Tag Archives for twitter
Two things just came to my attention about the nature of online life and interaction therein.
The first was published yesterday in the New York Times, entitled The Twitter Trap:
The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?
My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.
I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter. Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant. Following an argument among the Twits is like listening to preschoolers quarreling: You did! Did not! Did too! Did not!
Balancing this is a presentation at last week’s fab social media conference at UBC, Northern Voice. The title of the talk was “Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life.” It was given by a digital media director named Alexandra Samuel, and based on an article she wrote earlier for her Harvard Business Review blog:
Still, the fact that life online can occasionally surprise and delight us points us towards the truth: it’s not the Internet itself that leads to pathologies like cyber-bullying, spam and identity theft. Rather it’s our decision — individually and collectively — to separate the Internet from the context, norms and experience that guide human behavior. It’s our decision to engage in online interaction as if it were fundamentally different from offline conversation. It’s our decision to label the Internet as something — anything! — other than real life.
There’s no denying the differences between life online and off. In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that “reality” includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.
Who do you believe? Are your online interactions and relationships real for you? Or do you view Twitter merely as distraction? What I do know is that part of the challenge (and potential) of social media lies is shifting your online life into something more than just epehemera. It takes time, practice, and meaning, to find reality in online life.
I spent the evening, like many in North America, watching news reports and my Twitter feed fly by with the news and reactions to death/killing of Osama bin Laden. It’s interesting to me to watch the way these things go, because I’ve found for a while that people, including myself, complain about cable news. And how in spite of being on 24 hours a day, never seems to be quite up to speed. And how social media can help break those barriers.
Twitter doesn’t break news for me often in the sense that hours before an event is reported I know about it. It is my central channel for news, though, so what I like about social media is its ability to provide me with things that are easy to miss through all the pundit and questionable-expert-commentator babble.
https://twitter.com/#!/BoraZ/status/64920757137973248
Additionally, @whitehouse was live-tweeting Obama’s speech, which is good because I was able to revisit the soundbites I didn’t record while watching. Like this one:
https://twitter.com/#!/whitehouse/status/64897114781659137
Other social media are important in the evolution of the news cycle, beyond Facebook and Twitter. Don’t forget to check out the creation cycle of our modern encyclopedia, too:
http://twitter.com/#!/courosa/status/64895305874817026
Outside of the actual breaking news, tonight gave an important insight into why it is important to be authentic on social media. If you schedule your tweets in advance and news breaks, well, you might seem a bit out of place!
http://twitter.com/#!/stales/status/64887240815419393
It’s strange to have been out of the States for major political events in the past three years. I don’t miss the gross celebratory enthusiasm that accompanies military success; however, that is balanced by the recognized need for Obama and his nation to get a “win” under their belts.
http://twitter.com/#!/danhooker/status/64901183151669248
http://twitter.com/#!/simonslee/status/64909557499047937
My Twitter stream was also filled with jokes. Jokes about TSA security (“does this mean I can take X on a plane now?”), jokes about Donald Trump. But, my two favorites I’ll share here were unique (at least in my stream).
http://twitter.com/#!/drance/status/64886266424078336
http://twitter.com/#!/thesulk/status/64899861790720000
Finally, I’ll leave you with a thought from outside the USA, and looking ahead to tomorrow’s big night in Canada: the federal election. This is shaping up to be quite a week. Goodnight, Twitter. Thanks for the memories.
http://twitter.com/#!/doctorow/status/64920934720602112
As we move forward as a collective community of health professionals on social media, I have been thinking a lot of what a major role Twitter plays in the connection and collaboration of such an incredibly large amount of people.
Communities of Practice are defined by Wenger as
groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.[1]
And even though now that Twitter (and many communities of practice within it, including #hcsm/ca/eu) has matured and is being used effectively by so many people, I am growing concerned about its future and about the deep reliance that we have on it for much of our day to day practice. The paradox of social media is that we are currently slave to the tools at our disposal. The more we espouse Twitter’s revolution on communciation practice, the more deeply we become inextricably tied to its specific solution for our broader desire: simple connectivity to a broad community of people “who share a passion.”
In a 2002 book, Wenger, McDermott & Snyder describe the 5 stages of the Community of Practice lifecycle [2]. Consider for a moment where you consider Twitter to be in the stages below:
- Potential (informal network of people with a commmon interest)
- Coalescence (Value seen from connection)
- Maturity (Focus and roles are clarified, active and dynamic enagagement)
- Stewardship (Organically evoloving and growing, CoP maintains relevance)
- Transformation (Radical transformation, dispersal, or death)
Here is how I think Twitter fits into this model:
- Potential. 2006-2007: Twittr launches as primarily SMS-based status tool, tech geeks at SXSW sign up.
- Coalescence. 2008: Membership moves beyond tech community as users begin to see promise in sharing more than just a status, and on more devices than simple cell phone. TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd and other link shorteners bloom.
- Maturity. 2009-2010: Active communities form as membership mushrooms and communication and collaboration protocols are ironed out. First hashtags, then lists, continue to foster collaborative growth. Recognizing the ability to connect directly with their customers, businesses and celebrities invest heavily in their Twitter presence.
- Stewardship. 2010-2011: Twitter’s value beyond “what you had for breakfast” is no longer up for debate. It is finally OK to ignore the naysayers, and get to the meat of demonstrating and advocating for Twitter’s presence in a professional and collaborative context. Promoted Tweets appear. Increased pressure for Twitter’s monetization looms large as critical mass has been acheived in nearly every aspect of professionals, consumers, news outlets and advertisers.
- Transformation. 2011-?: The pressure for Twitter to become a business and not a collaborative tool grows too great. Maturing CoPs within Twitter (eg #hcsm/ca/eu) begin to look for other ways to collaborate and grow their practices beyond one platform. Businesses, advertisers, mass media outlets, and celebrities finally consolodate their hold over Twitter’s userbase.**
The importance of this model lies in the ability for us to evaluate our evolving use of Twitter as it fits into our work lives. Many of the people who read this blog I anticipate as being involved in health care, which is a field that is, in many ways, only beginning to incorporate social media into its professional practices and communications efforts.
Strategy is everything these days. Of course the broader concepts of information access and changing paradigms of online collaboration take precedent over any specific technological or software solution like Facebook or Twitter. But the extent to which the strategic conception of social media is incorporated into our on-the-ground work is still unstable. By that I mean, it is not unheard of to recommend Twitter to literally every organization that declares an interest in social media without a second thought. Today this is a safe bet. Next year or three years from now, we may be thinking twice.
But framing Twitter as a transforming Community of Practice may help to contextualize the position that we are all in as we build and invest our communications strategies on top of tools that are often less interested in freedom of information and communication than we may care to think. Because I believe in the collaborative power of social media, however, I look forward to seeing Twitter and the communities within it transform. And I also look forward to whatever it is that comes next.
**Excuse me while I digress as I truly don’t want to speculate as to the “future of social media” beyond this, but I feel the need to say: I have a feeling that blogging may see a resurgance as people grow weary of “promoted tweets” and ad-spam (I am already there and it has barely begun), and as they begin to seek ways to exert more control over their social media presence. Those who were on the social web before Twitter may return to their roots; Twitter natives will explore both the newest and oldest forms of online identity. And as for Facebook… well, who knows.
References
As I keep telling you, we’re busy developing content for a workshop on “Using social media for evidence-based practice” at the upcoming Cochrane Canada Symposium. Our three content areas of focus will be blogs, wikis and Twitter. As we develop a “manual” to hand out to participants, I put together a one- 0r two-pager on Twitter. Just the basics. Take a read, and let me know if it’s clear or if there’s anything, as a beginner, you’d wished you’d known. What do you need to know to get started on Twitter?
Twitter: a primer
Definition: Twitter is a “microblogging” (“tiny” blog) service that allows networks of users to send short updates to each other in less than 140 characters. Initially used to share personal information, Twitter is now a platform for global information dissemination, social networking and real-time communication.
Background: Twitter was launched in 2007 as a tool where personal updates were shared by cell phones but has expanded in popularity due to its simple, accessible way to connect with others. It is estimated that Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 24 billion search queries per month [2]. Today, Twitter allows for updates to be sent using SMS but has expanded to include software for the Web as well as smartphones (e.g. iPhone, Android, Blackberry).
Key characteristics of Twitter:
- Platform for sharing short updates called “tweets” of less than 140 characters
- Tweets often include links (URLs) or “mentions” of other Twitter users
- Personalized profiles include updates from people you choose to “follow”
- By including a topic keyword preceded by a ‘#’, users can find and track only those tweets related to a specific topic (e.g. #ehealth) or event (e.g. #ccsymp11)
- All tweets are public by default (i.e. other users can choose to follow you) but may be made private if desired
Uses of Twitter:
- Sharing links and opinions about online content (e.g. blog posts, literature) [3].
- Short conversations with other users and sharing of personal/professional opinions and expertise. (“Don’t underestimate this platform” [4])
- Collecting a broad view of current news and important events in real-time [5].
Challenges:
- Detailed conversations/debate are difficult to carry out effectively in 140 characters [6].
- Tweets are meant for consumption by the public; some may be uncomfortable with the “broadcast” nature of the tool [6].
- Spam and fake accounts are common. Requires proactive maintenance of your followers
Recommended Twitter Users:
- @cochranecollab: The Cochrane Collaboration: Working together to provide the best evidence for health care
- @DrVes: Assistant Professor at University of Chicago, Allergist/Immunologist, Internist. Former Cleveland Clinic Assistant Professor and NEJM Advisory Panel Member.
- @Berci: Medical doctor, founder of Webicina.com, health 2.0 consultant, blogger; Second Life resident, Wikipedia administrator doing PhD in genetics
- @laikas: Medical Librarian, scientist, mom, wife and human
Recommended hashtags:
- #ccsymp11: Cochrane Canada Symposium, 2011
- #hcsm: “Health care and social media”
- #hcsmca: Health care and social media in Canada
- Other hashtags to explore: #ehealth, #healthlit, #pharma
References:
- http://blog.twitter.com/2010/10/world-of-tweets.html
- http://searchengineland.com/twitter-search-queries-up-33-24-billion-searches-per-month-45840
- Mandavilli A. Peer review: Trial by Twitter. Nature. 2011 Jan 20;469(7330):286-7. doi:10.1038/469286a
- http://www.slideshare.net/mavergames/web-20-and-the-cochrane-collaboration-a-case-study?type=presentation
- Chew C, Eysenbach G. Pandemics in the age of Twitter: content analysis of Tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PLoS One. 2010 Nov 29;5(11):e14118. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014118
- Cunningham AM. What I have learnt about Twitter [blog post]. 2011 Jan 23. Available from: http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-i-have-learnt-about-twitter.html
- Hawn C. Take Two Aspirin And Tweet Me In The Morning: How Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media Are Reshaping Health Care. Health Aff. 2009 Mar;28(2):361-368. [link to abstract]
Good news yesterday that our workshop abstract for the Cochrane Canada Symposium was accepted! This year’s symposium theme is Early Exposure to Cochrane: Accessible, Credible, Practical. Our topic (see below) is one that will hopefully spark some interest and some great discussion and practice at the symposium. Leading up to February, we’ll obviously be interested in gathering some sources and opinions on how others use social media for evidence-based practice, so please get in touch with your thoughts if your have ideas or suggestions!
“Using Social Media to Promote Evidence-Based Practice: A Primer on Blogs, Wikis & Twitter”
Dean Giustini, Francisco Jose Grajales, Daniel Hooker
When / Where: Fairmont Pacific Rim, Vancouver, BC. February 16-17, 2011.
Background
This workshop provides an overview of three popular social media technologies, blogs, wikis and microblogging (e.g., Twitter, Yammer). The authors will show where to locate medical blogs and wikis on the social web and the type of information that can be found there to support evidence-based practice. Through a mix of didactic lecture, hands-on practice, and group discussion, this workshop provides an entry point for social media beginners.
Learning objectives
At the end of this workshop, participants will:
- Understand blog, wiki and microblogging tools and how they are used in medicine
- Have some basic knowledge of how to select one of the social tools examined to support evidence-based practice and medical education
- Identify major blogging and wiki platforms to create accounts, new content and social networks
- Be able to assess issues of privacy on various social media platforms
- Contextualize workshop information for personal use in practice, research and continuing education
Presenters
Dean Giustini, UBC Biomedical Branch Librarian, Adjunct Faculty, SLAIS
Francisco Grajales, Trainee, Western Regional Training Centre for Health Services Research
Daniel Hooker, Researcher, eHealth Strategy Office, Faculty of Medicine
Format
A practical session that combines lecture, live demonstrations and practical exercises.
Equipment required
Participants can bring their laptops and mobiles. Internet access will be provided.
Level of knowledge required
Some awareness of social media and basic knowledge of the web.
Lots of news this weekend on practicing medicine online, everywhere from the LA Times to the Mayo Clinic.
One doctor leverages social media for the good of her practice, and her patients:
In October 2009, she started a texting program and asked three 17-year-old high school seniors and their parents to get involved. They agreed.
Since then, Dyer has texted each teen every Thursday at 5 p.m. She begins with this introduction, “Hi, this is Dr. Dyer.” After they respond, she’ll ask them a personal question—such as, “How was lacrosse practice?” or “How were finals?”Once getting a response back, she asks: “How are you doing with your boluses? How are your blood sugars? Are they high or low?”
After three months, she says, the results have been successful. Before, the teens would usually miss taking about half of their boluses each week. Now, she says, teens miss only about three boluses each week.
Another doctor questions how much work he’s doing for free, after hours, and at what cost:
But medical care based on electronic communications is commandeering doctors’ personal lives. Our instantaneous availability is breathlessly touted by health care systems eager to serve their patient customers… To preserve their personal life and get home at a reasonable hour each day, test reviews and patient communications are increasingly performed from home – all for free. Worse, our similarly web-enabled patient population has learned that many of their health care issues can now be addressed online free of charge – just send a two-page e-mail – who needs an office visit?
One doctor doesn’t use email:
Until this happens – until we are somehow paid for giving care outside of the office – this useful technology will remain unused. Is it greedy to not want to give things away for free? Is it greedy for me to not want to spend less time with my family, make less money, or spend less time with patients? Is it greedy to think I am worth $20?
While still others share their notes online with their patients:
I’d reported a crusty lesion on my forehead at the hairline. I’d had the same kind of lesion last year, and the dermatologist had frozen it off. (I have a history of skin cancer.) This time, the need to handle it had slipped my (ever slippery) mind.
Several weeks had already gone by so I emailed Dr. Sands (in the PatientSite secure portal) asking if I should insist on a fast appointment. He said no.
Notice that all this happened without any phone calls, because I could do it online. And that means it all happened sooner (act in the moment, no phone tag). And it captured the action in the moment when I thought of it.
Many hospitals wrestle with Facebook:
In the incident at St. Mary Medical Center, nurses and staff posted a photograph of Wells on their public Facebook accounts for about two days before fellow staffers reported them to hospital officials, according to an employee who saw the photo and Facebook posts. Hospital staffers also circulated the photo in text messages, said the employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of being fired…
News of the Facebook posting at St. Mary coincided with the hospital’s launch of a massive online marketing campaign last month that will include a new Facebook page, Twitter account and appearances by doctors on YouTube.
While one hospital starts a social media education and training center:
“We see immense opportunities to use internal social networking tools for collaboration among our employees to improve patient care, education, research and administration,” Aase explains. “As we find new applications, we plan to conduct research into their effects so we can measure any cost savings, efficiency gains and improved effectiveness. And when we do, we’ll be sharing those findings externally to help the whole health system improve.”
Librarians are involved, too, and struggle to coordinate their work with research teams:
I was impressed by the level of involvement of the clinical librarians and the time they put not only in searching, but also in presenting the data, in ranking the references according to study design, publication type, and date and in annotating the references. I hope they prune the results as well, because applying this procedure to 1000 or more references is no kidding. And, although it may be ideal for the library users, not all librarians work like this. I know of no Dutch librarian who does. Because of the workload such a ready made wiki may not be feasible for many librarians.
Lots of problems that have yet to be resolved. It’s a learning process and setting boundaries is going to be an increasingly important priority in this space in years to come. The convenience of social media can obviously lead to overwork and a shift in work-life balance. I would love to be a librarian available 24 hours a day via email, Twitter and Facebook, and in many respects, I am willing to try. But I still need to make dinner, read books, and take time for myself. Where do we draw the line?
UPDATE: “Blocking Facebook won’t stop stupidity.” Great responses to the LA Times by two other venerable blogging doctors.
angry about this RT @jeanlucr: Has Twitter Declared War on Traditional Retweets? http://j.mp/dgkUbY
Josie Fraser
josiefraser
I have complained about Twitter’s search system before. I always used to think it was strange that you had to go to a subdomain, search.twitter.com. just to search anything at all. Eventually they integrated the search engine right onto the home page, so that problem went away. But as we’ve known for a while, it is nearly impossible to find older tweets since Twitter Search only keeps an index of tweets searchable for about two weeks.
Now of course that is probably small potatoes for most: why do you want to be able to search old tweets when Twitter is all about real time information? And now that the Library of Congress is taking over, who cares? These are good questions, and ultimately, the times are few when I truly need to find an old tweet through a search engine. But these things are steeped in principle: I should be able to if wanted. Moreover, there should be a better way to find a month-old tweet (one that I wrote, no less) than paging back through my entire timeline by clicking “more” 40 times.
Today a quirk of Twitter search was exposed that is even stranger. Apparently, Twitter is filtering search results that contain the word “RT.” This cuts down on repetitive results, to be sure, but again, a tailored list of results is not what we should be receiving from searching. Personally I think repetitive RT tweets are 1) easy to ignore and 2) a visual cue for gauging the popularity and, in some ways, the importance of a particular tweet.
I was a bit skeptical of this glitch even happening since it sounds like a bug, but it does indeed occur. Here’s the rub: it only happens when you are logged in. So logged-out or non-users searching the Twitter homepage get full results, as does anyone searching on search.twitter.com.
-
- Full search results while logged-out
-
- Tailored search results while logged-in
It is likely that Twitter is doing this on purpose, and for several reasons.
- They want to clean up results for users and see it as a wanted convienience and added value (which it may indeed be for many people).
- They want to encourage use of their “Retweet” button are are underhandedly “forcing” users to use it if they want to be included in search results.
- Building on the two above, @josiefraser from the Digizen project in the UK, thinks they are doing this to follow up on search deals with Google and Microsoft, to have Twitter’s new and approved Retweets as a way to easily and quantitatively rank tweet relevance.
So anyway, just another thing to be skeptical of when using Twitter for searching. With the addition of “sponsored tweets” and now the elimination of manual RTs, Twitter Search has really hit rock-bottom in terms of transparent and accessible search results. Worse yet, the users who do use the Retweet button do not get credit for having done so. All that appears is a note, saying that a certain tweet has been retweeted by x number of others (see picture above).
Hopefully the serious research archive at the Library of Congress will be useful for some who need a real archive. For the rest of you, hopefully most of you will see this as an improvement, an elimination of noise, and tell me to quit my bellyaching. As for me, well, I’ll just go crawl back under my griping rock and wait until someone finds me an easy way to search old tweets (that doesn’t involve Google or equally unappealing RSS parsing).
Update: The Next Web has weighed in saying, “If I were a betting blogger, I’d place my wager on Twitter addressing the filter as a “coding error” that will soon be “corrected”.” We’ll see.
By now everyone is up to their ears with tweets about the Library of Congress’s annoucement that they will archive every Tweet. Here are my initial concerns and lauds.
- Cost. Library Journal has already questioned this. How much storage space is this going to require? How will it be sustainable? And how often are they planning on doing updates to the data stream? Will they begin collecting Tweets in real time? Monthly? Yearly?
- Content and archival quality. What about all those shortened bit.ly links? Or the old ones from services that have shut down, like Twurl? Or the really old ones that might be full URLs but that have rotted away? We can’t expect this to be perfect, but is LOC planning on trying to capture anything external to what the tweets may refer to? I got this idea from @dancohen. He suggests that LOC may need to take snapshots of the linked websites, and I think that sounds almost essential in a way albeit messy and difficult.
- Searchability. This could either be the greatest thing to happen to Twitter search, or a huge disappointment. Will LOC make their database of Tweets searchable? Right now, Twitter search is good for about two weeks. Library of Congress has a huge opportunity to blast that wide open, and we can only hope that they are able (infrastructure and $$$-wise) to do so.
- Privacy. A commenter was posted on the LJ blog about this issue. Is there a privacy problem here? Yes, our tweets are public, but is it somehow unethical even if it may not be a violation of copyright to republish Tweets in what could become public archive? Don’t ask me for an answer. Because I’ll say “no, it isn’t.”
- Metadata. How will the data about the tweets and their authors be captured and stored? Furthermore, Twitter is about to let us start adding annotations and other metadata to tweets in our stream. Will this sort of marginalia be lost?
All in all I have a feeling that this project is going to set a tone for social media archiving practice. One of the most talked about services being archived by one of the world’s largest libraries. If they truly think this is important (and I am tempted to agree), I think there is an excellent opportunity here to demonstrate that importance publicly. Essentially, I think the LOC is about the create the standard and best practices for social media archiving with this project, for better or for worse. If it is not implemented well in the beginning, it has the potential to set the bar too low (in both the technical and the public eye) for future endeavours seeking to capture online content.
In any case, this is a very exciting development to round off my library education. Two more days!
UPDATED Apr 15:
- ReadWriteWeb has some more good questions. Among them: “Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind?” The answer to some of these is already known: no commercial use, there will [sounds like] be little web interface for searching–instead they will present a curated set for public use, while the entire archive will remain for serious research only.
- To address the problem of search, Google Replay was announced yesterday as well. This is Google’s attempt to capture what SearchEngineBLog calls a “vox populi” view of historical events. You can essentially search Google’s index of tweets easily for a specific date or range and keywords to get a sense of what was said about topics such as health care reform. With Twitter handling a reported 19-billion searches a month on their junky index, it’s about time we got another option. Google Replay, just like in their real-tme results display, resolves those shortened links, but I don’t know whether or not the full URL is saved within the index or if it is resolved on the fly. My guess is the latter.
What I want and have always wanted was a way to search for specific tweets by specific users. Sometimes I can recall a fuzzy thing like, “I know @somebody tweeted something about “Topic A” like a month ago.” With Google Replay, we’re getting closer, but it’s not perfect, yet. It does effectively use Twitter handles as a search term, for example: “iphone @danhooker” brings up some tweets (but not all) that I have sent or that were RTd by me. I hope it will get better. Google has that habit, so I fully expect–and pray–this will be a workable option for meaningful Twitter search in the future.
Twitter has just made a number of pretty big announcements in the past two days. First, they announced a potential “huge” overhaul of their web UI. Then yesterday, they release Twitter for Blackberry AND they announced that they have acquired Atebits, the little company that makes Tweetie, a popular Mac and iPhone Twitter client and are going to turn it into Twitter for iPhone.
What does this all mean? I don’t see the business model here yet, but they are clearly working on something. Twitter for iPhone (aka Tweetie) is moving from a $2.99 app to become free, so they are not monetizing the app purchase so far. One thing that Tweetie for Mac and other clients have done is put ads in the stream in order to get a little bit of revenue that way. Is that something Twitter is hiding up their sleeve? We don’t know now, and until we do, I guess all we can do is be happy. (Or dismayed at the proliferation of mobile phone “apps” instead of standards-based mobile web sites). The attitude of one Twitter funder is expressed this way:
Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.
With the launch of Twitter for iPhone and Blackberry it seems that some of those services are getting built in as we speak. One thing that dismays me a little bit is that there are no rumours about Twitter Search being improved, or the indexing and archiving processes getting any better. Maybe this is the librarian in me rearing its ugly head (or the subject of another blog post), but we need an effective and non-maddening way to get to old tweets. I guess I’ll just hang my hat on that one, and go back to clicking that “more” button.
I have been considering recently why we use Twitter. I know why *I* use it: it rocks for networking and collecting and sharing resources, and filtering the web-at-large through my network of other librarians and educators and web junkies. Collectively speaking however, I hear a lot of chatter about the concept of the “real-time web” and Twitter’s usefulness as a real-time search tool. ReadWriteWeb ran an interesting series recently about this topic of the “real-time web”, and it necessarily focused a lot on Twitter because right now it is the focal point of content coming in real-time. (Friendfeed, of course, is also out there, but so many fewer people use it that it gets ignored mostly.)
Hammering home this particular emphasis, the somewhat recent re-design of Twitter’s home page positioned the service as one that is based around Trending Topics and searching. My question is why is there all this buzz around the real-time web and searching on Twitter, when we all know that the Trending Topics are routinely clogged with spam, and even if they weren’t, are mostly about things like Chris Brown’s raunchy bowtie on Larry King, or what Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry are chatting about today. (Not to mention the fact that Twitter only indexes your Tweets in their search engine for around a week and a half.)
With the exception of tracking certain conferences via hashtags, (some of which now are even hard to follow due to spam), sometimes I feel like I am the only one who has never found Twitter Search to be useful. I find it very difficult to argue Twitter’s professional utility when the first thing a new user sees upon visiting the home page is a bunch of strange looking “topics” with odd ‘#’ symbols everywhere and the name Jay-Z three times in big blue font.
And that is not Twitter’s only problem if they want to be taken seriously as a real-time web tool. Slate ran an article recently about why microblogging (and implicitly, the real-time web) is too important for Twitter to be the only service out there. It was produced in the wake of the DDOS attacks that took Twitter offline briefly about a month ago. Imagine your RSS reader: if one blog or feed is down, you only lose access to that particular stream. On Twitter, as it stands now, if one stream is down, they’re all down. As I was writing this, I lost access to my Twitter home page for a couple minutes. What’s real-time about that?
One of the best critiques of Twitter I have read recently came from James Clay in his post entitled “Ten reasons why Twitter will eventually wither and die…” I would love to argue with him about why I think Twitter could outlast some of these things, but instead I am begrudgingly inclined to agree. Unless Twitter realizes its own importance, or the real-time web junkies start exploring new venues into making this data decentralized, then I think we are in for (or in need of) a real wake-up call sooner rather than later.
