John Bell: Blog
It's like Twitter on Ritalin
Creeping Inevitability: Search Engines Index Tweets
Oct 28th
Microsoft’s search engine Bing has struck a deal with Facebook and the hot micro-messaging service Twitter, a brash attempt to add real-time web updates to its search results in order to make Google look like a lumbering dinosaur.
While we’re still digesting the news of Bing adding Twitter to its search engine, Google has some news of their own: they’re about to do the same exact thing.
Searching Twitter traffic initially seems kind of odd. Then, after a bit of thought, it starts to sound a bit better. Finally, after a lot of reflection, it starts to venture into the realm of the bizarre. Here a quick summary of the stages of acceptance:
1 — Oddity: Why would you want to add Twitter traffic to a search engine? Twitter is all about quick thoughts between you and your ten thousand closest friends. Search engines are supposed to be good at answering questions, and most questions require more than 140 characters to answer completely. (I’ll blithely ignore the question of whether most people doing searches actually care about complete answers.) On first blush, it doesn’t seem like a great match.
2 — Sense: So why would Google and Microsoft be interested in indexing tweets, then? Assuming it’s more than just a PR chasing-buzzwords stunt (not necessarily a good assumption, but…) how would indexing tweets add value to the core of their search businesses? Well, if you treat tweets more as metadata than search data, it starts to make more sense. A good percentage of tweets contain links, and once you filter out spam you’re left with a lot of links that have been determined–by actual humans!–to be interesting. Machine intelligence is great, but humans are still better at figuring out which pages are worthwhile and which aren’t…this is the idea behind Mahalo and the like. If Google and Microsoft can mine that data to improve the quality of their hits, indexing tweets suddenly makes more sense.
3 — Nonsense: But if that’s the goal, why make the tweets themselves searchable? That’s going back to treating the tweets as actual data again, which seems questionable at best. If people start to see their tweets show up in search engines that will change the way Twitter is used. Right now it’s treated as an ephemeral medium; incorrectly in theory, since Twitter is already searchable, but given how well Twitter’s search engine works, it might actually be true. With stories popping up all over the place reminding people to be cautious about what they put on Facebook or MySpace, does Twitter really want to be included in the list of services to fear? I’m sure there are good reasons–probably money–for Twitter to get involved in this deal, but it’s not without risk.
via Bing Partners With Twitter and Facebook for Real-Time Search and BREAKING: Google Announces Search Deal With Twitter.
Creeping Inevitability: The Internet Improves Literacy
Oct 7th
Image by sebilden
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
There’s an interesting piece of research out there called the Stanford Study of Writing that points out that the sky, in fact, is probably not falling when it comes to written language. Despite the occasional puff-piece article describing a 4th grade teacher’s frustration with LOLessays, there is more writing going on now than at any time in the past, and the quality is actually improving with all that practice. Maybe that’s just because the study focused on college freshmen instead of 4th graders, I don’t know.
I wonder, though, if the gains that have been made by forcing socialization to be text-based are temporary. There is a constant push to make computer-mediated communication more audio and video based that ranges from programs like iChat and Skype to YouTube’s user-generated broadcast model. Thoughout the development of the net there has always been this idea that we’re just waiting for the technology to get us to the point where we can use it as a glorified videophone. Text has a lot of advantages, though…maybe video isn’t where we actually want to end up.
Creeping Inevitability: Using Twitter Hashtags, Just Like Usenet!
Sep 16th
Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies.
via HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business.
Not a whole lot to say on the content of the article itself as its pretty basic and self explanatory. What I find interesting, though, is the hashtag idea itself. It breaks the idea of a social network because you’re no longer just broadcasting to your friends, you’re attaching a global tag that can be found anywhere. I wonder what would happen if Usenet were introduced as a new product today? That’s essentially what we’re looking at with tags, except for the character limits.
The fun part about Usenet was that it created community by starting with the tags (group names, as topics, are essentially just tags). Twitter, though, starts with a loose community and has now emergently added tags to it. What do the network maps look like for both services? It seems to me that Usenet was actually a more ‘social’ service in the sense that new communities were formed…users used to be more atomic, whereas now they’re more locked in to their individual, pre-determined circles. Not that Usenet was a utopia of course, even the groups that weren’t overrun by spam, porn, and binaries eventually developed into impenetrable tribal cliques…but that seems to be largely how Twitter is starting out.
Creeping Inevitability: AdSense for Feeds
Sep 4th
Well, the creeping may have been done in the past since the news is pretty old at this point, but it scores high enough on the inevitability scale to make up for it. Google has a service that inserts their AdSense ads into RSS feeds. The program hasn’t exactly taken off, but then again, neither has RSS as a whole, depending on what you think RSS is really for.
RSS is supposed to be about syndication (hence the name). Historically, syndication models haven’t tried to send content direct from the author to the consumer, they just spread content to a number of different outlets that then sell the aggregation of that content (see also: newspapers). People have an idea that RSS is about direct-to-customer distribution, and that has been reinforced by all the newsreader programs that are out there and several years of hype. But it is even more powerful when it’s actually used for syndication: getting my content on another website is more useful to me than getting my content sent directly to the user. If my content is on another site then that is publicity that can draw in completely new audiences. Sending my content to the user is convenient for the user and potentially makes them ‘stickier’, but it also deprives my site of hits and can only reach one person at a time. To put it in MBA terms, RSS is far more powerful when it’s used in a business-to-business model than direct-sale.
I’m a little shaky on the idea of 3rd party ads being inserted in RSS because it isn’t most effective as a direct to the user technology and it makes my feed less attractive to other content providers. I know that, as a developer, if I wanted to use a feed on my site and saw it had ads in it the first thing I would do is filter them out (assuming I didn’t just drop the feed completely). I gain nothing by letting somebody else sell ad space on my site, and as a practical matter, none of my sites are intended to be commercial so ads would just look out of place. If the theory is that AdSense allows content producers to monetize RSS feeds it seems like the market just isn’t there to support it.
