I understand Twitter now. I get it. And the knowledge, the upsight, the clarity came to me after the nth time of explaining it to all those people who repeatedly asked “but why…?”
Here is the thing you need to understand to get Twitter: Twitter is a search engine. Sure, it is disguised as a social networking site. Sure it is dressed as a stream of seemingly disconnected thoughts strung onto the web by hundreds of thousands of vain and incomprehensibly motivated people. But that is nothing more than a disguise. Twitter is a search engine. And not just a search engine. It is a search engine for up-to-the-minute glimpses into the thoughts, idea, feelings, opinions, and (here’s the important part) observations of a vast and mobile network of human beings.
“And…?” you ask. “So what?”
Let’s step back and look at the history of the increasingly speedy ways we access published, public information. A few generations back, information traveled at the speed of publication. If you wanted to know something you needed to wait until someone put it in a book. Then newspapers. Each morning the overnight news couple be purchased for a few cents, consumed, and discarded. Faster, but still dozens of hours late. Shortly came radio and television and news stories — collected by reporters — could be parceled out a quickly as a reporter could be “on the scene.” Even faster, but still anywhere from a half an hour or more before we get the info, and even then on a news director’s agenda of priority. Google brought us published news stories within minutes, articles and blogs as fast as they could be indexed. And now Twitter has dropped the state of active citizen journalism into the transfer speeds of seconds. On Twitter, information more than a few minutes old is scrolled off the bottom of the page before we get a chance to see it.
“Still…” you argue. “What should I care?”
I’ll use the example from a personal experience from last night. I arrived home from work, looked out onto the Western edge of the city, and saw a huge cloud of gray smoke rising into the sky. I could have waited until the next morning to check the newspaper. I could have waited until five thirty to hope the television or radio news was carrying the story, presuming they judged it news-worthy. I tried searching Google, but for what? “fire edmonton” or “west side edmonton fire” brought me stories about fires that had happened weeks ago, the firing of the local hockey coach, maps to fire safety supply stores, and a link to the fire fighters union home page. That all might be useful, but I still didn’t know what the billowing cloud hanging at the edge of the city might be. So, I searched on Twitter: “YEG fire” (YEG, of course, being the currently fashionable short-code for Edmonton) and was greeted with fifteen results, including (but not limited to) descriptions, photographs, road closure speculations, and local reactions to a grass fire burning on a chunk of nearby First Nations land. Some of those posts were, literally, seconds old, and all were from people who I did not know and could have connected with in no other conceivable way.
Are you still wondering why I call Twitter a search engine?
The fact is this: while much of the crap on Twitter really is spam and emo-txt, the folks out there who are “on the ground” and “on scene” and connected to their mobile data devices are feeding into what is, essentially, a crowd-sourced network of citizen-based micro-journalism. By observing — and then Tweeting — our eyes and phones become nodes of content collection and creation that is up-to-the-second relevant, available, and search-able. Couple that with a collection of “followers” and followees that generally observe information you might be interested in and potential to access a world of news and updates more widely and indulgently is approaching limits only imposed by the speed of download.
Is that useful? Is it sane? This isn’t an arguement either way. I’m just saying I get it now. Got it? @datayodeler
