Comments
7 CommentsOk, not really, but I think we're overlooking some of the implications it has. I was explaining twitter to a friend. It really got me thinking about the potential of it. I'm going to post the conversation in it's entirety here so you can get to the concepts through my train of thought.
Alex (12:10:16): you need to get on the twitter train
Alex (12:10:18): it is f'd up
Adam (12:10:25): heh
Adam (12:10:42): that's a good thing?
Alex (12:11:00): It is this strange new social dynamic
Alex (12:11:23): Like... you follow people you're interested in seeing what they're up to, right?
Alex (12:11:45): That includes celebrities, CEO's, friends, politicians
Alex (12:11:53): the F* NEW MARS ROVER THING
Alex (12:11:54): etc
Alex (12:12:14): And you see whatever they feel like saying they're up to.
Alex (12:12:27): But they also know you're following them so they might check up on you.
Adam (12:13:03): can you see who someone else is following?
Alex (12:13:05): yes
Adam (12:13:13): can they turn that off?
Alex (12:14:54): I don't think so
Alex (12:15:02): but they can make it so they have to approve you to follow them
Adam (12:15:38): Effectively it's the same as the wall on facebook and comments on myspace.. just all jammed together
Alex (12:15:58): it is on one level
Adam (12:15:59): mm sort of
Alex (12:16:03): but it's also redefined that concept
Alex (12:16:17): And the openess level gives it something else too
Adam (12:16:20): big chat room, only show the people you want to see
Adam (12:16:37): but not as realtime
Alex (12:16:50): you can definitely use it as a chatroom
Alex (12:16:56): but you tend not to
Alex (12:16:58): at least most people
Adam (12:16:59): I am just using that as a vague description
Adam (12:17:13): twitter is just a huge chatroom that everyone is in.. and you pick who you want to see
Adam (12:17:20): + they have to allow you to see them
Alex (12:17:32): the default is to allow everyone
Alex (12:17:38): there are not many made private
Alex (12:18:04): I'd go so far to say that is an entirely new form of communication/socialization
Alex (12:18:50): Man... it could be frickin SkyNet
Adam (12:18:51): I bet the servers get hammered pretty redonkulously
Alex (12:19:14): yeah, they're not handling load very well right now, but are working to expand as fast as they can
Adam (12:19:53): it might become SkyNet if they use all the traffic as some sort of database
Adam (12:20:09): And if internet culture becomes conscious
Adam (12:20:13): well, just kill yourself now
Alex (12:20:15): hah
Alex (12:20:22): it's interesting, because we have huge db's of info
Alex (12:20:41): wikipedia, national archives, financial records, trends, climate information, hell, even the searches people have done on google
Alex (12:20:48): But this is a huge db of... communication
Alex (12:21:03): things people think are relevant at specific moments in time
Alex (12:21:16): It would be really interesting to analyze
Can you imagine how fascinating it would be to analyze that data? Can you think of all the trends that would become obvious that we're not even aware of now? It might affect far more than just AI study.
(Waits for Hrafn)
hthth
Written Jun. 3, 2008 / Report /
Haha - well I wouldn't go so far as to compare Twitter to SkyNet. But we're already knee deep in analysis! Especially when it comes to open information; Wikipedia's fruits fuel a lot of startup companies dealing with machine processing & intelligence. Emphasis is shifting onto finding ways to utilize open data and add standardized metadata. This will bring about exciting new opportunities in the near future.
peroty
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Skynet.
As predictable as meterologists.
Down 4 times a day.
And when it gets busy.
And when Apple releases a phone.
And...
I don't think Fake John Connor would be very happy about that though. He must be working to bring Twitter down as we speak.
Scrivs
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Heh, I would like an example of what would be interesting about what someone thinks randomly on Twitter. Maybe I don't see the intelligent conversations going on or something. And from your discussion you might be the worst Twitter salesman on the planet, I suggest they hire you. You were so confusing that you made it sound interesting.
Ozone42
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Well, I'm horribly tangential. My mind doesn't operate the way most do; I tend to be exploring every side avenue of a topic instead of looking at it face on.
The most obvious example I have is using Twinkle, which is a nice iPhone twitter client. In addition to being the best client on the iPhone, it's location aware. So, if you're using Twinkle, and someone else is, you'll see I'm posting from Denton, TX (or wherever I am when I tweet.) In addition to that, you can look right there at who is tweeting within N miles from you. So whenever some event happens, you can look and see people nearby talking about it. A big storm passes through, you see people talking about lightning, power outages, tornados, etc. A concert is in town, people talk about getting tickets, etc. This is kind of obvious stuff, but it's a view into a region that has never existed in such a direct fashion before. So on that level you not only have the time correlation, but a location as well.
Without that client, you've still got a time correlation to what people are doing. I learned about the latest Nine Inch Nails releases first through twitter... even though I'm on the NIN mailing list!
The really interesting aspect is being able to look at the trends to that data. There's already a few people building things to do this, and who knows what they're doing internally at twitter. It's similar to the google zeitgeist, but in a much more real-time and personal level. I think if we get some people studying this we will be able to have an insight into regions, society, etc, that we've just never had before without decades of data.
Am I making any more sense now?
Scrivs
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Location based conversations does sound interesting. Not necessarily knowing where the person is exactly when sending a Tweet, but if someone in Tampa is reporting on a storm (as per your example) then it would be nice to have a page with all Tampa Tweets.
However, this is only applicable if people are talking about stuff in my area which I think would be much harder to distinguish. Just having a page of all the people located in Tampa would make for a page with a bunch of garbage so in this case I don't think your example is as easily pulled off as you think.
Ozone42
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Perhaps it only works so effectively now because of the limited number of jailbroken iPhone users that have access to Twinkle. There's several dozen different people I see daily in the view, and it works. When it gets to several hundred, it might not work as well, but I think for major events it'd still be at-a-glance useful. More than that and it will require some analysis, which goes further into the data mining concept.
Location awareness really adds another level of utility to any data, but I think that's just one aspect of the potential here. Just having all the data of twitter by itself isn't terribly useful to an individual, but you put a filtering layer in between to show trends and it becomes an entirely different resource.
Scrivs
Written Jun. 11, 2008 / Report /
Yeah for it to be effective it would either have to have some major data-mining going on in real-time or people would have to check the option to get stuff put into the system when they are talking about location-specific things. This is why the new AP application for the iPhone interests me because it really gives cititzen journalists the tools to handle local news.