Twitter, URL shortening services, & the future of newspapers.
As I am spending more time inside of twitter it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the “retweet” (RT) is by far the most powerful gesture in the twitter universe. So powerful that I think it’s likely to replace newspapers.
It is the simple pointing of your finger towards an idea and saying that is interesting. Any one or two people pointing to an idea means nothing, but if there are ideas that are powerful enough to get hundreds or thousands of people pointing at them, then they must be interesting.
I think that twitter is now processing information much like a giant brain, with each person acting as a single neuron. If you follow that metaphor, then re-tweeting is the equivalent of a neuron firing.
This is essentially the original crowdsourcing insight behind so many companies, most notably digg. In the twitter universe its much more pure. It can be done from anywhere anytime. Ideas themselves are often very easy to put into 140 characters or less, and if they take somewhat more than 140 characters, it’s easy to reduce them into something that is just a few characters long and then include a link back to the longer bit. But even the links can be nearly 140 characters, which is why we need URL shortening services so that the URLS themselves take up as little room in the message as possible. That is why we now have a variety of newly URL shortening services fighting to the the URL shortening service of choice for the twitter world. tinyUrl and Bit.Ly and is.gd might have a very interesting role to play in the twitter ecosystem.
And if you look at the streams of popular URLs that are being shared on twitter at the moment, you will see that they do indeed feel a little bit like a people magazine cover. One with a decidedly geeky twist, but still…
At the moment, the top five is as follows:
- http://bit.ly/uVKNA (3,026) 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
- http://bit.ly/QfMeA (2,134) First 100 Days | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
- http://bit.ly/5hnAd (2,761) Homeless To Phase Out Dimes By 2011 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
- http://bit.ly/7pNe (2,083) Church puts Passion of Christ on Twitter — newsday.com
- http://bit.ly/HFJyd (1,904) The New Bebo: 50 Percent Growth in One Month
There are two from the onion (each shared more than 2,000 times in the last hour, and then some geeky news stories including one about twitter itself. (If you find this interesting, you can get a list of these stories sent your mobile device as they happen. How? By following BitLyNow on twitter of course).
There are even services now organizing the popularly shared URLS by category and updating them every 5 minutes. Have a look over here at Tweetmeme for example which is doing a very nice job in that department.
Perhaps the most interesting thing though is that often you don’t even need a link to convey a big idea. In fact, that top URL being shared this hour (3026 re-tweets according to BitLy). Shows a list of the ten most extraordinary tweets that by themselves contained important information. Examples include news of water on mars, the recent crash of Continental airlines 737 in devner, the breaking news of the earthquake in china, and the mumbai terrorist attacks. The list goes on. In these cases, you have both the speed of entry and the power of the re-tweet to focus in on the important content.
So to rephrase all that, twitter (or some other system that contains streams of short updates) will completely replace breaking news coverage because it is both faster to get word of new events, and more transparent in the way it amplifies important messages. It will also partially replace the more thoughtful editorial journalism by sussing out the best content from millions of writers through simple re-tweeting and the wisdom of crowds and then presenting it in real-time steams. Crazy, right?
And of course this now goes without saying, but…
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