Saturday, September 27, 2008

Twitter: Thought Bubbles Bursting into Messy Spaghetti

I've been on Twitter now for the past two weeks and here are my initial, unvarnished, naive impressions:

* I did not "get" that Twitter Search is deliberately bad and the whole point is to slog through the profiles of virtual passer-bys
* The effect of the speech bubble ambience is directly from the film Wings of Desire
* I am still hopeful that IM communion can happen but refuse to tether a Blackberry

On point 3 I tried the following statement:

Boston MA "days ago"

The parenthetical was designed to filter out casual or dormant twits and attract the more Type A participants. It doesn't work. So I qualified the location with...

consulting
jobs
investigations

Verdict: stemming is turned on.

One of my BU students is looking for a local handwriting analyst. I'm too focused on the 50 Boston area strangers I'm now "following" to even attempt a Googling of her request.

Even if the bubbles don't expand to include an actual dialog I can see the value around the patterns:

* Over-representations of non-Geek networkers (especially PR)
* Ability to store strings-of-consciousness for reuse in some future recipe
* Shear gestalt of surveilling the mental maelstroms of the twittering mobs on a "want" to know basis

Need-to-know-basis need not apply.

2 comments:

sadalit said...

When you say that Twitter search is "deliberately" bad, is there some mission (or anti-mission) statement from the folks somewhere about that? I'm very frustrated by it, and it seems unacceptable that a web app in 2008 doesn't have a useful search over content.

Marc Solomon said...

My guess is that search invites too much visibility into the twittersphere. It's interesting how quickly earlier social nets taught us to expect at least a piece of database access to go with our individual contributions to it.

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