Stephen Dale's Posterous - Passionate about the social web, collaboration, learning, sharing and trying to make sense of an increasingly complex world.
Posted on June 26, 2009 by Steve Dale in Twitter, Video
Maybe nothing new here for the seasoned Twitter user, but as always, Lee Lefever does a great job in putting across fairly complex concepts in a simple ‘matter of fact’ way. This new video from CommonCraft covers Twitter Search, and for anyone who wants to know more about ‘trends’ and ‘hashtags’ then look no further, all is explained here.
Twitter in Plain English, another great video by Lee LeFever over at the CommonCraft Show. If you’re still not sure what twitter is, or whether it’s for you, this will go some way to answering your questions.
Twitter is the fastest growing social network at the moment and gaining increasing credibility as the ‘killer app’ for 2009. Here Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, speaking at TED, describes how the project got started and how its development is continually shaped by user-driven innovations. From its original concept as a simple messaging tool it is increasingly being used to gather and disseminate information on news-breaking events. Sharing of information through the use of of hashtags is just one of the many user innovations discussed in the video.
The open API has fired the ingenuity of many small start-ups and entrepeneurs, and I see an incresing number of new applications being developed in the coming months (I’ve lost count of the number of ‘top 100 Twitter apps’ tweets from the twitterverse). It’s great to see such a buzz, and think that we’re well into the ‘Early Majority’ phase of the Everett Rogers diffusion model. As more people use it, more innovative ideas are developed with potential benefit for everyone. It will interesting to see how many new Twitter apps get developed this year. I’m guessing several thousand!
I came across this potentially useful compilation of the 100 most popular sites mashing up and remixing Twitter, as measured by the number of bookmarks at Del.icio.us. Thanks to the Museum of Modern Betas Labs for this list.
I’ve just picked up on (yet) another Twitter app called TwitchBoard. Twitchboard watches your Twitter-stream and notices anytime you post a url, and automatically sends the link to your Del.icio.us account. It represents the emerging class of cloud agents that are supposed to help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Others in this genre include Friendfeed, Stumble! and Digg (to name just a few).
I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble! These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ‘semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness (though happy for other to use my Friendfeed if this is what they want to do!)
I accept that our social networking connections are getting ever more dense and the data we’re working with is growing too big for ordinary mortals to handle manually. We need help in organising our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations and any applications or agents that can do some of the heavy data lifting for us while allowing us to focus on the meanings and relevance of content are to be welcomed. But ultimate control of our own personalised social web must – in my opinion – be juts that – a personal choice.
An interesting study by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu over at HP on the social interactions within Twitter. To quote from the preamble:
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared†set of friends and followers.
Key points from the report:
A ‘friend’ is loosley defined as anyone the user has directed at least two posts (tweets) to.
They conjecture that users who receive attention from many people will post more often than users who receive little attention.
Users with more followers and friends will be more active than those with a small number of followers and friends.
There are two different networks: a dense one made up followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of friends.
The number of friends is the actual driver of the user’s activity and not the number of followers.
Users with many followers post updates less frequently than those with few followers.
The full report is available at the HP website link above, or can be downloaded here.
