Bill O’Reilly has the last word on Twitter for today. He thinks the Twitterati is crushing talk radio, by sucking up all our listener time. He thinks that’s bad; I hope he’s right and it drives Rush out of business. It won’t drive The View out of business if Barbara Walters has a say; she regularly tries to shut down the Twitversation.
We’re becoming a nation divided along the Twitter faultline, forced to declare which side we’re on. This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter, and by the time I checked 10 seconds later there was three screens of earthquake tweets. Jeremiah Owyang was on the phone talking to someone in San Jose who felt it five seconds before it reached Jeremiah in the Valley. How long will it be before we’ll see an app tied to the accelerometer that registers each temblor into a realtime grid to track the pattern?
Tonight I read that Twitter has changed replies to mentions, mapping more accurately to the use of the @ sign anywhere in the Tweet. This morning Bit.ly received a $2 million round for its url-shortening/data harvesting service. Not slowly but very surely the 140 character landscape is being carved up and sold off at auction. Tim O’Reilly’s VC arm led the Bit.ly round, yet another marker of the attention economy carved up into discrete chunks.
Now that the VCs have corralled the @ signs and the URLs, what remains? The body of the text, the domain of Track and its wannabes. Glam Media’s Tinker is one such parlay, virtualizing keywords into event clouds and then distributing them via widgets around the Twitter nervous system. TweetDeck gives you yet another column for targeted searches, and who knows what we’ll see soon from FriendFeed and then Facebook.
When Bill and Tim O’Reilly converge, you know we’re at a twitting point, where the metadata orbiting the message stream is more valuable than the initial data itself. The recent Cloud Manifesto brouhaha underlines the tactics and deceptions of the players as significantly more important than the words of the original document. When we understand our metadata, our attention breadcrumbs, our gestures can and are being harvested, syndicated, and metered back to us, will we one more time leave it to the professionals to steal all our money and our childrens’ future?
Something tells us it may be different this time. It’s not that we’re smarter or more willing to do the hard work of paying attention. It’s not going to be easy to harness this out-of-control stage coach as it barrels down the trail on the way out of Dodge. There’s still plenty of anger, about too much Twitter, about our roles as consumers and the apparent lack of a connection to our jobs that pay for our room and board. Are we supposed to save or spend? Read or write? Eat or be eaten?
No, we’re no more clueful than we were a Tweet ago. Nick Carr will still have plenty of opportunity to mine the ineptitude of our crowd sourcing, the pathetic noise of our social mediocrity. But what the pundits don’t know is something we do: the more we are challenged about the value of our intuitive meanderings, the more we know how lucrative they are becoming. Over and over again, these systems are bending to our will, ill-defined, untamed, irrational, whatever.
It’s precisely this kind of civil disobedience that is our real job. On the Gillmor Gang this weekend, we argued about whether Darwinian brute force was appropriate, or whether we should just sit back and leave the driving to others. Is it rude to not believe the patronizing platitudes of IBM as they try and stuff the Manifesto down our throats? How beautiful was it when Amazon said, ever so politely, thanks but no thanks: We’ll just continue to rock around the clock on this cloud thing, and oh by the way, eat our dust.
These Amazon guys ain’t afraid of nobody. Not Microsoft, not Google, certainly not SAP and Sun and Cisco all busy puttying up a nice complexity firewall to slow the kids down. So we ultimately see the real work being those folks – Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon – who aren’t signing. They prefer to keep tweeting, keep connecting, not locking us in to complex derivatives it will take trillions to unravel.
You probably couldn’t find two more different people sharing the same name than the O’Reillys. But they both understand how powerful the Twitting Point is. One is the classic negative gesturer: when Bill buys, I sell. The other is going public as a lead investor while maintaining his role as a publisher and event producer, thereby sending the significant message that transparency can validate complex business relationships without conflicts of interest. Again, the metadata speaks louder than the details of the individual perceptions.
We will still suffer the arrows of the change-phobic for some time. But it was only a few short years ago when the notion that markets are conversations was revolutionary, or that Superman had to use a phonebooth to change the world. Today we each are broadcast networks: Bill O’Reilly said that. The new Marshall McLuhan. Go figure.
The tipping point for me is that Adam Curry and I both “discovered” Track (I’m using that term here just because I know it needles you, Steve) on TweetDeck in the same week, roughly a month or so ago, though he’s using a slightly different method now to pull various data as content for his live station.
While it’s just emerging as a toy for everyone from Diddy to Elizabeth Hasselbeck, it has now crossed into the actual value stream for me. And the real show begins.
This service is one of those tools that can potentially serve everybody’s needs, from goof to science research. I’m not too worried about who does what, because I’m too busy working my own angle. And that suits me just fine. I’ll leave the stress to Winer.
And I think Rush will be just fine. Chances are his next contract will be even larger than the 8 years $400 million he got on the last one.
There’s always money in the banana stand.
Just don’t give out free bananas to relatives…it’s bad for business.
“Two sticks and extra chocolate…is it Mardi Gras?”
The banana stand burned down.
Change “Marshall McLuhan” to “Twitter” and that guy standing in line bloviating about things he knows nothing about would be a dead ringer for you, Steve!
That all sounds great – but how about improving the performance of the twitter website and making it more stable.
Interesting, could have done without the cheap swipe at Rush Limbaugh
Agree. Political swipes like this typically cause me to change stations. Errr, click to another website.
But since you brought it up, perhaps this explains the failure of ‘Progressive Radio’. Can’t libs tweet and listen to radio at the same time? The nightmare for Mr. Gilmore is that conservative talk shows (Hugh Hewitt an example) are starting to integrate the conversation on Twitter into their shows. Hugh’s producer, @radioblogger, has north of 50,000 followers on Twitter. If Rush does this, his numbers will surge even more.
Well said. When Rush lets staff update his twitter account, it will become one of the largest on the system. Guaranteed.
The ’swipe’ at Rush wasn’t in the least gratuitous. Rush and his ilk dominate talk radio. As the conversation moves to Twitter and the audience broadens, there is every likelihood that Rush will become irrelevant. He knows this, which is why he has such contempt for Twitter. It’s eating into his market share and letting opposing views rise.
His listeners are not leaving him for twitter. His numbers have grown significantly since the election. The data doesn’t support your conclusion.
I like tweets, shot & sweet…..tweets
nuts that was supposed to read short & sweet..
The shot at Rush was appropriate. One-way broadcast bloviating (right or left) doesn’t hold up well when a few million people immediately and publicly question the bloviator in real time.
Twittering is a new and interesting social dynamic. It could become important. If it diminishes talk radio, such is life.
There are entertainers, and then there are consumers of entertainment.* Not all people can be both. Rush (and one-way content) will be fine.
*Same thing goes for research, and any number of other products. This isn’t going to change dramatically, only get (potentially, if we can figure it all out) better and perhaps more efficient.
The twitting is the movement right now
New media will have to adopt twitter one way or another. CNN, for instance, gets it. WE are at twitting point right now. http://tweetube.com.
Oh .. and the article is too looong for your audience …
Yes the article is too long for a Tweep to read :-)
“I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter.”
Hey, who you gonna believe – Twitter or your own lyin’ husband?
Whua? There’s a “track” on TweetDeck?
Out of MYvosi LLC, comes the face of Web 3.0, Maurice Valentino. Valentino never thought that out of his humble past that he would soon be the creator and innovator of the newest web technology that positions him to become the next Internet billionaire.
The Firm United LLC, which is a holding company for several companies including MYvosi LLC which houses Valentino’s genius creation, Myvosi Web 3.0, the wave of the future.
Myvosi Web 3.0 is a media/data exchange tool, a search engine that gains knowledge of the user the more it is used. It can be used for networking, it offers the most up to date encryption for product being sold/personal information and has a virtual mall with a presence of 250,000 national and international vendors in contract.In addition to your own personal virtual assistant that controls your every experience desire.
“It will challenge us and move us into the future now,” says Valentino. The site offers human deductive reasoning and inference. “Imagine a machine with personality that’s proactive,sounds like efficiency to me.” states The Face Of Web 3.0(Maurice Valentino).
Valentino also went on to explain in more detail what to expect from MYvosi LLC and Web 3.0.”MYvosi Web 3.0 is the successful marriage of artificial intelligence and the web. In addition we want to be efficient not only from an economical and an environmental perspective but also from an individual and technological perspective. Web 1.0 was for all to read, Web 2.0 was for all write and Web 3.0 is and will be for all to innovate.” personalize your future, live out your potential. Myvosi web 3.0 allows you to search by sentences not eliminating the keyword based search but expanding on it. You can type in sentences and in turn it would return relevant results and suggest other content related to your search terms. You can ask your browser questions such as “where can i go for lunch” and it will provide you, based on your likes & dislikes something suitable (human deductive Reasoning).”Many fear that this detailed information about them will be exposed, but it is the exact opposite,” says Valentino. Your likes and dislike /personal information are not publicized they are on an encrypted network using the same encryption’s as the one used by the major banks in the world(ex. the TLS and the high 128 bit encryption). This graduates the common concept of the current web, typing in the same information and getting the same information. What’s now offered is a unique individual experience on the web tailored to fit you personality. Myvosi Web 3.0 consist partially of “mashup” applications. An example would be looking up restaurants and have it tie in to another application(GPS) giving you place and directions. Myvosi Web 3.0 has the most intelligent software agent at the click of a button. You can share data files securely and efficiently without the threat of viral and other harmful applications (worms,Trojan horses,malware,etc) infecting your computer.A quote from Thomas Chille” For manifesting a web 3.0, we need a web 3.0. We need a real evolutionary shift in the perception of the web by the end users. Much like the paradigm shift in involving the user generated content for web 2.0.” Its purpose is to educate, create, and innovate the end User’s experience of the Web’s resources. It is the web’s Advanced Version Of the 3 dimensional giant”Second Life,”but Extremely user efficient. The applauding moment was simply this stated by The Face Of Web 3.0 “Most importantly Web 3.0 Is all of you. It isn’t the dominating player with the most Bank. It is about you (the user). We as individuals craft web 3.0. we all have a major role in its implementation” says Valentino. This is just an overview what Myvosi Web 3.0 offers. The detailed version would require a 1,000 paged text book and far superceeds what was said today. Myvosi Web 3.0 launch date is in the summer (July) of 2010.
Special Acknowledgments:
*Barack Obama in his spirited aura of change
*Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau who created the World Wide Web at CERN
*James Hendler An artificial Intelligence Researcher
*Nigel Richard Shadbolt founder of the Web Science Research Initiative
*Ora Lassila a Finnish computer scientist
*Computer Science University of Southampton
*Artificial intelligence department @ University of Edinburgh
*Eric Schmidt CEO Of Google
*Doug Lenat Computer Scientist Ceo of Cycorp
*Kevin Kelly Great Mind
If I left anyone out you are not forgotten, but for the sake of time, many more I give thanks to. Thank you all for your research , your time invested in making us better and more efficient economically and environmentally, America and the World thanks you.
A few pioneers of Green Energy who deserve recognition
*Scott mcnealy co founder of sun micro systems say that technology of the Internet is the most planetary efficient way of conducting business
*John Doer partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
says that Germany is the largest buyer of solar cells around the world
“These are point that should be noticed and implemented in our economic and environmental strategy and conducive to like such recovery” Says Valentino
*MIT chemist Daniel Nocera
*Thomas Hinderling innovator who wants to build solar island to make us more efficient.
*Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy
*Steven Chu head the Department of Energy
just to name a few.
“These are a few of the people who have inspired me to offer the Next generation ready platform. I look at their stories and their desire to innovate and to make better. These are things and mindsets I was conceived in. These Great minds gave me the foundation to start myvosi and change the future. So I personally feel they deserve a great deal of recognition” Says The Face Of Web 3.0 Maurice Valentino
so I must admit I love twitter…can’t believe how free the quality info has become, and have even been trying to contribute myself.
Even more outstanding is I CHOOSE my content, I don’t let media organizations choose it for me
BUT
how long will we have access to incredible stories from distinguished news organizations if they can’t pay their writers?
not long
and so the 140 tweet could become the depth of society…UNLESS we figure out how to pay those producers of amazing original content
we need to figure it out.
C Lee –
>>how long will we have access to incredible stories from distinguished news organizations if they can’t pay their writers?
There may be a new path. In addition to offering a (free) comments section on their web sites, endangered newspapers and broadcasters could set up a “related predictions” space where users make cogent (Twitter-like lengths) forecasts of specific events that they see likely to unfold in followup over a three or six month period.
To make predictions and build reputations, participants would pay a small entry fee. Those whose predictions are validated over time would earn karma points with possible rewards including visibility (guest blogging, etc) in the old media’s site. Another option would be an open forum feature from time to time where predictors could go on record with new forecasts of their choosing. The prediction markets in this new system might also include prizes/financial rewards, given to local or global good causes of the best predictors’ choosing.
Mark Frazier
Openworld.com
Twitter: @openworld
Think I’ll pass, the real life versions are much more interesting and attractive
I keep hearing about the growing b2b applications of twitter… other than marketing and networking, what have other readers used it for?
For the love of God, please keep comments concise!
Bill O’Reilly is annoyed by twitter because a twitterer can say whatever he wants without thinking about consequences or checking facts, and somehow people will still listen.
Twitterers are annoyed by Bill O’Reilly because he can say whatever he wants without thinking about consequences or checking facts, and somehow people will still listen.