A Twitter Wiki

As the popularity of short, fragmentary messages grows, I have become concerned the public conversation may lose the capacity for thoughtfulness and reflection. At the same time, I would like to caution those who condemn Twitter or other systems based on micro content to not throw the baby out with the bath water. The long form newspaper article found in the New York Times or Washington Post contains a lot of material used to provide background for the reader, often at the end of the article. Not only is this text boring and redundant to the knowledgeable reader, it takes up previous space. The one thing the web is good at is connecting one piece of knowledge to a broader context of other pieces of knowledge. There is no sane reason to continue repeating background and further reading material in a long form newspaper article when on the web, a writer can simply link to the information.

The brief, concise texts of micro content can be connected to many other sources of information, some just as concise (a kind of "blizzard" of small pieces connected loosely) as well as to other longer, deeper and reflective sources. This loose, disjoint and connected type of writing is simply the network native way of writing and connecting information. It is beneficial, as long as both kinds of writing and forms of content are available and can be connected.

My concern is really with lowering the barrier of entry, enabling and encouraging those longer, deeper and reflective forms of writing. I recognize that there are benefits from shorter, more concise writing, which leaves redundant, expansive or source material hidden (properly) under a link or conntected through a network of tags or a network of people. Perhaps will will see fewer long texts divided up by headings and sections and more smaller texts connected together through search, tags and linkages into a variety of wholes, determined by the user's interests and needs.

About ten years ago, I was fascinated by the idea of a long text (article, book, etc.) entirely constructed of fragments, similar to the kind of texts you see posted on Twitter today, which could be freely rearranged similar to those magnets used to write poetry on refrigerator doors. I imagined that instead of writing a large text with a single coherent whole, they way books have always been written, the pieces of information on a topic could be combined to create a "book" in innumerable ways by rearranging those pieces.

It would be like taking all the paragraphs in a book, shaking them out on to the floor, and then allowing or enabling those pieces to be rearranged for each reader or interest. The pieces would be tied together by keyword or by search result and only lastly by links. I coded a small prototype application called Strands to test the idea, but work and life caught up with me and I shelved it. I was and am still surprised by the ease and rapidity with which people have adopted Twitter.

Not only are people using Twitter, despite the fragmentary nature of its texts, they are participating creatively in shaping the technology and usage of this kind of system based on fragmentary texts.

The use of tagging emerged spontaneously from the user base. Using "hashtags" brief texts can be connected to media, such as images and video, with the tag at the center of a network of content.

Also, I've noticed users are starting to fit the tag word into their text. Some examples are:

"Young Nebraska farmer explains how limiting direct payments would affect his #farm at www.nefb.org"
(Tweet from http://twitter.com/farmradio)

and

"farmanddairyGet four issues of #Farm and Dairy FREE! Click on the big promo on our home page: http://www.farmanddairy.com/"
(Tweet from http://twitter.com/farmanddairy)

At the heart of my Strands prototype were small texts connected by keywords. I wanted to create the lowest possible barrier of entry, so a user could create a keyword (essentially a tag, I called them "strand words") just by writing it into the text. In this system, what was essentially a tag was created by writing it (texts were scanned on post or edit for the presences of tags and any new ones added to an index), which is hauntingly similar to how people have started using tags on Twitter. They started out adding the tags to the end of a message, but have now begun incorporating them directly into the flow of text. I hesitated to continue working in this direction on Strands, partly because I expected people would find the tags sprinkled through the text troublesome.

My current interest is in providing tools or ideas that will encourage and enable a society addicted to short messages, however beneficial they may be, however native to the networked way of writing and reading in a connected fashion, to engage in greater contextualization and thoughtful reflection, to enable collecting some of the knowledge quickly flying by in the "Twitterverse" into slower, more reflective pools of knowledge, like eddies on the edges of a fast flowing stream.

The first tool I want to build is a "Twitter Wiki" enabling anyone to associate a text of any length with a Tweet and anyone to edit it. If I have the energy, I will post any experiments on my site or at least attempt to describe it.