« Assorted links | Main | Sobering Reality »
In praise of Twitter
I am surprised how many people still think Twitter is a fad or a waste of time. I view Twitter -- or some modified future version thereof -- as everlasting. Most of all, the search function helps you tap into a real time conversation on just about any topic you want, including the lecture you just gave. Google is wonderful but it's hard to sort through the mess and figure out where the conversation is now. For sampling opinion on either movies or music, Twitter is essential, or even for researching a forthcoming blog post. Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force. If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.
At least now, the people on Twitter are smarter on average than the people whose choices feed into Google. I am not sure that particular benefit will last forever,
If you can find some people worth following, so much the better. But the value of the medium doesn't much depend on what they had for breakfast.
Many people use Twitter to ask for advice; I have yet to learn how to do this well.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 28, 2009 at 01:25 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I find the opinions expressed of less value than old AOL chatrooms.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Sep 28, 2009 1:44:06 PM
It may not be that you don't know how to ask for advice well... it may just be that you don't have as many friends in your social circle using Twitter. Younger or more techset people would get much better responses of advice.
The opinions of our dear friends are still a lot more trustworthy and weighty than those of people we just know through the internet... but that'll change with time.
Posted by: newfakename at Sep 28, 2009 1:44:36 PM
It just seems like a lot of tweet for twat.
Posted by: Rama at Sep 28, 2009 2:58:15 PM
Twitter will be much larger with the advent of widespread voice recognition technology.
Posted by: Mike S at Sep 28, 2009 3:01:35 PM
Personally, I dislike twitter because it becomes yet another thing that requires upkeep and saps attention from other projects.
There are only so many hours in the day, and I find social networks/e-mail/blackberries jarring and distracting. It outweighs any benefits I can imagine.
Posted by: bunchoftwits at Sep 28, 2009 3:04:51 PM
Twitter will be much larger with the advent of widespread voice recognition technology.
Posted by: Mike S at Sep 28, 2009 3:04:55 PM
I would concede the possibility that Twitter could be useful, but in practice it doesn't seem to very much, and seems to mostly be a distraction, as some others have noted. For a well-written anti-Twitter piece, see Why I Don't Use Twitter:
"What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves."
Posted by: Jake at Sep 28, 2009 3:18:34 PM
People bash that which they do not understand.
Posted by: Scott at Sep 28, 2009 3:22:04 PM
Tyler,
I just saw Jerry Seinfeld on Saturday night performing his new stand-up routine. He has some great jokes about twitter, dialogue and learning. I would be interested to see how you would respond to his social critique (through observational satire). The audience appreciated his critique, but of course that could be just caught up in his delivery. He also made fun of Blackberry, and Starbucks.
Pete
Posted by: Peter Boettke at Sep 28, 2009 3:22:40 PM
Do you use the advice you ask for in the real world?
Posted by: MW Keller at Sep 28, 2009 3:27:37 PM
To follow up on the earlier post on Twitter usernames...if you want economics-related Tweeters, there a directory to be found here:
http://wefollow.com/twitter/economics
It's not exhaustive, since users have to submit themselves, but it's interesting to poke through. It's also organized in descending order of number of followers so you don't have to search through a billion people with 5 followers each.
Posted by: Economists Do It With Models at Sep 28, 2009 3:27:56 PM
On the continuum between web search and Twitter search, don't forget Google News Search and Google Blog Search.
Posted by: Brian Holtz at Sep 28, 2009 3:28:38 PM
For asking for advice, I am actually more in favor of Aardvark -- http://vark.com -- I seem to get good, fairly accurate advice
Posted by: Carson Chittom at Sep 28, 2009 3:29:50 PM
Alot of the criticism of Twitter is related to the fact that it's a media and investor darling, hailed as a huge success and the NextBigThing, but doesn't actually make any money, and doesn't seem to have any prospects for doing so.
At least, that's MY criticism of it.
Posted by: hegemonicon at Sep 28, 2009 3:32:28 PM
P.S. Last week I had to find guitar picks at 10pm on a Friday. (Apparently it's suboptimal to play a guitar with a quarter.) No amount of Googling could help me, so I posed the challenge to the Twitter universe. It took about 30 seconds to get a satisfactory response, and the response came from someone who I don't really know as a friend. (In other words, it's not like I owuld have called him and asked.) I do acknowledge that this is not what Twitter is most often used for, but it's an helpful system to have when you need it.
(In case you're curious, random music supplies can be found 24/7 at the convenience store across the street from Berklee College of Music in Boston. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, and I consider this a big win for free-market capitalism.)
Posted by: Economists Do It With Models at Sep 28, 2009 3:35:49 PM
"Google Blog Search"
Dominated by spam blogs.
Technorati's blog search seems to bring up fewer spam blogs, I think they must be choosier about who they let in to their directory.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Sep 28, 2009 5:49:25 PM
One other great use of Twitter: at conferences. Few academic conferences have attendees on laptops, but at a conference on enterprise uses of virtual worlds, almost everyone had a laptop open. Twitter allowed for those present to keep a running commentary and discussion just by including the hastag #3DTLC.
The twitter stream was used by the moderator (for Q&A), and also followed by people in the industry who couldn't attend. It sounds rude to have people typing while the speakers were talking, but it actually worked out quite well. Everyone was engaged with the material covered in the session, if not with what a speaker was saying at that moment.
Posted by: Robert Bloomfield at Sep 28, 2009 6:30:32 PM
As someone who is naturally prolix, I find the 140 character limit to tweets good discipline. Sadly, I have not yet seen any obvious carry over to my unrestricted blog entries.
I am not sure this therapeutic function will be useful for many people, but there it is.
Posted by: The Epicurean Dealmaker at Sep 28, 2009 7:15:57 PM
I suppose Twitter is useful for sampling public opinion, if the only opinions you are interested in are the opinions of twits.
Posted by: King Cynic at Sep 28, 2009 7:20:23 PM
"Everlasting", agreed. Technical quaintness aside, Twitter is the most recent step on the inevitable road to mass mind to mind radio communications. All who fall by the wayside will miss the emergent event that follows. Get your tickets now!
Posted by: Jimmy at Sep 28, 2009 7:43:17 PM
"What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves."
In the second case ("abridged"), those statements often ARE given the space they deserve. Twitter is incredibly useful for making a quick description of a link or blog post and then providing said link/post (which expounds upon that statement.) It's not necessarily used to convey a full idea, but rather to advertise an idea. Kind of like...a super mini paper abstract, but less academic (obviously.)
Posted by: Liz at Sep 28, 2009 8:07:41 PM
Maybe the concept is nice, but the implementation is not. It is downright embarrassing how often Twitter is not accessible, and most of Twitter's features barely works. In fact, the set of features is so small that without external tools, using Twitter is a real pain.
Just an example: Imagine somebody is tweeting various funny ideas, but he's also tweeting his song playlist every five minutes. (This really happened.) The only solution to get rid of these song tweets is: Using an external tool to filter them.
Posted by: IWantCookieNow at Sep 28, 2009 8:42:18 PM
If Twitter was a public company I would feel confident shorting it.
Posted by: Portal Fan at Sep 28, 2009 8:46:55 PM
Oh, and I forgot to mention, if you're really interested and watching a conversation unfold, you should check out TweetDeck. I just started using it and it's not bad; I get my alerts right away. You can also use it on the iPhone, but I have no experience with the app on that.
Posted by: Liz at Sep 28, 2009 10:47:51 PM
Twitter's search capability is what makes it. I've already used it for so many kinds of informal sociological mining.... I searched a festival's name throughout the day and people told me who was playing when. I searched "Snow Leopard" on the launch day of the OS to see how people's installs were going. I searched "Facebook app" on a day mine was crashing and discovered that it was widespread, not just me.
The fundamental axiom of markets is that the sum of individual knowledges is greater than any single entity could keep track of (or something like that, perhaps expressed more eloquently). Point being, there is an invaluable potential in the ability to instantly collect individual knowledges about a certain topic or event that would previously have been scattered and isolated.
Posted by: Josh at Sep 28, 2009 11:40:56 PM
