Yes! Twitter has singlehandedly changed the game! Before twitter, people didn't communicate online. And you couldn't leak stuff and have it indexed by google.
Of course now everyone, law firms, governments, corporations monitor twitter all day, and base policies and legal precedents on what is trending and what isn't.
It's only a matter of time until we do away with the outdated elections and vote using hashtags.
I have a feeling that a lot of the attention Twitter is getting is because Twitter generates a lot of attention because of the attention they're getting.
In other words, once the novelty wears off, then what?
If Twitter generates 10N units of hype for every N units of substance, it's a huge advantage. If everyone's paying the same cost for their substance, Twitter's getting the highest possible return. It may never live up to the hype, but it'll be more than it would have been without the hype.
"Yes! Twitter has singlehandedly changed the game! Before twitter, people didn't communicate online. And you couldn't leak stuff and have it indexed by google."
No-one's saying that. Twitter has increased the extent and intensity of that communication. And that is incredibly important, especially when you're dealing with PR (and i'm sure that's no the only area).
Well called. Every time I see a story like this (and there have been quite a few of them recently) I always think about how irrelevant the actual specific platform is... The same thing would (and likely did) happen just simply via blogs, wikipedia etc...
I just hope that eventually people stop being so excitable...
Except that it happens a lot quicker than it ever did on Wikipedia or blogs, and reaches a much wider audience now.
Here's the thing people like us tend to forget - the power of Twitter is mobility. Yes, blogs and wikis are powerful publishing platforms for people viewing them on computers.
Twitter is viewable on the most common device in the world, mobile phones. There are very few mobile phones in the world incapable of getting access to Twitter, making it potentially the most widely available social network on the planet.
No computer required.
Add in all that other media democratization stuff, and that's why you get a lot of the hoopla around it you never saw with Wikis and blogs.
What do you get out of snarking towards things that really aren't worth snarking towards? There is no live search as valuable as Twitter's. Google doesn't do live search. Stop making up shit that the article said and then making fun of it, especially when so many TechCrunch articles are saying stupid shit.
It indexes quickly, but that's not live search. I can't pick a name and see what people around the world are saying about it. Google's just never designed anything to do that. Twitter has. So while the Internet's existed for a while, this live feedback has not.
Difference is, twitter is often far less useful, since it doesn't have any notion of trustworthiness (yet). No PageRank. (Although afaik they're working on something like that). Also automated tweets are more of a problem than with Google. (PageRank also does well to get rid of the automated spam)
The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same.
Or it could just be twitter bots doing the retweeting.
The trending tags on twitter just mean lots of people re-tweeted something. It's the equivalent of emails that say you should forward it to 100 friends to get good luck. In this case it was "You should be outraged by this, re-tweet it!". But the effect is the same.
So what's the problem with the link that shows up in the google search? itpints is giving me twitter, boston.com, and the guardian, among others. The feature you seem to like is the ability and lack of self-consciousness for people to say 'something' that Twitter allows, rather than the live search it has. I think if mibbit searched conversations, that would do the same thing and have the possibility to be more valuable.
Live and realtime is instant, as in less than a second or two and at most a minute (in certain contexts).
Friendfeed, for instance, is a live search engine. Update your GChat status or share something on Google Reader. The time to update and be indexed by the main search engine on Friendfeed is seconds.
Of course now everyone, law firms, governments, corporations monitor twitter all day, and base policies and legal precedents on what is trending and what isn't.
It's only a matter of time until we do away with the outdated elections and vote using hashtags.