A couple of months ago I noticed something strange; some of my tweets didn’t always show up in the twitter search. Quite soon it appeared that my hashtags were not indexed or omitted from the search functionality. Whenever I would click a hashtag to find it’s latest connected tweets I would never see any of my tweets. At first I thought that this might be some smart thing on the side of Twitter, where it would omit your own tweets from any search you would do. This didn’t turn out to be the case, however as it also happened when using a different system where I wasn’t logged in. I didn’t think too much of it, keeping in mind more search troubles with twitter that had been reported earlier this year.  The fact that this also keeps me from being included in backchannels made me think after a while and I searched a bit more.

Of course I was quick to find that inclusion in the Twitter search seemed to be a hot item in the Twitter help section, thus it did not take me too long before finding a bit more. A lot of missing tweets seem to be missing due to resource constraints, but as I’m a fairly active user and I’ve been active for more than a year this didn’t seem to apply to me. Being really active might be the underlying reason though. I checked out Twitter’s tips on missing tweets and found that they are also filtering on quality.

Now this quality filtering might be the cause of me being blocked in Twitter. Of course; my tweets are often in Dutch, but that can’t be the problem. Instead I think it’s because of the way I use hashtags. They are great to define a subject, so you can tweet with #db09 and appear in searches for the Dutch Bloggies. But the thing is, in “my” group are used for giving a context to tweets in a more varied way. Thus one could tweet “I really dislike these kind of things. #hamburgers”, thus indicating one adds to the ongoing hamburger discussion there. Even though I just tweet a lot of “general chatter”, I do not think my tweets are bad quality wise in a way that I spam products or websites or any other “bad” behavior. Instead it might be the hashtag thing; way more people tweet in this way, but most don’t tweet as much as me… Then again, it could also be that once in a while I retweet a normal tweet of someone known as a spammer, or any other reason. Not only is it a bit annoying; it’s even more annoying that you’re not sure as to why you seem to be blocked.

On a positive note; I have never gotten a single “Britney” spam follower because they probably don’t find my tweets and the followercount of my @ThE_ED account doesn’t seem to suffer. (Which indicates that people find people through recommendations and tweets of others, but one can never be sure of course.)

Is Google Internet Stats a peek at the near future of the Web?
Yes, Google Internet Stats has been live for quite some time, albeit only in the .co.uk domain. However, due to some recent discussions I had with people about the future of presenting information on the web I think it might be useful to have a look at this website anyway. Moreover, this seems to be a good moment to look at this, now attention for Google’s bigger new toy, Wave, is fading. This is because the way that this site is presenting the information might just be part of the next step in publishing, blogging or whatever it is you do on the web.

Short, easy to read snippets of information is the way that Google Internet stats tries to represent the latest research data on just about any topic. Yes, the site looks awfully simple and sometimes it’s just really a tiny bit of information, but at least it’s live. With corporations like TNS, GfK and Nielsen involved in this project it does not use the most obscure sources of data either.

These tiny bits of information are part of what I see as a trend in at least blogging; the miniaturization of source information. Meaning; giving basic news, data, information, or any of those things and moving from articles towards conversation. Tools like (microblog) Twitter facilitate this process. Yes, the information Google Internet Stats is often without backlink to the source, a bit too minimalistic for my taste. But we might find ourselves pretty soon in a world where newswebsites, blogs and any other site like that get’s replaced by basic feeds where the article is shaped by the readers in the discussion that follows…

This short article is loosely based on a longer article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

Something different, perhaps, than the usual article you’ll find about twitter. I may have a lot to add to any article that’s out there already, but as people have been publishing so many articles in the past two months or so it might be best to let it all just be for a n while.

There are a lot of excellent and less excellent articles out there about how you might use this microblogging tool to your advantage and I’m not going to add to that, for now. Instead I want to talk about a more basic thing and that is the structure underlying the whole tool.

Some time ago I was asked about what I thought was the new thing about twitter. Indeed even before I had joined I have been asking myself the same question. For those of you that know me it might not be a surprise that I thought of it as nothing new, all the elements making up this latest new thing were already present, weren’t they?

Indeed we’ve been chatting quite a lot already in the past ten, maybe twenty or more years or so. New ways of communicating have been introduced and this new tool is somewhat like and IRC chat, an old fashioned chatroom or maybe it’s more like an instant messenger as people keep a list of friends with whom they usually communicate.

And herein lies the “new” part, if you like. After giving the question about what I thought about this tool some thought I could not think of anything else than to respond that it was the broadcast model of the tool. There are friendlists, sure, but there are no chatrooms and if you don’t “lock” your stream of messages everyone, even your non-friends can see and search your tweets. Basically you’re broadcasting your messages, your thoughts to the outside world, and anyone can tune in. Some of these listeners might have chosen to tune in permanently, but in theory everyone can see what you’re broadcasting. This also allows everyone to respond to what you’re saying, and this is the “new” thing.

No longer are your messages confined to either a chatroom or the particular friend you’re talking to, but they are open and can be used by anyone, either to respond or to gather data about just about anything. (Including yourself, obviously!) This is the essence of the word microblog: through it’s open structure it truly acts like a blog: your messages may look like normal chats but they are open to comments, linking and indexing. (Thus providing both an argument against and for locking your account.)

This linking is further extended through a now common practice of repeating some of your tweets. Friends will repeat any messages they find interesting, thus further extending the reach of your messages. (Yes, this is what you’d call “retweeting”.) You might ask; “but you’ve just mentioned that anyone can access “any” message already?”, and indeed this is true, but as searching through them usually only happens when someone is interested in a specific topic, ‘now’, people usually only read the messages they get from friends; from people they follow. Your followers offer a fast track to spread your messages as when they repeat your message themselves they make it directly available to their friends. (Of which you might share a couple, so they will see it twice, yes.)

To structure my thoughts about this I sent an image of how I thought this would best be explained. I know this is not consistent with normal ways of displaying information flows, and it actually doesn’t really show that flow very well, but I think it shows really well the thought behind the whole process.

Like ripples in water your message will spread, sometimes amplified again when someone chooses to repeat it.

This way of representing a sort of sphere of influence that a person or a group has, with people being in multiple groups, thus adding the means of spreading is not entirely new, obviously. And one might even assert that once beyond your own sphere your messages loses part of it’s meaning. Only the meaning readily present in it’s 140 characters is kept and all context is, or might be, lost. Your message holds a particular complex meaning in your sphere, your world, and to others, when repeated, it only holds the ‘face’ value, that what is readily present in the message.

The message might be even reduced to a binary meaning, something is true or not, takes place or not and that meaning is then transmitted throughout the twittersphere. You own direct sphere of influence, on the other hand, is influenced by exactly such messages from beyond it. This of course is particular true for the most narrow sphere; you yourself. Maybe this is the underlying force that drives people to say that Twitter is feeding on itself and hype seems rule rather than exception. This may be true for any type of mass media, but the quick flow and short messages of Twitter are amplifying this in a way that it becomes really visible to even the most ignorant of us. This is not to say this is either good or bad, but it is something we might want to consider nonetheless. (And rest assure, I think we unconsciously do, the question may be: to what extend to we keep this in mind when dealing with (new) media.)