This link has been bookmarked by 32 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Jun 2009, by Will Richardson.
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01 Sep 09
Benedicte CaginOnce just a fad, Twitter is developing into a powerful form of communication. What its growth says about us — and the future of American innovation
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22 Aug 09
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05 Aug 09
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17 Jul 09
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17 Jun 09
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14 Jun 09
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anything that lives behind a UR
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12 Jun 09
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The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones
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As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers
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user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page
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If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education
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The average Twitter profile
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a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities
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mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed
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In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable
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But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong
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We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors
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via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation
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employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL
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This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.
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Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching
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Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority
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That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web
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Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google
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John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web
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If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.
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Because Twitter's co-founders — Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey — are such a central-casting vision of start-up savvy
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much of the media interest in Twitter has focused on the company
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the much more significant point about the Twitter platform: the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.
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This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself.
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The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag" — #hackedu or #inauguration — was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol)
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The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year
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Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event — political debates or Lost episodes — has become a central part of the Twitter experience.
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One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties
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A service called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas, tracking references to flu and fever
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Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor.
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the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade.
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every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years:
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News and opinion.
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the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow
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a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network
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your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily
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As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search
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looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google
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if you're looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.
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Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood
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Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers
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But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers
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a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged
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how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be
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Not all these developments will be entirely positive
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But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up
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you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date
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Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives
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When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s
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America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii
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But what actually happened to American innovation during that period?
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11 Jun 09
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09 Jun 09
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yizheng zhouOnce just a fad, Twitter is developing into a powerful form of communication. What its growth says about us — and the future of American innovation
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08 Jun 09
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Andrew LongAuthor Steven Johnson's view on Twitter, particularly how the service is evolving thanks to the community (c/o MKP). BTW: This is the print version.
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07 Jun 09
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06 Jun 09
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05 Jun 09
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The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It's as if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising.
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But there are hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value in these innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use.
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"ambient awareness"
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04 Jun 09
allgood2 Allgood
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal." -
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Taryn .Time magazine really needed for *SBJ* to pen this turd? Something stinks about this Twitter-fandom. Haven't put my finger on it yet.
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Will RichardsonPut those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.
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Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.
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