The Real Trouble With Twitter – There’s no There, There

(Image from Darren Greaves (Boncey) via Creative Commons license)

I’ve been thinking a lot about – and playing around with – Twitter. These Dylan lyrics came to on the plane this morning, as an apt description of why I’ve had a hard time “getting” the value of Twitter:

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
. . .
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
. . .
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

No, I’m not suggesting that Twitter is an omen of some rapidly upcoming flood. It’s the middle line there I’m thinking of.

Annalee Newitz writes in “The Trouble with Twitter” that:

Twitter’s popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time).

But the problem I have with Twitter isn’t that it is too fast, and thus discourages reflective thought, or that the messages are too short, and thus discourage contemplative rhetoric. Those things are true, but not the problem. (They’re equally true of SMS and of IM).

The problem is that no one is listening.

More accurately, the problem with Twitter is that there is no conversation to listen to. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, there’s no there there.

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Creative Commons by default

(Via Lawrence Lessig)

Sony’s new competitor to YouTube, eyeVio, will license content users upload under a Creative Commons Attribution license by default.

Lessig points to this article from Digital Trends as the source of this bit of info.

I wish Flickr would do this. Flickr already allows you to set, as an individual user, your preferences for uploaded images to default to a specific license, including several creative commons licenses, – but the global default is still “all rights reserved.”

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Open Source Flex (MPL)

<Update>
It’s worth taking a look at Ed Burnette’s take on this at ZDNet: “Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest.”

Although I am certainly happy to see Adobe moving in the direction of open source, it is good to more closely at the overall picture: what is being open sourced and what is not, which is exactly what Burnette does.

I guess it’s really just a question of “getting it” relative to others. The Flash player is still a closed platform, but at least it is available for Linux, unlike Silverlight.

</update>
—
Adobe seems increasingly to “get it” when it comes to enabling the modern web application environment, leveraging the strengths of the Flash player on all those dekstops, and allowing enough openness for creativity to flourish.

The latest example of which is the announcement this morning that they have open sourced the Flex SDK – compiler, libraries, and all. (Everything but the Eclipse-based IDE, which remains under a commercial license).

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Newspapers all a-twitter; me, not so much

Via Smart Mobs, via Random Mumblings, comes this piece from The Digital Edge: “Twittering the News”

It’s an interesting concept – Newspapers using Twitter as a way of reaching new media savvy consumers. Because of the 140 character limit, the stories are effectively limited to headlines and short blurbs anyway, so it isn’t that great a leap from the publishing of headline-only RSS feeds, in the sense that the audience would still need to come back to the newspaper site to get the full story.

There are some significant limitations, though, as Lawton notes in the piece:

Twitter is still primarily a new toy for the tech-savvy, so the number of people using the service is still small compared to other social networking services. “I have a suspicion that if it breaks out beyond the web-savvy crowd that’s given it a lot of recent buzz, it’ll be because people find really useful applications,” Friesen said.

Twitter continues to seem to me like a solution in search of a problem – how is this different than subscribing to receive push alerts from a newspaper site by email, except that this time it’s SMS? (Of course, a number of different services, including CNN, have offered SMS alerts of breaking news for some time).

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Brands whose consumers tell the best stories, win

David Armano points on Logic + Emotion to Alain Thys‘ “I Am The Media,” a presentation given at the Marketing3 conference in the Netherlands back in November 2006.

The presentation itself is available under a creative commons license via Slideshare – if you actually download the ppt file from there, you can view the notes on many of the slides as well – or it also embedded below.

It’s a compelling presentation, well designed, connecting the power of brands (and consumer’s emotional connections to them) with the rise of consumer-generated media: (more…)