The day Twitter broke down (failure of the hive mind)

Legend has it that Dorothy Parker of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table was asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. Without missing a beat she responded, "you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

Sharp wit requires fast response, and yesterday Twitter failed miserably at that task. It all began when Edward Boches, creative chief of the ad agency Mullen, suggested four of us test the limits of Twitter as a debate forum. The structure was simple: We'd wrestle with Edward, John Winsor (formerly of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, now head of Victors & Spoils) and Ben Malbon (of BBH Labs) for 24 minutes on four topics (Twitter as a connector, content-finder, marketing tool and crowdsourcing application). We were to launch at 4 p.m. Monday, mark tweets with #tw24 to track the discussion, and see who else jumped in.

Chaos reigned. Delays in input and responses caused Twitter threads to overlap, split, and suddenly five or six topics were being chased concurrently. Observers chimed in with questions and thoughts, but most often puzzled critiques. It looked like four ad guys had suddenly gone mad on Twitter. After an exhausting hour of trying to catch up with each other, we stopped and admitted we need a better tool such as Google Wave or Jordan Kretchmer's new LiveFyre.

Your missing channel: Collaborative communication

What did we learn from this failed test? Twitter, like almost every other communication tool, still is primarily a one-way messaging service similar to physical postal mail. Users, including us, tend to be egocentric. We send out our updates or links to share what we are thinking, and hope others will respond directly to us. Yes, we hope some messages will spread virally -- retweeted for a modicum of personal fame, or for a business, marketing meme dissemination -- but those are also one-way vectors out into the masses.

The problem with all of these tools is one-way transmission makes for lousy collaboration networks. Think of your own office and the crazy email streams that begin when one person asks a question, then more people answer, and suddenly you have 35 emails marked "Who Wants to Play Secret Santa at the Holiday Party" cluttering your in box. The old dynamics of one-way mail don't work for rapid consensus building. Now, think of the best collaborations you've had, perhaps over Thanksgiving dinner, where trains of thought bounce seamlessly around the table building momentum of ideas, wit, and solution. Communication at its best becomes unhinged from one individual into a form of hive mind, an evolving intelligence based on the contributions of the whole tribe. (We've argued before that artificial intelligence may not come from computers, but rather markets of humans in the aggregate that form hive minds of higher, even predictive, insight).

This is hard to do among humans, who have yet to learn to cooperate like bees, and even more difficult online, where typing and transmission and refresh rates create barriers in communication. Google has seen a market opportunity here and is pushing Google Wave as a new collaboration platform (think a constantly evolving Wikipedia-style rich-media page for any email conversation, and you get the idea). LiveFyre, the brainchild of Jordan Kretchmer of Twitter RFP fame, hopes to build yet another collaboration portal (it's still in beta, but we have high hopes).

It's ironic that in this age when we all must check voicemail, email, physical mail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Google chat for messaging inputs that we still crave one more way to communicate with others. But we do. The selfish, ego-at-the-center one-way vectors of messaging past won't get us to the future we need ... one where we give up some control in exchange for collaborative input from others. Sorry, Dorothy Parker. We're not with you yet.