In rapid succession, Fred Wilson and Howard Rheingold used Twitter to communicate articles they had just written on their respective lurve for Techmeme and Twitter.
First Fred, on
A VC blog:
Seeing the big news headlines of the day is important and I love watching them come through in my twitter feed. But seeing the related links and knowing when someone you trust is talking about an issue is the big deal for me in Techmeme. Others do this as well, but to my mind Gabe does it best and that's why Techmeme is a daily read for me.
My view exactly - the killer app for Techmeme is catching all the commentators as well as the A Listers, adds depth and width. The risk Techmeme et al run is that that "Big Story" board becomes too self referential (ie only takes stories from newspapers and A - Listers - see our earlier post on Digg in this respect - and its interesting to see how the Techmeme input streams have concentrated over the last 4 years), but that is mitigated by the commentor model.
Howard
waxes eloquent on Twitter in Smart Mobs, on the benefits of Twitter:
Openness — anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else (unless they restrict access to friends who request access)
Immediacy — it’s a rolling present. You won’t get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
Variety — political or technical argument, gossip, technical info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, repartee, scholarly references
Reciprocity — people give and ask freely for information they need (this doesn’t necessarily scale or last forever, but right now it’s possible to tune your list — and to contribute to it — to include a high degree of reciprocation)
A channel to multiple publics — I’m a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds — and each of the 1300 people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks. I used to just paint. Now I document my painting at each stage of the process, upload pix to flickr or flicks to blip.tv, then drop a tinyurl into Twitter. Who needs a gallery or a distributor?
Asymmetry — very interesting. Very few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
A way to meet new people — it happens every day
A way to find people who share interests — I follow people I don’t know otherwise but who share an interest in educational technology, video, online activism.
A window on what is happening in multiple worlds, some of which I am familiar with, and others that are new to me
Twitter is something I am less certain of - it certainly is a good broadcasting channel for people with big followings, but I would treat with a pinch of salt any of these people's claims on reciprocation. The experience of being on the "receiving end" is all too frequently one of being a consumer - in fact I have turned off quite a few "A Listers" as their post frequency and unwillingness to converse makes their Twitter contributions akin to spam sometimes.
As with any conversation system, it is easier to meet new people than via totally asynch systems, and as with any group network based system it get a wider variety of inputs - so long as you sign up to a wide variety of different people.
One emerging good point about Twitter is that the "River of Drivel" is declining, as people now spend less time letting everyone else know about the banalities of their lives, and start to self-edit for decent content.
The other point that does interest me - and goes back I think to Fred's point on Techmeme - is that there is asymmetry in the following / follower area. I think there are 2 reasons for this:
(i) You follow some people who are interested in the same stuff you are, but the vice is not always versa.
(ii) At present, we all have different rules for following people who follow us, I suspect this drives a lot of the asymmetry.
However, its not as efficient as the older email/groups systems for message persistence (ie if something was said yesterday you're unlikely to go back and read it today) or message management (eg sorting stuff, filtering irrelevant posts) nor does it have the immediacy of real time chat.
What it does have over the Web 1.0 chat systems is the real time view of "friends of friends", and as we've noted before this is the slightly voyeuristic (and thus often unstated) attraction of today's Social Nets. In addition it is a good UM system as it can be sent and received across so many devices.
But I do feel that the endgame for Twitter et al is the blending of the functionality of Groups and email with the voyeurism of FOAF, and thus I am less clear on its future - that and the fact I haven't got a clue how it will make money apart from banner ads on the website.
