets skyrocketed to approximately 30 an hour. Since a number of people in my circle were dealing with this situation, I was finally referred to tweetdeck, an application which allows you to create groupings of your twitter feeds into arbitratry groups that span more than one column.
In addition, there was the persuasive tech feature of growl notifications. Growl notifications are “an unintrusive way to tell you things that happened” which is a debatable point unto itself. I felt compelled to utilize this functionality, motivated by the fact that if left unchecked my twitterfeed would grow by the minute. If this happened in order to review it I would have to actually set time aside for it, otherwise risk going down an internet rabbit hole comparable to wikipedia in it’s pull. So, growl notifications: bitsize snippets of time spent checking twitter, but more often.
Then Twitter traffic grew some more. As more people from the ITP community entered twitter, and the conversation supplemented our student mailing list’s propensity towards frivolity, the traffic grew to approximately 60 tweets an hour, which averages 1 tweet a minute, which meant that on average, I was getting one growl notification a minute. This happened this past week, and I finally turned off the growl notifications. I had at this point completely lost my ability to focus on anything for more than 50 seconds, which can be detrimental unless your entire professional life consists of making twitter posts. (It seems social media consultants actually do that).
The growl notification system as an implementation of captology is pretty simple: when a piece of software running in the background has a state change, the system flashes a note with the pertinent information in the corner of your display calling you to act accordingly. It’s usefulness is clear: allow the user to forget about the application and what it’s doing until something of significance changes: you can set that level of significance as the threshold in the individual applications.
The overall usefulness of growl depends on it’s ability to limit itself to the least amount of usage as possible. This puts it at odds with it’s own success: as more applications that utilize it’s functionality are installed on a single system, the higher the likelihood of that annoyance threshold being reached. In my case, one app was fully capable of doing it on it’s own. I think event notification systems still have a long way to go. Their ability to increase the plateau of annoyance has to be contextual and inferred. For example if a quicktime is playing video at full screen, it would be best to disable all growl notifications except for a select few that the user has deemed high priority override. Another example, which pertains to myself at this moment, would be that if any text editing program is actively in use, to again change to a high priority mode. This does assume a more involved setup process that could include the user judging (wrongly) what he might need in the future, but eventually some form of contextual recognition in persuasion through interruption will have to take hold. As for myself, I was persuaded by a simple message I received (over twitter) on how to deal with the feed overflow: http://www.twitterisntemail.com/. It’s true, it isn’t. sometimes perception is the best persuasion.