Tweeting about the Weather Isn't Lame

I can't remember where I read this, but someone (with some time on their hands?) figured out that some higher-than-you'd-expect percentage of posts to Twitter are about the weather. Seriously, the weather!

I myself have done this. And the past month in Seattle, with the crazy snow and now rain we've had, my PNW-centric personal Twittersphere has been all abuzz about sledding, traffic, holiday travel hassles, snow, snow, snow, and now the road-salting controversy in the City Council. (Salting! What is this, Wisconsin? It snows like twice a year here.)

I have to say, the volume of weather-related tweets this holiday season has been marked. And this has made me wonder what's going on. Why would anyone go to the trouble to broadcast a stray water cooler comment out to the world?

On the one hand, this sudden flood (ahem) of banal weather tweets might seem to confirm once and for all the uselessness of Twitter. I see it a little differently, though. What I think is actually happening is that people are creating a layer of light conversation around a synchronous shared experience. It's the equivalent of a water-cooler chat, yes--but I've started to think there's something important about the shared aspect of that experience. If there's one thing we have in common, after all, it's the weather.

Though other smart folks (including, most vehemently, my psychotherapist / wife) disagree, I'm starting to think experiences don't have to be meaningful to be important, as long as they're shared, and especially when the sharing is synchronous with the experience.

So no, tweeting about the weather isn't lame at all. I'd rather think of it as a social gesture acknowledging commonality, strengthening bonds, and maintaining connectedness.

But do all our random followers on Twitter, or even our followers who (are lucky enough to) live in other climates care about this kind of stuff? In many cases, clearly not. For me, this points to Twitter's shortcoming as a social network. Twitter, I'd even say, is not an appropriate tool for relationship-building. It's not, in other words, a social network in its own right.

I see Twitter, instead, as a powerful feature of social networks. Standing alone, it's a feature of existing distributed social networks--and a great reminder that social networks are made of people, not web pages. Fed into Facebook, Twitter becomes a more-powerful status communicator, a feature of Facebook. And with Twitter's open API, endless possibilities exist for layering meaningful triviality into social network-driven web experiences.

Comments

[Ariel v.]

As you know, I totally love twitter, but I do worry about it replacing other interactions that benefit from face time. Unlike water cooler talk, where we are up, standing, and getting face time, we tweet while sitting on our asses in front of screens.

I have a friend whose daughter texts her from the next room to communicate. I just finished watching Wall-E last night, and the dystopian image of where we're headed sticks with me: People floating around in a bubble fed completely via screens, patently unaware of their actual surroundings.

We can be super in touch via all these mediated ways, and boy howdy do I love the way twitter keeps me ambiently connected to folks I otherwise wouldn't get any "touch" with. But when you're sitting 10 feet away from me and it becomes more habitual to d reply your tweet than to holler across the aisle at you, I get to become even more passive-aggressive than I already am, and I don't know that that's healthy.

[Tyesha]

i am guilty of this...that wind storm last night was just so freaking awesome i had to share. weather effects so many of your senses, maybe all of them. i think a totally sensory experience is the perfect thing to tweet.