Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.
The surprising thing is that anyone should be surprised by this.
[Source.]
Heh! Here’s something to make the Twitter-deniers choke on their muesli. The Herschel-Planck space mission is now well on its way. Needless to say, it has a good website. The mission has launched two spacecraft. Herschel is the largest, most powerful infrared telescope ever flown in space. Planck is
Named after the German Nobel laureate Max Planck 1858-1947, ESA’s Planck mission will be the first European space observatory whose main goal is the study of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang.
Observing at microwave wavelengths, ESA’s Planck observatory is the third space mission of its kind. It will measure tiny fluctuations in the CMB with unprecedented accuracy, providing the sharpest picture ever of the young Universe — when it was only 380 000 years old — and zeroing-in on theories that describe its birth and evolution.
Planck will measure the fluctuations of the CMB with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.
But now comes the really neat bit: Planck has a Twitter feed! It curently has 360 followers — and, understandably, isn’t following anyone. Probably has enough to do as it hurtles through space.
(Yeah, yeah, I know: the Tweets are done by some geek in ESA. But still… A friend of mine’s husband is one of the leading scientists behind the project. He was a bit miffed when she sent him a message this morning telling him that some complex manoeuvre had been successfully completed. She knew before he did, because she’s a Twitterer and he’s not).
Tim O’Reilly is the world’s most astute publisher. He’s also a great Twitterer. Someone retrieved his Tweets using a Python script to produce this Wordle tag-cloud.
Lucy Kellaway has been looking at what business executives do with Twitter. She is predictably funny about it:
Despite the dismal use to which executives are putting Twitter, more and more are signing up for fear of being left behind. Last week I met a British business leader who told me that he had just joined, but complained that he was now so focused on turning the details of his day into pithy tweets that he was finding it hard to pay attention to what he was doing. Worse, once he had composed his Tweet he felt insecure and unpopular as only three people seemed to be following him….
Coming soon, apparently. Hard copy not yet in the shops, but you can buy a pdf download for $15.99. Seems a bit steep to me, much as I love O’Reilly’s stuff. Besides I’m saving up for a really good book on Drupal.
Nicholas Carr was, predictably, not impressed by the #amazonfail business:
Flashmobs were okay, but they had a couple of big downsides. First, they required you to go outside. Second, you had to, well, be in a flashmob.
Hashmobs solve both problems by transferring the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the “hashtags” that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of a hash sign, ie, #, in front of a word or word-portmanteau, eg, #obama or #obamadog. The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don’t have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don’t actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob….
Tom Morris via HuffPost.
There is communal thinking on Twitter on a level and in a form I’ve never seen before. Almost every day, a topic comes up that causes me, as a philosopher, to ponder a bit, and then share the results of that pondering in the 140 character increments that Twitter allows. Today, someone mentioned Susan Boyle, the lady who has made such a stir worldwide with her recent appearance on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. The You Tube video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY.
As I reflected and tweeted briefly on Susan and her lessons for the rest of us, people started retweeting, or passing along those short reflections to others. When I saw what touched people the most, and elicited the best responses, that in turn informed what I continued to think and tweet. While considering all the activity that these simple tweets generated, because of who Susan Boyle is and what she’s shown us, I decided to use an extra blog post today simply to share these tweets, or twitter reflections, to provide an example of the unlikely musing that is now flashing around the internet, and also to highlight Susan’s example for us in this forum as well…
The editor of Management Today, a magazine, seems to be having an off-day:
Like Black Lace reunions and charity wrist bands, Twitter is a tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on. News editors at the national newspapers have been desperate to keep up with the Joneses, i.e their proper broadcast media rivals, in offering up-to-the-minute G20 news of the crusties and anti-capitalist protestors surging on the Bank of England, busting into branches of RBS, and trying to knock policemen’s helmets off. They’ve gone for Twitter because it’s The New Thing, and because they don’t have the resources in their depleted budgets to do it properly.
Quaint, don’t you think?
Interesting observation by dave Winer.
In a way, as a user of Twitter, I have the same business model as the investors in Twitter. I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling there’s something here. I look at it this way, if you tried to tell me what we’re doing on Twitter has nothing to do with what we’ll be doing with networks in the future, I’d be 100 percent sure you were wrong. There’s something here. The challenge is to figure out what it is.
However increasingly I’m sure that Twitter itself is not it.
