Tim O’Reilly saying interesting things about Twitter:

In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn’t do, and the way that its core services aren’t bound to a particular interface.

It strikes me that many of the programs that become enduring platforms have these same characteristics. Few people use the old TCP/IP-based applications like telnet and ftp any more, but TCP/IP itself is ubiquitous. No one uses the mail program any more, but all of us still use email. No one uses Tim Berners-Lee’s original web server and browser any more. Both were superseded by independent programs that used his core innovations: http and html.

What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database. And that’s the old secret of Web 2.0, Data is the Intel Inside. That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

O’Reilly also talks about how a large number of Twitter users use Twitter to update their Facebook status, which is exactly what I do. In fact, if you just look at my Facebook page, it looks like I’m fairly active on Facebook, until you realize that almost every thing in my profile is pulled into Facebook from other services like Twitter or this blog (via Wordbook). Thanks to the demise of Scrabulous, I pretty much only go to Facebook any more to approve friend requests and respond to people who comment on my Twitter status inside of Facebook instead of in Twitter.

I’m not sure what a Facebook that tried to untie its data from its interface like O’Reilly recommends would look like though. But an even more interesting thought experiment is this: what about a Facebook-like social networking system that works like laconi.ca, a Twitter-like piece of software where the data itself is decentralized on individual instances of the software but where the social networking & communication can occur across each instance. This gets around both the centralization of interface, but also the centralization of data, which is really a much bigger problem!

“Hack the Debate” is a joint effort of CurrentTV (the network founded by former Vice President Al Gore) and Twitter.com for all the debates in the US presidential election this month (hat tip to Stephanie Tuszynski and Anders Fagerjord on the Association of Internet Researchers listserv).

This means that if you watch the debate on CurrentTV, you’ll see running commentary of live “tweets” along with the regular broadcast. The way it works is some producer working over at CurrentTV will be working “backstage” during the debate and selecting messages from Twitter and sending those to go live and appear on your TV screen at home. (The backend of this is very similar to the job I used to have in the IT-world, back when I was producing live online events, but I digress.)

While Current and Twitter are both promoting this as a “first” time this has ever been done, it’s not. In fact, these sorts of short messages (SMS) over television has been common in Norwegian TV for at least five years now, possibly more. You can read more about it here:

Enli, Gunn. “Gatekeeping in the New media Age: A case Study of the Selection of Text-Messages in a Current Affairs Programme.” Javnost – The Public 2007;Volume 14.(2) s. 47-63

Do you Twitter?   Twitter is a microblogging software that allows you to post short updates, just 140 characters, in answer to the question: What are you doing?  The updates that people add to Twitter are called “tweets.”  You can choose to “follow” people, that is read their tweets.  And, people can choose to “follow” you, or read your updates.

I know, I know.  Another web application to update, what a pain.   I thought so at first, too.  But Twitter continues to surprise me in its usefulness.   I follow a range of people from Barack Obama to friends to people I don’t know offline but who post really interesting updates.   The most useful tweets are those that include links to other websites, so it’s one of the main ways I stay informed about breaking news these days.

And, I predict that Twitter is going to have increasing significance as a tool in sociological research.   Just last week, for example, I posted a short announcement about a new research project I’m doing for which I need a very specific set of respondents: feminist bloggers.  So, I posted an update on Twitter that I was looking for (at least) forty feminist bloggers to interview.     A feminist blogger I follow on Twitter re-posted, or “retweeted,” my call to her network of followers, then posted it on her blog.

A week later I have responses to my quick online survey from twenty feminist bloggers and follow-up (face-to-face and phone) interviews scheduled with 15 of those.   That’s nearly half my sample in a week.   Now, I’m considering revising the total sample size upward.

It’s not a representative sample, to be sure, but it is a solid “snowball” sample and a perfectly fine sampling strategy for qualitative research.    Twitter as sampling strategy simply means that the “old” way of snowball sampling, by asking respondents and key informants to recommend people, is now being mediated – and speeded up – through online networks.     This morning, I’m off for my first in person, face-to-face qualitative interview for this research project.   All arranged via the “snowball” sampling strategy for the digital era: Twitter.

I wrote this for my personal blog, but thought it might be of interest here, seeing as this blog is partially about introducing new technology to people. Twitter, if you haven’t heard is a new “microblogging” service: you’re limited to 140 characters and the interface is designed to make posting and replying to others’ posts as simple as possible. I decided to try it out and here’s my response:

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a week now. For a long time I was hesitant to sign up. While Twitter had lots of hype, the hype was all within a pretty narrow circle: sure, all the internet celebs on TWiT each week love Twitter, but they’re in the crowd using Twitter. Nobody I knew used Twitter and it seemed like the kind of thing that’s only useful if you know lots of people using it. But both the geek and the sociologist in me were interested in it, so when one friend signed up, I decided to give it a go.

My first response to Twitter, and I think the first response of many people, is “Why would anyone care what I’m doing minute to minute?” There’s definitely some vanity involved in Twittering, but not really that much more vanity than is involved in the human experience generally: Twitter is basically an extension of our capacity for gossip and our curiosity about others. We all gossip to some degree (some people think it’s even the key to our evolution as linguistic creatures), even if it’s the simple “So what’s new?” kind of catching up we do everyday with virtually everybody we see regularly.

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