Will Twitter Go Mainstream?

With the arrival of my ancient PhD supervisor on Twitter, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on how mainstream Twitter could become. Whilst the amount of Twitter discussion on the blogosphere and the number of sites that are based on Twitter would seem to indicate a burgeoning community, my experience is that it hasn't moved beyond the web 2.0 geeks (which is also the conclusion of Compete.com too). Personally I am still failing to see a killer Twitter application, maybe that's because there just isn't one, or maybe we need to see the twitterings seperated from Twitter.

Twitter has been getting some good publicity recently as a news source, primarily because of the speed with which twitterings were appearing about the China eathquake but as ReadWriteWeb point out, Twitter is in no way a substitution for the traditional media. Earthquakes and other mass-news events are really the only occassions Twitter is likely to focus on one story: Millions of people on the ground feel an earthquake and it unsurprisingly makes a lot of noise, if I twittered about a murder outside my window it would barely make a ripple. For all the good publicity, news will not make Twitter mainstream.

Although I am not a big fan of Twitter, I do see some potential in micro-blogging. Not as a seperate service, but rather as an integrated part of people's web presence. There are occassions when 140 characters would suffice for the odd musing I may be having, or for a link I wish to comment on, but I don't necessarily want to use a specific site for this microblogging. It would be nice if I could microblog on my own site, follow other microblogs on my own site, and possibly even converse through microblog posts on my own site. I want to keep my own content. Twitter could provide a place for those without their own web space, as well as a central directory of microblogs. Maybe then microblogging could go mainstream.

nb. Before anyone says 'they're called tweets not twitterings', I personally think that 'twittering' better reflects the continuous-droning-pointlessness of so many of the so-called 'tweets'.

Local Election Day! A tale of two cities

Democracy has always struck me as a rather stupid idea; I no more want the general public making decisions about the most appropriate economic strategy, or the merits of joining the Euro, than I would want them performing open-heart surgery. Nonetheless, democracy is what we have, and luckily the more objectionable views of the puppet-majority manage to get watered-down by the representational aspect of our democratic system (God help us if technology ever gives us direct democracy). However, in spite of my dislike of democracy, I love the election coverage. The day after general elections are always a write-off, whilst even the local elections are liable to get me watching until 3 or 4 in the morning. Whilst the BBC provides great coverage, the web provides us with the opportunity for enhanced electoral coverage at the local level.

Coverage of the local elections tends to report the overall results of the council, rather than the results of individual wards; the simplicity of video streaming means that the web can provide that coverage. Being able to view the local council results would hopefully encourage people to think about local policies and engage with the councillors on issues that matter; too often local issues are over shadowed by national issues and protest votes. I was pleased to note yesterday that Birmingham council will be streaming the results live, although as always Wolverhampton is the poor relation: "Results will be posted on this website on 2 May". Not even a live posting as the results come in! As on-the-cheap streaming could be accomplished through qik and an N95, or results published as they happen via something as simple as Twitter, you really have to despair at Wolverhampton's lack of effort.

Just remember, voting for the BNP is not a "protest vote", it is vote for fear, ignorance and fascism, not the sort of things that make Britain Great.

Open Data - post 2

I posted earlier about open data, and included an example of the sort of network diagram Many Eyes allows. Following this, I decided to see the sort of things it could do with some text, and uploaded some data I had collected from Twitter back in February.

Not a particularly great set of data, but something interesting to play about with, with word frequency clouds:

And a word tree:

I will definatley be keeping the potential of these tools in mind as I collect bits and pieces from the web in the weeks ahead.

Twittering Egotists, Spammers, Reciprocators

Despite only ever posting two tweets, I have nonetheless found myself with seven followers. Do these followers really care what I have to say? Of course not; I doubt there are seven people in the whole world who care what I have to say. Instead, as I have no 'friends'(whichever meaning of the word you take) on twitter, my followers (and probably the majority) fall into three categories: Reciprocators, Spammers, Egotists.

Reciprocator: Those who follow you because you are following them.
Spammers: Those who follow you in the hope that you not only follow them, but buy whatever it is they are selling.
Egotists: That special sort of individual who is trying to sell themselves.

As with any classification system the boundaries are not particularly clear. A Reciprocator (mine is the infamous Scoble) may actually be an Egotist where you have got in there first. On the other hand I am not sure whether my latest follower (Jason Calacanis) would be best described as a Spammer or an Egotist. Is he selling himself or his company? Whilst I must admit I admired the ingenuity of the first Spammer I came across, it is a ploy that only worked the once, and now I don't always look to see who my new followers are.

Digging, Reddit-ing, Stumbling, and Tweeting this particular post, should satisfy my own egotism without following 16,000 others on Twitter.

What's Everyone Twittering About?

Whilst I am not personally a big Twitter fan, I am interested in discovering what people are Twittering about and how the posts differ from other forms of communication. With such thoughts in mind I started my first tentative Twitter steps this evening.

Adapting an open source RSS feed reader I set about downloading the public timeline (http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.rss), for which Twitter has no restrictions on the number of requests that you can send. Whilst the original plan was to download an hour's worth of data for a small pilot investigation, unfortunately I had to stop after about 45 minutes when I received Http 502 Status Code ('Twitter is down or being upgraded' rather than 'exceeded the rate limit').

The first post that was downloaded was numbered 723435732 (just after 7pm), whilst the last was numbered 723547592 (about 45 mins later). As the last number seems to be superfluous, there were a potential 11,186 posts to be downloaded, of which 6,422 posts were successfully downloaded. Many of the 'missing posts' will have been private, whilst others may have been missed due to delays in sending and receiving the RSS feed.

I have not, as yet, had time to do anything more interesting with the collected data than look at the frequency of terms using Text-Stat. So in true informetric style, here is the log-log graph of word frequency in rank-order:

Most noticeable in the frequency data is:
-Over 58% of twitter links are via tinyurl: 'http' appeared 588 times, 'tinyurl' 343 times.
-Twitterers are generally a polite bunch. The more 'popular' swear-words don't appear that often, in 6,422 posts: shit (11), fuck (6), & cunt (zero). Admittedly a large proportion are not in English and the are a few variations on the words, but nonetheless I probably swear more than all these people in my average email.
-And they are not celeb-obsessed: Britney only gets three mentions, whilst there is no word on mention of Winehouse. Instead they err on the side of the geek: windows (19), Mac (25), iPhone (20).

As the analysis shows, these are early (childish) days. But hopefully I will have the opportunity, later in the week, to create the tools to investigate the data more thoroughly before downloading a larger sample.

Poking about on Twitter: As is Scoble

Whilst Twitter (et al.) has its place, I have yet to see a role for it in my life. However, as a researcher into all things Web 2.0 I decided to dig a little deeper, move beyond the signing on process, and have a look at what everyone else is talking about. Unsurprisingly, with my particular research interests, I added the likes of Scoble and Winer (manly due to the promise of anti-hilary rants). Approximate time it took Scoble to start following my feed: 1 min. Surely he either has the process automated, or the man is a machince.

How can you meaningfully follow 6,971 Twitter-ers? And would it actually be useful? Or is it all for show and he has a secret account with those he really follows?

UK limited to receiving 250 twittering texts

I was shocked when I first read that Americans pay to receive texts the other week, although it has helped to explain why there have been many US-based sites for sending texts from the web, and few based in the UK. It is claimed that because of this Twitter is reducing the number of SMS messages that are Twittered to your phone to 250 in the.

However, whilst it is not the norm in the UK, it is possible to subscribe to certain services that will charge you every time you receive a text at a higher rate(e.g., certain news and horoscope services). Rather than limiting the Twitter service to a fixed number it would be better if you could get the first 250 free, and then if you wanted you could allow messages from a specific sub-set of feeds to continue being sent at a premium rate. Whilst you may not be willing to get the headlines from the Beeb at 25p a shot, you may happily pay to find out what your mates are up to.