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Twitter

Twitter’s firehose problem

June 22, 2010 in Data

Esquire confirms what we already knew: Twitter is a waste of time. The information “firehose” has more in common with the Deepwater site, spewing redundant and useless information at a constant pace. In that regard, truth be told, it’s not much different from any other communications service – except that alternatives have either explicit or implicit filtering mechanisms. Until I see analytics considerably more sophisticated than “count words to figure out what’s popular,” my minority opinion of Twitter remains solidly in place:

The #worldcup tag, then, is the foremost miserable experience of this summer’s Twitstream — and its crowded crowd-sourcing may suggest that Twitter is even more confusing than previously believed. While 16 percent of Friday afternoon’s tweets were legitimate news updates, [from] what we could tell only 7.6 percent actually furthered the conversation.

But more than 75 percent of #worldcup tweets are considerably — if not horrifyingly — less interesting, if not downright useless….

Come Wednesday, you’re not going to have a much better time keeping track of the U.S.-Algeria showdown: the last match, filtered by a #USA tag, garnered just 10.6 percent meaningful conversation and 6 percent self-promotion, plus 8.4 percent spam, 30 percent babble, 42 percent re-tweets… and only 2.4 percent legitimate news.

Honestly, I’m impressed the retweet percentage never made it over 50%!

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37Signals is worth $100 billion

September 29, 2009 in Internet

Closely following the Twitter valuation news comes this brilliant satire from 37signals:

37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1…

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

(via Michael Broukhim)

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Twitter’s broken data model becomes slightly less broken

September 19, 2009 in Data,Internet

I don’t usually have anything nice to say about Twitter (though I still ignore my mother’s advice and say it anyway), but the company is finally taking steps to improve one of the most glaring faults with their service: retweets.

Previously, retweets were simply new tweets that happened to contain old information. This created clutter and noise: you may read my full thoughts here. Now, Twitter developer Marcel Molina admits:

One of the main confusions and criticisms about the retweet API was 
around what happens when a given tweet is retweeted multiple times. 
The explanation was that developers need to do their own retweet 
collapsing. If N people retweet a given tweet, you’d get N instances 
of that same tweet in the appropriate retweet timeline and the home 
timeline. You would then have to do your own internal book keeping 
about whether that tweet had already come in. If it hadn’t you’d 
display it for the first time. If it had you’d update the already 
displayed tweet.

Asking developers to collapse retweets in timelines is onerous, 
complicated and confusing. We’re not going to do it that way. We are 
going to add a resource that gives you all retweets for a given tweet. 
In timelines you will get only the first retweet. You can then request 
all retweets for that tweet at any time to get up to 100 retweets that 
have been created for it.

So we are on our way toward a real data model! No longer will data be spuriously copied and clutter the Twittersphere – now information will retain one form, with many instances of the same. This is a mature approach and how it should have been handled in the first place. Bravo to the Twitter team – late is infinitely better than never.

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Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: “the Twitter age?”

September 14, 2009 in Internet

The beginning of this Mashable post made me pause:

How much buzz is one inappropriate publicity stunt during the VMA’s worth in the Twitter age? In the case of Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, almost 300,000 tweets in one hour.

What does it even mean for something to have “worth in the Twitter age?” Is there really anything fundamentally different here?

Five years ago, Kanye getting on the stage would have resulted in the VMA audience universally thinking about his actions. Today, it results in them posting those thoughts online. Is there anything really productive about that? Certainly not. It merely represents a public display of thoughts – and nothing more.

I anticipate two counterarguments: first, that Twitter is a means of communication. By posting their thoughts online, people initiated conversations of real value which would/could not have occurred five years ago, since this revolutionary means of discourse did not exist. That just seems silly to me (though I will eat my words if anyone proves otherwise) – the tweets that characterize the event are initial declarations (“OMG! Kanye took her mic!”), not in-progress conversations. 300,000 people announced their shock into the void – and the void said nothing back.

Second, by posting their thoughts, these Twitterites alerted other people to the event, even if they did not engage in any direct conversation. This argument has much more merit – but still falls flat. The people who are interested in such a thing were either watching themselves or could rapidly learn about the event from any number of news sources – including every relevant news site or blog online. On top of that, let’s not get ahead of ourselves – the VMA audience is over 10 million people, or more than 30 times the number of tweets, so what kind of direct audience impact do we really think a bunch of micro-bloggers could have? It’s not as if the tweets were all instantaneous, or beat other news sources to the punch – those 300,000 came over the course of an entire hour, or roughly half the awards ceremony itself.

Maybe this is “worth” something because it tells us (with a little semantic analysis) what people feel about Kanye West in the moment (one could also just look at the audience, which booed him at every opportunity); but to call this “the Twitter age?” Come on. Are we supposed to refer to every hyped fad which attracts 10% of the population as an “age?” Is this the iPhone age? Am I too late for the pets.com age? Oh right… that one didn’t end very well.

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Twitterverse demographics

August 28, 2009 in Internet

I spoke too soon – another post from ReadWriteWeb manages to frustrate yet again. In an article claiming that teenage use of Twitter is on the rise, they present this chart:

Let’s do what RWW did not and actually think about what this graph is showing. For each age group, their use of Twitter is plotted over time, relative to their use of the internet as a whole. In other words, this is a visualization of the relative composition of the Twitterverse. If all age groups used Twitter similarly to their overall internet consumption, then all the lines would be at 100.

I do find it amusing that RWW has a almost cliched “statistics can be misleading” section in its article, which fails to note the single most important caveat (unsurprisingly, given their misinterpretation of the chart): increased participation by any one age group must be offset by decreasing participation by another. So the rise in the “12-24″ line is equally and exactly offset by declines in the adult groups. Kind of a different headline, isn’t it: “Adults Abandon Twitter!” And yet, it’s based on the exact same information.

At this time we should note that just two days ago, the Times ran an article called “Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens.”

The key here is that we don’t know whether teens are using Twitter more or adults are using it less. All we know is that if you look at the Twitter userbase, teenagers form a greater percent of the community than they used to – even though the absolute number of teenage Twitterers could be static or even dropping (if adult use was falling off at a greater rate).

What’s much more interesting is that for the first time, teens are using Twitter disproportionately – they are a larger demographic of the Twitterverse than the internet generally. But again this gives us no context, and that fact could arise from their increased participation or adult accounts going stagnant.

It’s interesting and informative to note that young people are a steadily growing percentage of the Twitterverse. It is a mistake to make assumptions about their number from the graph, however.

I fully expect an article from RWW examining the “massive rise” in “2-11″ Tweets – who are these tweeting toddlers? What do they tweet about? And most importantly, how can your marketing strategy take advantage of this trend?

Update: I am not surprised to learn that this graph comes from Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day column. I cringe at the thought of that site’s influence.

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What passes for news

August 28, 2009 in Internet

ReadWriteWeb takes 600 words to conclude:

What this means for Twitter is that the online chatter taking place on the popular microblogging site, while still an important vector for studying sentiment, is not powerful enough on its own to truly impact the overall success or failure of a movie.

Really?! Does this mean there are people out there who actually believe tweets about movies directly impact the movies’ success? As if people could take a good movie, write bad things about it, and consequently have it fail?

I must invoke Occam’s razor. A movie’s quality is a latent variable that drives both its financial performance and its early Twitter reviews. Any correlation between the Twitterverse’s opinion and the box office receipts is spurious. Any exceptions to this rule are just that: exceptions.

Please forgive my frustration.

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The 100 users of Twitter

July 31, 2009 in Internet

An interesting visualization of Twitter as 100 people is a good take on a popular infographic meme, but reveals a few inconvenient truths about these sorts of images.

Firstly, although I am (not so) secretly pleased to see this illustration of Twitter’s non-inclusive communicative nature let’s not forget that Twitter, like so many other social phenomena, follows a power law distribution. We’ve all heard a lot about the “long tail” – here it is in action.

Second, “100 people” visualizations, or any display of percentages, need to have exclusive categories to work well; otherwise they may not add up to 100%. In this case, are the “5 loud mouths” really different people from the 5 with more than 100 followers? And couldn’t one of the users with many followers also be a lazy account? These overlaps create issues in the discrete presentation of demographic groups. If the groups really are exclusive – which in this case would have to be by chance rather than by design – then the graphic works well.

Finally, more of a nitpick than anything else: if Twitter were a community of 100 people, then how could anyone have more than 100 followers? Obviously, the number refers to the true Twitter population, but it’s incongruous with the graphic. One option is to scale 100 people down to this sub-community, but then the figure would lose its impact, for the scaled version of 100 users would be just .0024 (based on a true population of 4,200,000 Twitter users). A second option is to abandon the “100 people” metaphor and go with a percentage-based pie chart, but that would ruin the appeal of the infographic.

For a truly excellent set of “100 people” visualizations, see Toby Ng’s collection.

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“A revolution in the American fantasy”

July 13, 2009 in Internet

The RWW article I just discussed included a link at the end to an excellent discussion of American egoism and hypocrisy as epitomized by the glorification of the Twitter’s recent role in Iran, decrying it as “a revolution in the American fantasy.”

While I found it a to lean a bit on the conspiracy side, and I would aknowledge further the fact that Twitter played an imperfect role as the communications device du jour while the government was attempting to censor everything (see: WWII resistance radio), it is a well-written expose of the technological and cultural biases coloring most people’s perception of Twitter’s role in the election’s aftermath.

Moreover, it wonders where all this angst was for other recent elections, or if it will re-emerge for the upcoming Afghan elections. Or was this just a flash-mob event, fueled more by concern for a piece of software’s visibility than the plight of real people? That would be tragic beyond words.

A sobering read on the state of hype as it relates to social media.

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No, Twitter does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

July 13, 2009 in Internet

Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: ReadWriteWeb is running an article with the title “Does Twitter deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe not yet, but it could someday.” Fortunately, they acknowledge the idea is ridiculous for the moment and are really just responding to this outlandish post by Bush’s Deputy National Security Advisor. Nonetheless, besides encompassing a continuation of the shameful “Twitter revolutionized Iran” meme, much of the article is spent lauding Twitter as an idealistic (but hardly realized) “new plane of communication.”

But it’s not all bad. RWW decides that Twitter does not, in fact, deserve a Nobel prize. The reasons are fourfold (despite being sugarcoated by the “Twitter is magical” bit):

Twitter is a magical thing. It will be even more magical once it opens up to communication with other networks, solves the problem of archiving what could be historically important conversations, facilitates greater amounts of conversation analysis and of course, grows in size.

Those middle two look an awful lot like data model issues – the very ones I’ve been ranting about for months and most recently described in detail just last week. RWW goes so far to say that “If someone isn’t doing something to change the lack of accessible archives on Twitter, it’s absolutely criminal” and in my info-noia I agree. The first and fourth points are sort of obvious – the latter being a fairly exogenous factor.

So from this otherwise completely ridiculous article, I take some vindication: apparantly, the only thing standing between Twitter going from ” just a company that made some software” to winning a Nobel Peace Prize are the very features I have insisted since day one are not only necessary to support but dangerous to exclude.

While it’s promising to see some mainstream attention beginning to be paid to these details, I won’t hold my breath.

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Twitter, exposed

July 2, 2009 in Data,Internet

Twitter’s data model is, interestingly enough, entirely user generated. Hashtags of every variety, retweets, and other methods of ascribing meta-information to tweets have developed outside any formal structural model or standard. The lone first-party implementation is that a “@” prefix links directly to a person, and even that isn’t fully functional.

All of my problems with the service stem from a deep-seated paranoia that as it gains acceptance as a communciations tool, people will begin to treat it as a real method for data syndication, something it absolutely does not support. This fear precludes me from recognizing that Twitter excels when used for its stated purpose: telling people, in real time, what you’re up to. But as we move beyond this superficial usage, the massive limitations of the system will simply erase data which otherwise would be maintained, catalogued, and available to future users of the tool.

In a series of examples, I would like to demonstrate my frustration with the system as it stands. All of these can be remedied with trivial patches and I remain astounded that they persist at all.

Spurious information via retweet copies

As I’ve discussed before, retweets are particularly problematic because they create loosely-attributed copies of information without referencing the original idea (in a linked-data sense), thereby flooding Twitter with noise. Consider what would happen if I tweeted “Twitter’s data model is broken” and it was retweeted by a handful of my followers; then a handful of their followers also retweet it, and so on. The product of this exponential distribution system is many unique versions of the same message: “Twitter’s data model is broken.”

Now someone comes along and performs a search for “Twitter” and “data”. The first 1,000 results that come up are retweets of my original message. Why? Because each retweet is considered a seperate piece of information by the system – since it has no way to know that they are merely relays of a single, original idea – and they all satisfy the search string.

It should be obvious that a more useful system would display my original tweet at the top of the list, and indicate that it had been retweeted X times, which is why it had been assigned high relevance to the query. The second result would not be someone else’s copy of my information, but an entirely different (though relevant) thought. In this system, retweets are an officially-supported mechanism which, rather than simply sending out a new tweet that happens to contain the same words as someone else’s tweet, merely rebroadcasts an instance of the original tweet to the retweeter’s followers. Same or stronger signal, no additional noise.

Spam via retweet copies

Consider the example:

  1. Person A sends out a tweet (“Twitter’s data model is broken”).
  2. Person B retweets Person A’s tweet.
  3. Person A retweets Person B’s retweet of Person’s A original tweet.
  4. Repeat ad nauseam.

Again, perform a search for “Twitter” and “data”. The results page would be flooded by the message “Twitter’s data model is broken”, but coming over and over from just two people! This much should be apparant as an extreme case of the first example I described. But this spam could be avoided by not only considering the number of retweets in assessing relevance, but the number of retweets by unique users.

In a data model which views copies as a measure of relevance, the infinite progression described here would be viewed as extremely important. Obviously, that isn’t the case; the data model needs to jibe with our intuition, especially in a simple case like this.

Now, to be fair, this could be done in any data model (just send out slight variants of the message, or employ more than two people)… but traditional spam filters would come into play here.

Conversation tracking

Over the course of a few days, two people have a conversation over Twitter. In the meantime, they carry on conversations with other people as well. At the end, I want to follow their conversation from beginning to end.

I can’t.

There is no mechanism to follow a conversation (even Facebook has this in a very basic sense as “wall-to-wall”). I could search for messages from one user containing another user’s name, and do the same for the second user, and then look back and forth at the two results… but really? Is that an effective mechanism? Just recently, Felix Salmon tried to re-capture a Twitter conversation for publication on his blog and found it quite difficult.

Archiving and retrieval

Finally, there is no mechanism to retreive past data that hasn’t been explicitly saved by a user. Searches are unequivacably ordered in chronological order. Apologists will argue that the system asks people “What are you doing?” and is only concerned with right now – but unfortunately the fact that someone enters information in the present tense does not mean it will be read in the same. Moreover, at times it will actually be desirable to find out what someone was doing an hour, a day, a year ago.

Link sharing is one of Twitter’s most popular uses. And yet good luck finding a link that wasn’t published today. Imagine being told “Oh, I saw this great picture on Twitter… so and so sent it out last week.” Are you really going to dig one by one in reverse order through so-and-so’s incomprehensible url-shortened links to find it? Wouldn’t it be nice to call up that person’s history from a certain day?

Conclusion

I’m genuinely scared that in the absence of these key features (or presence of these flaws), Twitter remains unable to act as a true communications tool as we’ve come to expect in an internet-enabled, data-driven society. It is, in fact, the anti-Google Wave… and I think that’s not a good position to be in.

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Kottke on Twitter

June 25, 2009

No less an authority than Jason Kottke is taking up the “Twitter’s data model sucks” mantle, instantly doubling the size of my little crusade. Actually, Kottke doesn’t even attack Twitter, but rather sites that claim to provide Twitter-organization services, but it’s close enough because it implicitly recognizes that Twitter doesn’t have even a shard of [...]

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Trading Twitter

June 24, 2009

Bubble 2.0 datapoint of the day: StreamBase has announced that their CEP (complex event processing) software for algorithmic trading now supports Twitter. One CIO admits in an otherwise Hallelujah-esque article that “traders he has spoken to haven’t yet jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon.” But here’s the clincher (emphasis mine): A key benefit of Twitter is [...]

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I just don’t get it

June 17, 2009

I may be tilting at windmills with my Twitter rants, but I find it so hard to believe that this is really the future. It may constitute an incremental step towards some form of communications bliss, but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t get pushed aside by the first service to get data organization right [...]

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The flow of information

June 16, 2009

This NYT article on Twitter and Iran sums it all up (emphasis mine): “We’ve been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony,” said Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor. “The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over.” It’s an amazing and deserved accolade for the young service. But. [...]

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Twitter will/will not change your life

June 5, 2009

Time magazine has Twitter on the cover and can’t gush enough about how the service will change your life. Remember when they had you on the cover? This is totally different. This is you distilled into 140 characters, which, naturally, is better. Obviously, I see the benefit of allowing people to upload their thoughts in [...]

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Security, more or less

May 30, 2009

58 minutes and 30 seconds into the Google IO demo of Google Wave (youtube link), does Stephanie Hannon actually type out the Wave password by mistake? Is it really “wavewave”? I hope that was just the password for the demo Twitter account and not for anything more sensitive. As Stephanie said, better get that tab [...]

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Google Wave

May 29, 2009

If Google Wave is successful, will anyone care about Twitter anymore? To me the most exciting thing about Google Wave isn’t that it’s real time; nor that it’s live; nor that it combines email, IM, and social networking; nor that it lets people send photos quickly; nor that it is the first “web application” that [...]

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Tweeting Libor

May 21, 2009

I’ve just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. I need all of you to stop what you’re doing and listen: The British Bankers’ Association announced today it is now publishing its key benchmark figure (three-month sterling LIBOR) on Twitter every afternoon, shortly after it is announced to the financial markets. Words fail. Libor, a [...]

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Real time and the data society

May 16, 2009

The Times has gone all Twitterish – a new feature called Times Wire displays stories as they are published. It is the latest effort to cash in on the growing phenomenon of “real time search.” The new Times page implies very simply that recency = importance, which just isn’t the case, but somehow our need for [...]

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Touché.

April 27, 2009

I have been doing some research on text analysis, in particular on extracting sentiment in the absence of context (a la Twitter).  Among all the theory, I came across the following joke which I think really captures the complexity of any natural language processing (not that it prevents us from trying): A linguistics professor was [...]

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Superbowl Tweeting

March 27, 2009

I know I’m really late on this one, but the NYTimes put together an excellent timelapse visualization of Twitter comments across the US during the Superbowl.  It’s especially cool to see player names jump out as plays take place, or ad campaigns taking hold as commercials air.  Check it out here.

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