One. Two. Tweet. What Do You Mean?
In the interest of great artistry and saving time, I have stolen this post from myself to fill these halls and help reduce the echo.
Driving Ideas Home
Yesterday on the drive to pickup my daughter from school, I had a few minutes to my own thoughts, and I started to pondered about the true value of Twitter. I know this seems as if I have nothing better to do with my thoughts while driving in the rain, but I have been slowly using the service more, read about it every day, have a conversation about it every other day, and see new ideas and applications built on Twitter five times a day. So, I pondered away. What I realized at first was that…it hasn’t changed my life. Yes, it has proven to be a great micro-networking site, sort of compared to a huge billboard on the side of the highway where 10 million people drive by every day. That has proven helpful, valuable, and easy to manage. However, for the time I spend on the subject or the site itself…it doesn’t seem to be providing me the personal ROI for my time & energy. A new job, a new friend, a new idea, a new experience, can all lead to wonderful things, and can be provided via Twitter. But, does it actually provide me value, glimpse meaning of myself, others, and the universe, and fundamentally change me or anything?
One would think that all of that traffic, all of that information, all of those thought streams, and all of those spur of the moment conversations with no one or everyone, would reap deeply rewarding benefits personally to each member in some way or another. I am sure the folks at Twitter ponder this daily, hourly even, and understand this that the value of their service is currently being stored in a cloud, an invisible poof of web services. But to me, the user, the human, and now, the interested party, I seem to be begging for more than just having a socially open instant messenger & micro-blog. I am looking for value. It’s a relationship, and all relationships have one thing in common, and that is the shared value each participant directly or indirectly produces, or receives from the relationship. The relationship people and products share have the same characteristics, and any advertiser, marketer, Ikea designer, or Apple employee knows that.
Connecting the Disconnected
Out of this pondering with one’s own mind, while driving in the rain (a perfect time for creativity to breed ideas), came the thought of Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar’s “We Feel Fine“. I was first introduced to We Feel Fine through the TED talk from Jonathan Harris released last June, aptly titled The Web’s Secret Stories. I too, like Jonathan, am a story teller at my core. My wife, who hears more information from me through story telling, can no doubt have a few things to say about this, aside from agreeing with me. Under this pretext is how I came to really gravitate towards this type of work, this information “meaning making”, connecting of dots, information visualization, and new perspective on the things we do or say and share online around the world, whether we realize it or not. In the last few years, this field has grown exponentially, all you have to do is take a look at some of the projects coming out of the artefact labs, the beginnings of web 3.0 chatter, ben fry’s projects, the life of Tim Berners-Lee, and the host of Twitter Visualization applications alone. Keep looking and you will see an underbelly brimming with activity, in every major brand, corporate headquarters, startup brainstorm session, and grocery checkout line. People are looking for something new, meaningful, and something valuable to engage with. They are starving for connection, to help their neighbors, to be helped, and to change their own little world or the entirety of Mother Earth herself. The world is on the brink of simply agreeing with itself about this, but too often we feel too disconnected from ourselves and everyone else to understand what to do.
I remember back in late 2007, a Google group was started called Social Network Portability, of which I was a part of, just to see what was happening. Social networking has of course helped the internet reach to become a People Web since then, and grown astronomically in many ways not even imagined during that time. During the beginning discussions of that group, we talked about a paper written at Yahoo Research by Andrew Tomkins and Raghu Ramakrishnan, and published by IEEE, named Toward a PeopleWeb. It was more about the Semantic Web than anything, but the abstract was based on creating a richer content structure and to introduce a significant shift in online communities and information discovery…or; how to provide meaning out of all the heaps of data being created every nano-second. I digress, but the point is that as the information age evolves, it’s reach is widened and the interaction is deepened, we still aren’t changing lives on the massive scale, I believe, that we each hope to reap from all of the time, money, and attention we give to creating or consuming information. But, I don’t think we are far off, at all. Just visit TED.
What to Do With Real-Time Consciousness?
In this changing economy, shifting global perspective, and radically growing extension of our daily lives we call the internet, now is a perfect time to boost innovation organically, through entrepreneurship, with the resources we have already at hand. Cloud computing, thought streams, web services for everything imaginable, and a new spin on the need for innovative startups setting out to change lives through providing personal meaning to the humans that touch their products, is all we need to capture some imagination. From there, who knows, as the rest could become history, and this post becomes a pre-shift piece of chatter. We, as humans, have an enormous power…and this is called our creativity. We have the mind, the consciousness, and the will to create that which we desire to see. The more we genuinely see what we have been creating, and how to create healthier, more sustainable life patterns, the more we can change.
In the meantime, we’ll see what comes out of that car ride where I drove in deep thought about how to bring meaning to myself and others simply through Twitter’s stream of real time thoughts, emotions, desires, regrets, dreams, plans, ambitions, suggestions, ideas, intentions, and more.
