★ A New User Joins Twitter…

My Mom who is techie enough to do real estate online, send emails and video chat with me has decided to use Twitter. She’s already on, actually but we can pick any computer user who is proficient enough to use Gmail and put them in front of Twitter.

The sign up process is simple but I’ve only told them, they can follow family & friends and update those people with what they’re doing. It’s a way to easily connect with others and share things. Mom is excited but the front page is pretty confusing. “popular topics by the minute, day and week” is on the main page. She reads through all of the topics and this is what she sees.

She’s aware of Veterans Day and Fort Hood but “#blamediddy” and “#donttrytoholla” look weird. What’s “Google Wave” and why are people talking about “MW2”? This is a bit confusing and she immediately assumes that this site is a place to talk about current events but she heard from me that this is a way to keep up with friends and see what they’re doing. Twitter’s tag line says, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

At this point, her interest has passed and she’s merely following my recommendation. Joining is easy but with 82 million current users (11/12/09), she has a problem picking a username. Once she’s in, there are hundreds of “suggested” people that are recommended to her to follow. Al Gore is there and model, Brooke Burke and some guy name TechCrunch is recommended. She follows a few celebrities and moves on. Skipping the “find friends” area she now has a main page full of tweets from celebrities and there’s a box that asks, “what are you doing?”

After a while of scrolling around and seeing a lot of tweets she has no idea what to do from here. The sidebar has her name and tweet count and there’s a search box and then trends that show all kinds of topics and most mean nothing to her at all. She’s not really interested in pop culture and why are people talking about “3 words after sex”? She sees an option for lists and finally there’s a button that says, “Find People” at the top of the page.

From here, she can enter a friend’s email address, login to her Yahoo Mail account or search by first and last name for family members. This process couldn’t be easier but since her friends don’t tweet very much, her Twitter stream is now full of deals from Dell Outlet and some VC in Silicon Valley that’s live blogging a conference. “This isn’t very valuable” she says. She makes a great point.

I’m watching closely as she explores the screen. I told her she can reply to someone’s tweet to start a conversation. “How?” she says. She makes a great point. The reply and favorite buttons aren’t visible until you hover over a tweet. This simple user interface decision turns into a user experience nightmare. I don’t answer and let her try to find out for herself. 52 seconds later she finds the reply button and clicks it. The process of sending a reply is very easy.

She clicks on TechCrunch’s avatar and sees their page full of auto-posts. This is pretty boring and she wants to unfollow them. Where?

I have to show her the drop down to unfollow them. What are lists, she asks. Well, lists are a way to organize people you want to categorize into different sections like friends and family and maybe one for Florida friends and another for California. That makes sense but she has no idea how to create one so it’s very quick that she gives up.

Back on the main page, she’s following 10 people and suddenly Ashton Kutcher shows up on her stream w/  “retweeted by brooke burke” text below it. “Why is Ashton showing up? I can’t stand that guy!” I explain to her that people can retweet other people’s tweets and you can choose to not see those on a person to person basis. She understands and wishes that she could just disable retweets all together, “what if someone retweets something pornographic?” she asks and I have no response and just tell her that let’s hope they tag it with “not safe for work” so she doesn’t click it.

This was all Mom needed for her first Twitter lesson. She goes off exploring and here are some follow up questions I get over email.

• Who is “britneyfuckedvids” and why is she following me so many times?
• I clicked on some post under trending and now I see a ton of RTs about google wave. How do I get out of that?
• Someone followed me and keeps sending me all of these replies about hotel deals and travel. Did they hack into my twitter?
• I signed up for a get more followers thing but now all of these people are showing up in my page?
• How do I tweet from my phone like you do? Where do I go to get something like that?

Then, fast forward one week and she’s stopped using the service. She goes to my page to see what I’m up to but she’s simply stopped. The spammers, features and retweets just made it one big mess and even though she’s a modern woman in her forties, Twitter was simply too much to fuss with.

If she had joined Twitter 3 years ago like I did, the progression of complexity would be slow and manageable but it’s kind of like you’ve never used a word processor and all of the sudden, here’s Office 2007, Go have fun! It’s too much and sometimes we just want notepad or textedit instead of MS Word. Twitter is on the road to complexity and when it really matters and we really are trying to do something, along comes the failwhale and Twitter is over capacity.