Is it introversion that drives the success of Twitter?

Earlier today I listened to a really interesting interview of Jane Mason by Cameron Reilly (listen to it here). They were discussing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in people and categorise everyone into 16 different personality types.

The part of the conversation that I found most interesting was when they were discussing introversion, and the fact that introverted people are not always against interacting with other people, its just that they like to control those interactions (e.g. a number of famous actors are introverted).

This led me to thinking about Twitter and other microblogging services, and why they have been so successful. The conclusion I came to was that it is the early-adopting introverted “geeks” (I apologise for the term but its the best I could come up with)  like me who naturally flocked to Twitter as it allows us to interact with others, whilst still controlling those interactions.

Obviously, this conclusion relies on a number of assumptions:

1. That the archetypal “geeks” are the early-adopters of many new technologies
2. That “geeks” have a tendency to be introverts
3. That Twitter allows people to control the interactions they have with others

I think I’m fairly safe with the first assumption, but the other two probably need a bit more thought.

In terms of geeks being introverts, whilst I haven’t been able to find any definitive resources to prove this fact, my general observations do reinforce the perception that this assumption is almost definitely correct.

In terms of Twitter and its use, if you think about it, Twitter is really the ultimate tool in controlling interactions with the outside world. A Twitter user has total control over who they follow, as well as what they tweet about, and which conversations they get involved in. They even have the ability to tune out totally from the tweetstream if they want to. As such, this is a great tool for introverts to control their communication with the outside world, whilst still making themselves heard.

Drawing together the three assumptions above, it is therefore clear that Twitter was a perfect tool for the early-adopter introverted crows to flock to. This allowed it to build up a critical mass of users, to the point where it is now beginning to go mainstream. It is also at the point where the extroverts, the people who thrive on interactions with others now also flock to Twitter as it is an outlet for them to communicate with a broad audience given its huge reach.

It is interesting to think about this paradigm when trying to think about what the “next” big web application might be. I’m tipping it will be one that allows the introverts to even further control their interactions with others, although I’m not sure what that will be.

Update (4/12/08): Danu Poyner has an interesting post on his blog which talks about the fact that Twitter is great for the Intuitive (N) type people highlighted in Myers-Briggs. He also refers to a great survey of Twitter done by the MBTI blog which shows that the most common (self-reported) MBTI type on Twitter is INFP, with both Is and Ns being over-represented in Twitter as a whole.