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Personal Technology: Is Twitter the future of news?

I've spoken about Twitter before, but I feel it's worth another visit, based on the questions from readers in my inbox

The Jakarta Post
Mon, March 16, 2009

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Personal Technology: Is Twitter the future of news?

I've spoken about Twitter before, but I feel it's worth another visit, based on the questions from readers in my inbox.

Until recently there was a piece missing on the Internet. The problem was we couldn't figure out what.

Blogs are great for sharing insights. But we only read those posts when we visited the blog.

Then RSS - really simple syndication - came along, which is a great way to get blogs to people who are interested. It's fast, but it's not instantaneous: RSS takes up a lot of bandwidth, so there are restrictions about when a feed can be "pinged".

Good, but frankly, how many of you use RSS? And those who do, how many of you read all those feeds you subscribe to?

The problem is that neither of these create networks. They are both forms of information delivery. Delivery is just a pipe: You read this newspaper because someone delivered it to you, either on your doorstep or to the vendor you bought it from.

And yet the Internet is not just about delivery but about both information and network. Information is just that. Text, photos, video. Data. The Gospel was information. A photo on Facebook is information.

Network is a web of connections. It could be a bunch of wires, or a bunch of people. The Apostles were a network. The information they carried on their network was the Gospel. Facebook is a network - or, more accurately, the people who are friends with other users are the network.

The Internet allows us to create our own networks. Not physical ones but dozens of ad hoc networks, for whatever we need:

News: global, national, local, hyperlocal.

Friendship: old, new, present, potential.

Shared interests and needs: Nearest restaurant. Cooking tips. Ways to de-claw cats.

Facebook collects and updates us on friends we know. Mostly. Our "real world" friends. Call it the network of our "stable past".

Then there's LinkedIn, for exchanging information about jobs, careers, the industry. Call these friends our "loose ties".

They're all informational networks. But they stress the network part, not the information part.

We go to Facebook because our friends are there and we want to hear what they're up to. Maybe they've also got interesting things to say or share, but we're listening to them because they're our friends.

What we lack is a trusted network built on new information. This, actually, is what newspaper is.

But it's also what Twitter is.

Twitter, if you haven't been awake, is an online service that allows anyone with an account to send short - 140 characters - messages to anyone following you.

These messages could be about what you're doing, they could be links to things you find interesting, or they could be messages - public or private - between you and other Twitterers. This always engenders the response: why?

Well, there are lots of reasons why people Twitter. But the main one, I think, is that Twitter has gone further than any previous Web 2.0 service in answering the question: what is the future of news?

Let me explain. We read newspapers- or watch TV or listen to the radio - because we want to rely on someone to collect and filter the news for us.

A newspaper is not a limitless pile of paper thrown together willy-nilly: It's a carefully thought-out collection of articles in a very specific order. And limited in content: to the size of page, to a number of words, to a number of pages. These decisions are all made by editors: professionals who have decided what we are going to read and commissioned those articles, or selected them from a pile written by reporters or wire services.

We rely on the newspaper (or other mainstream media construct) to gather, filter and deliver in a timely and comprehensive manner.

If Armageddon has broken out, then we hope our newspaper editor has saw fit to put that somewhere in the paper. Preferably on the front page. Twitter works on a filtering process too. And the filters are humans too. The difference, of course, is that we choose those filters: We select those people we follow. But otherwise the process is remarkably similar.

We might call it "discovery" - the encounter of information we didn't necessarily know we needed to know, but are glad we did. That's probably not a bad definition of news, come to think of it.

Twitter has other attractions. It's simple, which was something RSS hasn't quite managed to do.

It's short: Twitter was designed for mobile phone SMS messages, and so each message has to be 140 characters or less. As we found with SMS some time ago, this enforced brevity is a blessing, not a limitation.

There's another key part to this too: identity. Twitter users are usually not anonymous. Some are, but the vast majority are either clearly identified individuals or institutions.

This makes it a lot easier to filter out noise-why trust what someone has to say if you don't know who they are? - and also brings Twitter closer to what a newspaper editor does. Of course, I'm not saying there's any individual who is close to replacing an editor. But that's not the point.

Once you start following other Twitterers, you quickly get a sense of who is worth listening to.

Some are boring, telling you only that they're tired, bored, or about to go to sleep. Some are self-promoting: "Read my latest blog post!"

Some are always talking to other Twitterers, so you feel like you're eavesdropping a conversation right in the middle of it. But some offer links to stories you wouldn't otherwise have heard about.

Some offer pithy insights. They have to be pithy, because there isn't the space to be anything less.

And some break stories: earthquakes, burning Chinese towers, financial upheaval. Some are eyewitnesses to history: inaugurations, earthquakes, terrorist attacks.

Chances are, once you've started following a decent range of Twitterers, you've plugged yourself into one of the best information networks there is.

Check it out. And then maybe you'll see why it's maybe the toughest challenge yet facing newspapers and other old guard media.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com

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