Twitter’s value

So I’m writing this post so I can start directing people here rather than restate my opinion over and over. My point is: Twitter is immensely valuable. That’s the short version. What follows is the long version.

Today at lunch we talked about Twitter, again. The same argument came up…again. “Twitter is not valuable.” “No one wants to know what I’m eating for lunch.” Okay, probably true, but even if we set aside the fact that someone might actually want to know what you had for lunch, the argument is weak.

First of all, I can make this “useless” argument about any type of software. Watch:

Why do I need Quickbooks to manage my finances? I already know how to add and subtract.

“Wait! That’s not all Quickbooks is good for,” you’re yelling. No kidding, I know.

By taking this minor subset of tweets - seemingly useless bits of information - and extrapolating it across the entire service as proof that it is a worthless flow of information ignores the millions of useful tweets that people publish each day. It’s a straw man. You’re claiming one Tweet sums up the entire service.

It’s not actually that useless

Now: let’s consider that some people you know do care about what you ate for lunch. This is a concept calledambient awareness. People who aren’t necessarily with you every minute of the day end up feeling closer to you because they can passively process details of what you’re doing during the day via short bursts of connected information. Weird, right? No. It’s not weird.

Nellie (my girlfriend) and my mom both read my Twitter stream. When I call them in the evening, even if we haven’t talked for a few days, they are up to date on what is going on in my life (not every detail, but enough that they feel like we’ve been chatting regularly). We can instantly start a conversation without me recounting what I was doing 72 hours ago.

So if we combine that with the fact that I can also maintain dozens of relationships with minimal effort, Twitter is starting to prove pretty useful.

It makes my closest relationships stronger and keeps the looser ones in tact.

We haven’t even gotten to the magical part

Real time search.

Google can’t do this. Twitter can. Imagine this: an earthquake happens in Los Angeles and your uncle lives there. I’m going to know this happened within 30 seconds because I am on Twitter and I will start seeing tweets and retweets about it.

Tyler pointed out at lunch that this is still too long to do anything about it and the USGS still knew first. Okay, true. But they could easily hook up their alert system to Twitter and push out updates on earthquakes over a certain magnitude and every amateur geologist would know just as fast their scientists.

Back to your uncle.

You’re not going to be able to get through to him on his cell phone because anyone with cellular telephone reception is going to be using their phone - the network will be jammed. This happens after an Ohio State football game, it’s definitely going to happen after a major earthquake.

You aren’t going to be able to search Google for more information - they have to index the entire fucking web, Google won’t know about this earthquake for at least 15 to 30 minutes, and even then it’s going to be from news outlets who are still piecing together that information from their sources. The sources who, like your uncle, have no cell reception.

Twitter will give you a real time stream of information from people on the ground. You’ll be able to see the first tweet about the earthquake and get an idea for when it occurred. You’ll be able to see the USGS estimate of the magnitude, the epicenter, and the chance of aftershocks. You can do this right now.

What about your uncle? The best bet is to compose a text message to someone saying he’s okay - it will send as soon as their is room on the network. So as long as he’s doing that, why not make that text message a Twitter update so the whole family, as well as all his friends and colleagues, will know he’s okay. They’d all know at once. They’d even know where he was at the time of the earthquake!

This is where things get interesting

I know what you’re thinking, again: the search on Twitter for a situation like this would be a mess. Thousands of update per minute probably. I agree, it would be a huge mess today.

In 5 years Twitter could easily create portal pages for major events on the fly once the number of tweets related to that topic hits a critical mass. Hell, maybe Twitter will be able to do that next week. If they haven’t thought about this yet, they’re not as smart as I thought. They have the power to give certain Twitter accounts high levels of credibility (USGS, for example) and use these to spread the most relevant information while using some other algorithm to process what user generated content deserves to hit this portal page (e.g. which user got the most @replies on the topic).

Right now you’re willing to pay for information from CNN that takes at least 10 minutes to hit their newsroom - they have to verify sources, find a reporter on the scene, and find someone who can pretend they know what they’re talking about. Even with that bureaucracy CNN is really close to real time.

Twitter is real time. It’s not close, it’s there. Why wouldn’t we be willing to pay for that?