Twitter: Semantically Geolocative
Just got back to this NMK article on Twitter. It’s something I watch with interest and don’t participate in. At 27, as a marginal/specialised geek, I find myself in a rather annoying generation: A bunch of my friends are just a little too old and a little too conservative to dabble in new web stuff, still being firmly stuck in desktop applications, email and the page metaphor.
The extent to which Twitter yields noise over signal entirely depends on the number of friends you add to your network. While the initial reaction to the system might be to immediately add dozens of semi-strangers to your network in a MySpace-style popularity contest, the results of doing that aren’t likely to be especially rewarding. Bobby Johnson of the Guardian says in reply to his colleague that: “Point is, you *choose* who you listen to. Choose well, and you’ll be fine, it could be even be enlightening. Choose badly, and it’s like a bunch of monkeys jabbering away.”
If the Twitter messages you receive are boring and lack value, then you’ve probably made more friends than you should have, and with the wrong people. Pick the people who you might phone to ask ‘what are you doing now?’ would be the extension of this argument.
Twitter is also becoming a way to deliver services. BBC Headlines, Tube Services, events and software companies all exist as channels on the service providing a way to deliver news updates in an extremely flexible, inexpensive way to multiple channels and potentially wide audiences. As email seems to become increasingly unreliable and interruptive, a Twitter channel delivers the message at the audience’s convenience and without spam.
A part of the value I’ve seen mentioned of Twitter is that it is geolocative. Theoretically, this could be replaced with GPS, Arphids, etc. However, that would be syntactically geolocative. Twitter is semantically locative. This dichotomy mirrors the approaches of Google and Yahoo: Net as machines versus net as people.
The syntactic approach to announcing your location gives the same very precise answer to the same question every time. The semantic approach can be laden with meaning, such a why a person is wherever, what that place is doing to them, what’s going on there, etc.
To put it another way: GPS doesn’t foment parties :)
I also saw today on Tom Armitage’s blog that the Jodrell Bank telescopes are now reporting their current observations on Twitter. It’s… cutely utilitarian.
May 24th, 2007 at 2:44
Count me as one of the ones who’s too old, cliched and flaccid to pinch out a significant enough fart to hang with all of this stuff you talk about. ;) I guess since I work a 7-3:30 and have a fairly standard routine that drains my vitals more as time passes it’s difficult to even contemplate how much energy is necessary to dive into what you do.
May 24th, 2007 at 16:32
Keeping up is easier with a job connected to media ;)
I suppose there’s a fair amount of risk in anything new: why learn/adapt to something if it’s only going to be a contender until the next shiny thing comes along in a few months?
I had to teach my dad to cut and paste quite a few times, but he heaved himself over a bump eventually and became PC savvy enough to keep it virus free. That was only really when he bought a digital camera and found loads of stuff online to do with his interests; before that PCs were pretty irrelevant.