My Lost Twitter Journey

Make something simple, and let your users build complexity on top of it based on how they are using it, not based on how you think they will use it.  To me, that’s a good practice when it comes to the collaborative web.  And, the folks at Twitter most likely had that in mind.  And, if they didn’t, they lucked out.

Wednesday night was Lost night.  And, given the fact that my wife has lost interest in the show, I had to look for excitement elsewhere.  So, I went to Twitter.  And, after desperately twittering about my love of Lost from the virtual mountain tops, I wasn’t having a lot of luck.  Most of my followers either weren’t interested or my words were lost amongst all the other tweets.

So, I tried a few things.  The first thing I tried as going to Twitter Search and searching for “Lost night”, and following a bunch of other “losties” twittering from the mountain tops.

Unfortunately, now I was permanently following a bunch of people just so that one night a week I would have Lost companionship.  And, their tweets were already going to be buried within a bunch of other tweets.  I’m following a lot of people now.

Enter TweetDeck…

TweetDeck is a nifty little program that is basically a twitter command center.  And, I had an inspired thought about how to use it along with a convention known as hashtags.  You probably already know what tags are.  The are simply words used to describe or categorize something on the web to make it more searchable.  Tweets contain hashtags with a ‘#’ followed by the tag name.

Below is screenshot along with my annotations:

In the above screenshot, there are three panel that are circled.  Each panel contains tweets based on a particular filter, except for the TweetScoop panel,which I’ll explain below:

From left to right…

• Replies to me – filtered based on the ‘@purecognition’ being located at the beginning of the tweet.
• TweetScoop - A tag cloud showing me what terms are popular based on how often they appear in tweets.  Their size indicates their amount of usage.
• Lost Tweets- filtered based on ‘#lost’ appearing in a tweet.

So, for all intents and purposes, a Lost chat room is molded from the ether simply by enough people collectively using the hashtag #lost.  I can read their tweets, reply to them, and get their replies in my reply panel.  I can also see what topics are gaining the most prominence at any point in time during Lost with the tag cloud.

One interesting thing that happened was during a scene where a character said something to the effect of, “I guess we aren’t going to Guam.”  It amused so many people that a lot of them tweeted his words.  And, over in the tag cloud the word “Guam” got HUGE!

I literally got to watch a piece of the English speaking world watch Lost.  This really hightened the experience, especially due to the fact that it was already a really good episode.

At the end of the episode, one of the Twitterers invited everyone back to his place to chat and listen to a live video of a Lost discussion at a sight called Generally Speaking Production Network.  It was like in college when you are at a bar and someone says, “Hey, we are heading over to a party, wanna come?”

I didn’t stay long, as I had work in the morning.  But, before going to bed, I checked out my counter on my blog.  The counter said 316, which was the name of the Lost episode.  Lost and coincidental numbers go hand-in-hand, thus making that little coincidence a great deal more omenous and a great ending to a formative collaborative web experience.

Lost has a prominent place in the Web 2.0 world.  If you want to see this, just look at this article.  Also, go to Lostpedia and The Lost Experience.

I realize that Lost, as super awesome as it is, is a TV show.  So, I hope using it to make the point at the beginning of this blog entry didn’t trivialize it.  The experience is important because it was organically created by the following:
Twitter + Established Conventions such as HastTags + Twitter API + TwitDeck = My Lost Twitter Experience.  Not by one single centralized organization, but by decentralized communities of users, developers, and fans.

Very cool.

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The Many Faces of Twitter

So, recently I decided to get back into the collaborative web 2.0 thing.  And, I started with Twitter.  This ended up being the perfect door into the collaborative web.

First of all, I should mention that I’m interested in the collaborative web because I’m interested in people and their genius.  And, I’m interested in thinking about new ways for them to work together to realize their genius.

Twitter is a type of application known as a micro-blogging application.  Micro-blogging is exactly what it sounds like.  It is blogging involving tiny 140 character blog entries.  These blog entries, in Twitter, are called Tweets.  You find people to follow, and you see their tweets.  They follow you and they see your tweets…simple.  Incidentally, the 140 character limit is based on texting limits.  You can both tweet and get tweets via texting on your mobile phone.

When I first read about Twitter I excused it as useless.  I figured it was more “noise” contributing to the signal-to-noise ratio of the interactive web…enter human genius.  ANY TIME you forget to take into account the effects of human creativity and genius, you will be wrong.  And, I was wrong.

Twitter ended up becoming almost every type of application.  It ended up with many faces…fueled by the human minds.  Below are some of them:

1. Blogging – For when you can communicate something meaningful in 140 characters.
2. RSS Feeds – Most Twitterer’s links to their latest blog entries…I do.
3. Social Bookmarking – Most Twitterer’s share their favorite links…again, I do.
4. Social Networking – I, for instance, like to follow software developers, web designers, and people interested in the Semantic Web.  To be honest, though, if you are a human and you follow me, I will follow you.  I’m interested in all sorts of minds…not just those like my own.
5. Professional Networking – I’ve read about job offers via Twitter.
6. Chatting – You can send tweets that are replies to other tweets.
7. Advertisement - Some tweet to peddles their goods and services.  Here is a good example.
8. Community Building – Groups of like minded people that share similar aims in life or reside in the same geographical location will follow each other in a manner similar to groups in MySpace or Facebook.
9. Online Collaboration – You can leverage the knowledge and creativity of your Twitter community.
10. Interactive TV – Julie Banderas from Fox News Channel reads tweets on the air and even has voting to decide whether or not take take commercial breaks.

Let me know if you have other uses of Twitter.  This interests me a lot.  I’m on twitter as @purecognition.  Better yet, send me a comment.  I don’t get many of those.

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