A lot of my friends and colleagues have been playing with Twitter, and they’re not the only ones. The Web app that lets you update friends on your every move via mobile has become the social network of the week. I could think of no reason why it should have become so popular until I read a fascinating article by researcher Luis Bettencourt and several colleagues about how the pace of life in urban spaces speeds up exponentially relative to population expansion.

I think Twitter — a hyperactive version of blogging — reflects the increasing pace of urban life as mor eand more people move to cities and try to keep track of each other. I write in my column this week:

Twitter, primarily an urban phenomenon, makes perfect sense if you look at Bettencourt’s model. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and many city centers such as the Bay Area are growing. As these populations grow, tech innovation grows far more quickly: thus the move from daily newspapers to blogs to Twitter in just 10 years.

The question is really whether we can sustain ourselves in Twitter time. Bettencourt and his colleagues’ models suggest that as urban populations grow, the pace of life increases exponentially but then must slow down again or crash. If Twitter is a symptom of urban life speeding up, we should expect to see communications tech like it become unsustainably fast and bottom out — or slow way down. Read more about Twitter time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 9:32 pm.
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