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Scoble and Twitter in the Borneo Bulletin: the future of news?

Wow - a funny occurence, in light of my growing interest in Twitter of late. I was flipping through the Borneo Bulletin at a cafe in Brunei, and amidst the coverage of the catastrophic earthquake in China, stumbled across coverage of none other than the tech blogosphere’s two darlings: Robert “Andrew” Scoble and Twitter. It looks like a wire excerpt, but still fascinating to see in a tabloid format local Borneo paper…

“Twitters Beat Media in Reporting China Quake (Sanfrancisco, AFP): The world had real-time new about China’s massive earthquake as victim’s dashed out Twitter text messages while it took place, in what was being touted Tuesday as microblogging outshining mainstream news. As the earth shook with tragic consequences, people in parts of China that felt the quake used their mobiles to send terse messages provided by the San Fransisco-based Twitter Inc. News of the deadly catastrophe reached Twitter devotees such as blogger Andrew Scoble in San Francisco even before the massive tremblor, which killed more than 12,000 people in Szechuan province, was reported by news organizations and the earthquake-tracking US Geological Survey. “Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake while it was going on!” Scoble wrote in his popular Scobleizer blog. Twitters are abbreviated text messages that can be instantly posted on online bulletin boards and personal websites and sent to the mobile phones of selected friends.

For me, this post, found in this paper in this place highlights the parallelism rapidly emerging between the blogosphere and mainstream media: for breaking news and on the ground reporting, blogs and micro-blogging services are rapidly becoming the global-standard destination. Connecting web users and mobile users, first world and third, journalism with ad-hoc/off-the-cuff/street-cred reporting, the net is the first place more and more are turning - in the developing world, its setting a precedent that will shape the evolution of nascent news/communications/entertainment industries. The mainstream media is assuming a new shape as well: in depth coverage, background research, and historical context are services that are more easily provided by a news organization…

Anyway, in a nutshell: blogs/microblogging provides instant, unfiltered news; MSM provides a longer term perspective on a given story. Both have a place, neither is mutually exclusive. Its late, I’m tired, I hope this point is coming across - more on this later.

scoble twitter

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Track your Memes on Twitter!

Here’s some fun news: this afternoon I decided to figure out how to use the Twitter API, which is decidedly simple and functional. Anyway, if you’re a twitterholic, you can now get your dose of technology, automotive, environmental, or sun microsystems news via twitter - each of my memetrackers now merrily posts all of its front-page updates to a twitter account for your enjoyment!

TechWatching (tech and web): http://twitter.com/techwatching
SunMeme (sun micro): http://twitter.com/sunmeme
WheelScore (automotive): http://twitter.com/wheelscore
PlasticBasket (environmental): http://twitter.com/plasticbasket.net

On a sidenote, I’m appreciating the utility of Twitter more and more every day as a broadcast medium and selective news filter.

memetrackers, plasticbasket, sunmeme, techwatching, twitter wheelscore

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Tweetmeme DOA?

I’m fitting this in while visiting family, so this post is late, and likely short on insight - that being said, after pouring hours and days and weeks of hobby-time in building a relevancy algorithm (see: techwatching) I feel the need to comment on Tweetmeme, which launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Divining interesting-ness from a content pool depends on a number of bits of information that provide relationships between disparate bits, allowing them to be linked together into a topical unit (i.e.: a cluster of stories all discussing a certain topic) that makes sense. Over on TechWatching, I use four things to create topical units (”story clusters”):

1. forward links - the pages that a blog post links to
2. back links - the pages that link to a given page
3. keywords - the meaningful words that posts share - i.e.: proper names like “Google” are counted, conjunctions like “and” are not
4. time - content must have some chronological proximity to be considered “linked” - i.e.: an article about Google from two months ago is less likely to be discussing the topic-du-jour than an article from two hours ago

Now, Techwatching indexes blog posts - which are characterized by all of the above four points - i.e.: blogs are noted for linking, posting quickly (chronological proximity), using relevant keywords and so on. My question about Tweetmeme is whether Twitter provides the same fertile breeding ground of memetic confluence as blogs… Personally, I think its ephermal nature and limited length works against it. Aside from the occaisonal exceptions (Apple events, the socal fires), Twitter seems to be pretty scattershot - and those special situations seem to me to be better served by something more explicit, like hashtags.

techmeme, techwatching, tweetmeme twitter

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Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

hashtags, semantic, tagging, tags twitter

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Twitter Quibble

Why do so many people maintain a Twitter account to which all they ever post are their blog’s headlines and TinyURL links back to posts? You know who you are. Am I missing something here?

blogs, quibble twitter

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Twitter Spamming

I saw some referral traffic from Twitter this AM, and went over to see who had Twittered me. At which point, I realized (a) there doesn’t appear to be a way to search Twitter, and (b) Twitter is vulnerable to spamming. Here’s the frontpage that I saw:

Note the “usaid3” posts about Sony buying Microsoft. Breaking news. Can’t see what’s behind the TinyURL. Tempted to click? Well usaid3 wants you to click really bad - its a script that’s bombing the twitter front page, posting the same thing every few seconds:

In the time that it took to write the post, the Twitter being send by usaid3 switched to “Twitter TV” - pointing to the same TinyURL.

Oddly, that TinyURL goes to a defunct MySpace page. Confused? Me too. Looks like a spambot that outlived the page it was trying to drive traffic too.

Of course, I don’t imagine too many regular Twitter users are hanging out on the front page. That being said, it still seems odd that Twitter doesn’t appear to have any anti-spam measures in place - I can’t imagine a much clearer spam flag than the same thing being posted from the same account identically hundreds of times every few minutes.

Perhaps Twitter should write a hook into Akismet, or validate posting IP’s against http:BL. Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

myspace, spam twitter

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Kevin Rose jumps on the Twitter-wagon

Om shares the non-news that Digg’s Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka are working on an IM-like Twitter competitor. Andy Beal, Rex Dixon, and Paris Lemon speculate further.

Speculative options include:

1. Digg-ified Twitter Clone: Voteable twitter posts, sounds a lot like Guy K.’s Truemors. Plus, why not just build an IM submit pipeline for Digg itself, like Meshly uses?
2. An actual IM competitor (as opposed to a twitter competitor): I have no idea what this might entail; IM is a weird anti-hype vortex - its huge, used by millions, monetizeable, etc., but by-and-large buzz & hype free. The digg-squad could be the crew to sex-up IM again - they’ve got the promo chutzpah and better-mousetrap ideas to make it happen.

Will it be one or the other or neither? Who knows! Hopefully whatever it is is a separate corporate entity so that it doesn’t get pulled down when the DMCA grim reaper comes knocking for Digg.

aim, digg, im, instantmessaging, jaiku, kevinrose, livemessenger, truemors twitter

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Meshly - diggable IM bookmarking

RedWriteWeb points us to Meshly: an IM bookmarking service that takes del.icio.us, adds digg-style voting, and uses IM as a front end. Bookmarking on Meshly works by IM’ing a Meshly chatbot (AIM: meshly, GTalk: meshly@gmail.com, MSN: meshly@meshly.com), and entering simple commands to initiate a stream of prompts:

Pages that you bookmark through IM show up on the Meshly site in your user profile, and can be voted on my Meshly.com visitors:

Even the signup process takes place via IM:

The bottom line is that Meshly provides a well executed digg/delicious alternative with a gimmicky-yet-valuable twist in the use of IM as primary UI. Its fast and easy to use, and if you’re a regular IM user (I hit meebo a few times a day), it fits into your regular workflow nicely, and is about 10x faster to submit to than Digg. The MyMesh tab on the website (once you’re signed in) provides channel and tag indexing for your bookmarks, making for a similarly powerful user-experience as that provided by del.icio.us.

Josh Catone rightly suggested that the concept of channels and tags overlapped and created redundancy. I can see what Meshly intends (user created content areas), but along Josh’s thinking, I’m not sure why tags can’t form the basis of this. Del.icio.us makes a single layer folksonomy easy-to-use, so can Meshly. Josh also suggests adding a del.icio.us-style bookmarklet to enable people to use Meshly without IM; while it sounds good conceptually, doing so might dilute Meshly’s source of differentiation - I’m not sure if utility outweighs branding or not here. Meshly could also use a web sign-up - presently registration is only through IM client.

One other question I had was Meshly’s business model: If much of the Meshly activity takes place via IM, is their ability to advertise and make money compromised? I’d be curious to see a by-activity breakdown on del.icio.us traffic and see how big a slice Meshly is missing by going IM.

In any event, Meshly is hitting a chord and getting good coverage around the web. I think Twitter has really primed people for more in the way of “instant” services… prepare for more to come down the pipeline.

1. Rexduffdixon suggests that with email overload becoming a hotbutton issue, IM may be ready to get more attention as an alternate transaction channel.
2. Libraryclips suggests also taking another look at clipmarks, spurl, and netvouz.
3. 901am compares Meshly to enabling digg-voting on every inane Twitter that you put out - personally, I don’t think the comparison applies, as Meshly is (for now) more bookmarking than just Twitter-babbling.
4. Muhammad Saleem sums up Meshly as “not greater than the sum of its parts” - suggesting that all of its functionality is available elsewhere in more established services already.

aim, bookmarking, clipmarks, delicious, digg, dodgeball, gtalk, im, meshly, msn twitter

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Exodus from DodgeBall - Google’s Growth Working Against Innovation?

Om covers the departure of DodgeBall’s founder and first employee from the Googleplex. Of particular note is the comment in the departing team member’s announcement:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Sheesh - fighting for engineering resources. Sounds like something more likely to happen at IBM, Microsoft, EDS, or some other lumbering 1.0 titan - not everyone’s favorite wizard of innovation. This is where I question Google’s scattershot approach to prioritization - why does Google pump resources into something like Google Base, Google Bus Routes, or Froogle, while viable acquisitions die on the vine?

If you’re losing presumably valuable people (you paid for them) and flatlining acquisitions (that were previously media superstars), its time to re-visit your internal prioritizion system.

EDIT: Scoble makes a parallel point - that Google has gotten “big company disease” and is no longer able to understand/leverage/utilize things below a certain scale threshold. This is similar to what I mentioned above - Google’s prioritization is skewing away from small/nimble/innovative towards large/slow/monolithic.

dodgeball, google, jaiku, sms, techfold twitter

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