Sean Behan's Blog

Twitter, http://twitter.com just redesigned their home page. And guess what is featured in their redesign? A big fat search bar! Who would have thunk? You can now search twitter (you could before as well) and get a good sense of what real people are thinking/doing in real time.

A lot of people ‘tweet’ about seemingly irrelevant things like ‘getting milk’ or ‘i like potatoes’. But who is to say what is irrelevant? Perhaps, I’m a dairy or potato farmer? The real value of Twitter occurs in between the pointless ramblings, when groups of people make similar decisions and/or observations and catalog them online. Regardless of the content, we still want the content so as to come to our own conclusions.

Twitter is a barometer on public mood/perception of events, products, brands, bands, celebrity… etc. People who use the service are not conservative with their tweetage because there is no usage limit (except on bots) and posts are extremely short, 140 characters or less.  The side effect is a plethora of short status updates, w/ subject matter much like you would send to your friends over SMS. The origin of the 140 character limit design decision stems from the maximum number of single characters that can be sent over an SMS message. Twitter was first envisioned as a mobile communication facilitation service for tech people in San Francisco.

The big boys of Search, like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, don’t even have this figured out yet and they are scrambling to play catch up w/ Twitter. Search engines index the web but by the time they get things all nice and organized, the content is stale! (The one exception that I know of is Google Suggest) Not to mention the classical web is full of longer posts, which take more time to produce and contains whole thoughts, complete sentences and less ‘discoverable information’. Discoverable information is the information you accidentaly find in large datasets of seemingly random information.

Because of the frequency of tweets and the personal nature of the service (The I’m famous on Twitter mentality) some pretty interesting and accurate information can be gathered and plotted, not just in real time but over time as well. The concept of Abundance and Waste in Nature shows us that only such a random and free service can actually deliver meaningful content at all! Because of the prolific tweetage of people, in between their pointless ponderings, we all share some similar ideas, opinions and observation, truths and falsehoods. Twitter helps us group and analyze what has been for the most part an intangible thing, public opinion and perception from the bottom up. If you were tasked with the design decision of having to make an accurate snapshot of society, and you have whatever means at your disposal, how would you do it? The best way I can think of  would be to hand everyone a piece of paper and collect their thoughts, then aggregate and analyze. Sound like Twitter much?

Twitter has become the dandelion of the internet. It fills in the cracks of the information superhighway that would have otherwise been overlooked and/or determined to be largely irrelevant.