Twitter, Micro-blogging, and Notions of a Public Idea Funnel

A post on the problems with twitter caught my attention today. I signed up, had a play, and came to the conclusion that the author may have missed the point. Regardless of the partial validity of her claims (hard to explain, what's it for), the platform clearly fills the useful void of persisted and syndicated micro-blogging. The success of the Twitter approach to the problem is grounded in the founders focus on those two features, the recognition of the importance of lightweight authoring mechanisms (140 characters from IM, SMS, and the web if you have to), and their opening up of the whole thing up with API's.

The Twitter in Plain English video totally nailed the platform in my eyes for the average user, and Middlebrook's Big Juicy Twitter Guide nailed the power user case.

The baseline usage of "what are you doing" is banal, but so what. The hierarchy of each person's geographically disjoint clique defines the relative utility of tweeting for the average user. More interesting is the consumption (following) behaviour, promoting the elevation for those commentators that are effective in the medium (not necessarily writers, bloggers, or journalists!). Participation for the average user makes sense in the same way as blogs and before that personal webpages make sense.

Twitter in the broader sense (at the moment) is all about breaking news. Specifically the identification of an event that may or may not have been identified by other media (speed), and the coverage of an event from multiple perspectives including those participating (accessibility). This useful application of twitter is widely acknowledged, for example in identification of natural disasters and in coverage of technology conferences. This application of the platform provides the first viable pathway of the approach toward wider adoption, and will/is promoting the development of effective aggregation tools to extract and exploit this value.

TC and RWW have a lot of coverage of Twitter. I found RWW's comment on the importance of the open API interesting (10 times more traffic than the website) and the founders recognition and exploitation of its power in allowing the community to find and refine the value of the product. This reminded me of id Software doing the same thing with the Quake computer game (which I experienced first hand in my youth), and the patterning of this successful approach thought the 'web as a platform' crowd. Twitter seems to provide yet another case study of a humble (smart) project, that provides core features and acknowledges both that they may or may not know the best way to use and exploit the product, and that the users defiantly do and will. Whether this was by design or convenience, doesn't matter in the face of wide adoption.

What I don't agree with are ideas of such a service as a platform for serious discourse, or the new tech water cooler. It is clear that the early adopters are annealing the usage of product, helping to define utility beyond the average user case (for example). I don't really get the feedback's of the service yet, I need to play with it some more.

One thought that did occur to me was that of taking selfish usage to the extreme (average user). Something I do a lot of is take notes. I take them down on paper, word documents, google notebook, etc, and eventually I formalise them as technical reports, blog posts, projects, whatever. A useful 'single user centric' application of micro-blogging like Tumblr or Twitter would be for the capturing of semi-formal thought snippets for later application in the highlighted ways. Unlike private automatic-aggregated capture, the micro-blog format would promote better single-user aggregation tools, and permit discrete reuse beyond the single user. The first notions that come to mind are the use of a tag cloud and post classification for improved single-user thought aggregation, per-user/per-day clustering of feeds/posts for promoting discovery of related people, thoughts, and materials, and finally keyword search for good old fashioned broader discovery and potential comment.

This notion of a 'public thought funnel' is an application of micro-blogging I would immedatly find useful for project, research, and blogging related activities. I have only considered note taking, which does not fit into the broader notion of micro-blogging solutions, as such Twitter is a good starting point. Unfortunately the high-frequency of the tweets and selfish nature of what is posted do not provide a natural fit with twitetiquette, and the aggregation tools require third party mashing (surmountable). The power here is the social factor for discovering materials related to and ultimately refining you perspective on your present interest. For example, the amazon approach would be something along the lines of "you may be interested in..." and "people who had thoughts on ... on also notions on ...".