Maybe too much of world cup tweets.
so twitter’s got loose motions today, ha?
Manoj Damodaran
manojd
Category: Microblogs
My online life revolves around Twitter. I get all my industry information from there. I connect with so many of friends via Twitter. I connect with other industry professionals on Twitter. I get my breaking news from there. But what Twitter hadn’t been for me till now is a centralised and organised source of news not unlike a magazine or blog. So, it was a pleasant surprise when I saw the dashboard for the football world cup on Twitter.
First impression: Looks slick. Very clean UI as usual. Woohooo!
On deeper testing: I can only think of one thing. What am I supposed to do now?
It does not solve any purpose for me. The tweets that are whooshing past in the activity stream are either very irrelevant or they move past too fast. How are they selected? On the basis of most no. of RTs? Or most no. of followers of the original source?
Well, whatever it is, it is clearly failing. There are some tweets which are not about the world cup and some which are not in English (how hard can transliteration be, man?) :
A decent feature seems to be the Top Staff Picks which is a collection of the best Twitter handles (experts and players) on the topic.
The individual page for each page sounded promising but turned out to be a bigger disappointment, full of bots, hashtags and random information.
What is happening here?
The current model is way too reliant on trusting individual users and then streaming their tweets to the visitors. What Twitter needs here is a better search based UI which is good in its algorithms and measures influence properly.
Otherwise, I am afraid Twitter will always be what it is in this dashboard: Noise.
This recent article by the talented Daniel Tenner (CTO at Woobius) got me all charged up, sometimes shaking my head at the writer and sometimes nodding in agreement. Here’s what I think of the real time web Mr. Daniel; challenges, pros and cons all wrapped up in one:
Definition
A fundamental shift in the way information is spread and shared on the internet. But as Mr. Daniel says – “At its core, the concept of “real-time web” must be about the immediacy of information flow” Well put, Sir!
Why do we need it?
Human beings are an impatient species. And as the reference article says everyone has 24 hours, no less no more. All the more reason for us being impatient, right? Personally, I want to grab every piece of information, as soon as I can, before everyone else.
Some important things to be noticed here are that I would like the information to be relevant to me interest, it shouldn’t interfere with my daily work and I should be able to quickly assimilate the whole story from snippets of real time data flowing around me.
Push or pull?
The most important point that Mr. Daniel stresses is the fact that real time web is forcing info on users and thus interrupting productivity. What is being forgotten while making this remark is the fact that the 2.0 web and all its real time characteristics with it (web 3.0?) are permission based ones. No one pushes the information on to the audience in the new media, the audience goes to the information portals and seek it out themselves.
Challenges
The challenge of mining real time data and converting it into meaningful information will be the breakthrough of the century. And we are slowly moving towards that goal, one step at a time.
