Twitter and Facebook

When I went to Twitter today, it displayed a dialog

We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover
their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to
make sure the people you care about can easily find you.

asking me to update my name, bio, location and email fields.

This suggests that both Twitter and Facebook are insecure about each other, seeing strengths in the other and weaknesses in their own service. Twitter feels threatened by Facebook's focus on a true circle of friends and colleagues. Facebook feels threatened by Twitter's capacity for marketing and building followers in public.

It suggests they may eventually become very similar in the features they offer, with Twitter integrating photos, video, circles of friends and Facebook making their content more public (which they are doing). Perhaps both sites will give users more control about who can see what content.

Twitter and A Flock of Seagulls, Publishing in a Networked World

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?).

These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on.

The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces and fits and starts through the social network of friends, family, colleagues. The network is the world of social publishing.

Why? Because it is to difficult to find works online among billions of documents and uncounted trillions of ever expanding words. You just can search for things you do not know exist. The social network trades in attention, which is necessary to discover what exists, through your social contacts.

It just does not make sense to "publish" a work to a certain location (or a physical book), then try to get everyone to come read it through clever marketing. It makes no sense to prevent copying, since copies are the method by which information spreads through a social network. The idea of scarcity and exclusivity makes no sense at all in a socially networked world, unless by exclusive you mean being friends with the author.

The network, by the way, does not really need to worry about this issue of citation, since there is usually a trail back to the original author, through a 'retweet path' (if dutifully or automatically maintained) or through carrying authorship information with the work through the social network (as I've talked about here before).

As a poet, nearly every poem I write is immediately published to the social network, so I can't give anyone "first rights" to it, and moreover, that is meaningless. I noticed the Haiku Society of America states, at least for some submissions, " The appearance of poems in online discussion lists or personal Web sites is not considered publication." a much more adaptive policy.

What happens on Twitter is more like a flock of seagulls, making all references to publication, first publication, second publication utterly meaningless, as we tweet to others and they tweet back at us, retweeting and retweeting. I suppose the next thing, is they will want "first tweet" rights. I understand the goal is to keep your publication fresh, but that simply does not fit reality. It says something about a publishing world where the consumer needs to be reassured they are not being "cheated" by recieving old goods, which are turned over from elsewhere, similar to the way "shovelware" became a problem in the 1990s CDROM publishing era. I suppose the same problem exists with bloggers, twitterers, who merely repeat what others write, but I just don't see the problem. In a network world it costs nothing to unfollow or unfriend a source.

"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

The ugliest Twitter post yet?

New generation of farmers. RT @FMCorg: 40 farmers under 40 http://tr.im/tnjB (via @civileater via @ediblechicago)
about 22 hours ago from web

Things are getting ugly on Twitter. This tweet I posted to @farmfoody is more citation than message. It is filled with gibberish, the "retweet" code and the via's, the cryptic tiny url. Something will have to give and eventually meta data will find its way back to where it belongs, hidden somewhere outside of the message text in the message envelope.