Qed

Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com

Twitter has been on my mind a bit lately and David Carr’s piece reminded me of a draft post I have in the pile of unfinished stuff lying around. At first I thought the two lines of thought might cross over but Davi’d article takes a fairly familiar line so I guess my Twitter Confession will have to wait.

I am going to have a look at David’s article because I am starting to suspect that Twitter is more hype than substance but it may yet become something. What? Well I think Twitter is a ready made tool to replace the News and Advertising industries that until recently was married under the auspices of the newspaper industry. I think there are some reasonable grounds to make that assertion but let’s have a look at some of David’s claims with regard to Twitter.

First, there is the claim that Twitter is somehow an essential part of the internet plumbing, that the internet service provided by Twitter is so deeply meshed with all the other services that it must survive. An example is this blog, where you can tweet this story using the “share/save” button. This groovy little bit of code makes it easy for you to send these words anywhere else with just a few mouse clicks. If you take that functionality and apply it across the web then you can get some sort of picture of the sort infiltration that David means by his quote

“Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

Okay, Twitter is part of the landscape whether or not it does anything. With such built in connectivity it is likely that Twitter will achieve some sort of critical mass and take on a life of its own. Possibly it is already there but before it becomes entrenched it will need to do a couple of things. First it needs to start making money for someone because no web service can survive for free over time, either they are subsidised by another profitable activity or they make a buck in their own right. The hard fact of life is that there is nothing free about providing a service on the net. This site costs money, facebook costs money to the people supplying it, Google costs money.

So Twitter will eventually have to attend to business. When it does then we will have a better idea about motivation and rewards, until then however Twitter’s business model seems primarily one of garnering sufficient mindshare to justify its existence.

The other thing Twitter will need to do is establish a much better track record in terms of service availability. Twitter Fail is fairly common in my experience and this is tied in with the business side of Twitter. To put it simply, providing a 99.999% reliable service on the net costs money, more money than Twitter can probably afford. So the gurus at Twitter probably sweat their arses off hoping it all holds together until someone comes up with the money for them to deploy a better service. In the meantime we get lots of “we are working on it” type announcements.

David acknowledges the issue of service reliability in his article but he seems more concerned with what Twitter can do for you and me. According to David, Twitter can keep us informed and up-to-date. It’s the electronic pulse of humanity, you just need to put your finger on the right spot.

It’s at this point that I think we need to stop and look seriously at what is being claimed for Twitter. According to Clay Shirky who David quotes;

“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail.”

How is this raw capacity defined? It sounds like an impressive claim but one that David fails to substantiate. He then goes on to parrot the now familiar lines that Twitter represents some collective networked intelligence, a claim that may be true but one that begs the question of so what? According to David, this collective intelligence is best deployed helping him decide what netbook to buy or what is going on with flights during a US style terror scare. It seems uncritical thinking on his part, and it avoid the corollary. That is just how much time and mindshare is absorbed by being part of the Twitter experience.

And it is at this point that I really depart from David’s line of thinking. From my experience Twitter is a interactive now type of internet service. What is happening now is millions of tweets are filling up cyberspace with what’s currently of interest to the authors. And then there are the retweets and the corresponding conversations, but all of it is very NOW. Switch off twitter, as I have done for the last month or so of my break from uni, and suddenly life seems slower.

What you get from Twitter depends on who you follow and how often you use the service. For journalists and other media professionals I can easily see the usefulness of Twitter after all currency is the what drives the News industry. For the average punter I guess there is some value in tapping directly into the mindshare of the masses when something is happening but the question remains is it something we need? And given the business imperative that Twitter must deal with sooner or later, what will commercial interests do once they figure out a way to exploit the collective mind?

The bottom line for me is that Twitter is another time sink. It is also another mind grabber. Sure I can ration my use, I can organise my internet patterns so that it’s sitting in the background but the fundamental fact remains that unless I actually engage with Twitter, which means time and effort, it does nothing extra for me. The collective wisdom is what Andrew Keen discussed in his book “The Cult of The Amateur” and although I disagree with his predictions with regard to the creative mind, his points about the wisdom of the masses are well worth considering.

David is probably right in the sense that Twitter is here for the foreseeable future even if the retention rate of service adopters remains at it’s current level. It is hard to see Twitter disappearing overnight but it is also hard to see what is going to take Twitter to the next level of a “must have” internet service. Hype of the kind that David and other evangelists preach might drive a few more people to look at Twitter but the constant on feature is not, as claimed, a bonus in terms of our already busy lives.

Why Twitter Will Endure – NYTimes.com.

The ‘Web Squared’ Era – a thought bubble

From Tim O’Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka

Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.

via The ‘Web Squared’ Era – Forbes.com.

and on TED

Going back to O’Reilly & Pahlka –

The scale, nature and speed of the data change what we mean by collective intelligence. Consider the obvious use case: internet-connected GPS applications that have built-in feedback loops, reporting your speed and using it to estimate your arrival time based on its knowledge of traffic ahead of you.

I’m not sure about the term collective intelligence. A feedback loop is just that, data into a process, data out. Intelligence for mine implies a notion of active judgement and adaptation. A simple GPS based application is just leveraging data in a sophisticated manner. It looks smart but I’m not convinced it’s intelligent.

This does point to something else though, which sounds like a good story from the realms of speculative fiction. What if, or more likely when, we do succeed in creating something that has its own powers of judgement and adaptation which we continue to feed with terrabytes of data, what then? Have we created another form of intelligent life and how will it view its creators?

Or say we fail to spawn such a thing, what are the implications of these new sources of social intelligence if they are exploited for less than altruistic reasons.

My GPS equipped mobile thingy instantly becomes a tracker that could be used to monitor my location. Biometric indicators could provide real time tracking of my physical condition, such data might be useful to a medical officer but it could also be used by an insurance company to vary my premiums or coverage. Monitoring my purchases or purchase inquiries could provide other important profiling about my lifestyle and my future intentions. In other words, what if a real Big Brother comes along?

Ok, fear of the future is no real reason not to go on but a dewy eyed vision of the future may blind us to other things that could happen, even if in our hearts we hold more noble aspirations. Not everyone in the world is so generous.