Like Twitter With Money

[First published on Cent]

Earlier today @mckie tweeted this out:

*Go to Cent to see the Tweet image*

Comparing Twitter to Cent is interesting.

Although I wasn't an early adopter of Twitter, I've read a lot about its origin story and meteoric rise as a completely new way of communicating.

Twitter essentially took the socially sticky asynchronous aspect of blogging one's thoughts and added the ability to engage in banter with the entire world. That was revolutionary.

In the words of early Twitter investor Fred Wilson:

"Twittering [sic] is an emerging new form of communication on the Internet that changes the expectations associated with other forms of communication and yet it's fundamentally different than blogging. Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn't and it's available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs."

The feeling that any first time Twitter user gets when they experience that first back-and-forth about an area of common interest is freaking electric.

I think Centians feel the same way when they post or reply to something and someone responds turning that bell in the top right red. I know I do.

But if Twitter's stroke of genius was focusing on banter in 140 character bursts, I think Cent is proving that people are starving for richer, deeper engagement, from people like them.

Reliably rich, deep exchanges from potential strangers is hard, expensive, time consuming, and pretty unprecedented, at least as far as I can tell.

What's allowed non-famous Cent users like myself to achieve a reliably regular expectation that what I write will receive thoughtful engagement is obvious: it's all about the incentives.

For new posters to Cent, bounties help garner immediate engagement. This seems obvious, but it's still a strange action to many. It works though, and thoughtful engagement still feels electric, regardless of whether it was paid for or not.

But the electric jolts don't end there. When your post or reply gets tipped or seeded for the first time - boy oh boy - does that feel good.

There's more though. When you seed an awesome post early and then 10s of other Centians pile money on top, literally paying you more than you gave - dude seriously - it is hard to think of anything better.

And maybe this's what @mckie meant with his tweet. Regardless, that tweet meant a lot to me.