aaron c beals

some background

almost two years ago now, i posted about microblogging. at the time, i didn’t see the value in services such as Twitter, at least in a productive sense of the word “value”. it wasn’t that i thought people would avoid these services — rather, i figured the masses would flock — but my concern was that the constant cycle of tweeting and reading tweets would devolve into a dead-end of inactivity.

i still maintain that Twitter (the other microblogging sites i mentioned in my previous post have all but died out, leaving Twitter alone at the top) has the potential to be yet another information feed to fall behind on, like your email inbox and RSS feeds. however, as time has passed and innovative minds have started building new services on top of the Twitter platform, i realize that these deviations from the original “what are you doing now?” mantra hold the key for the transformation of Twitter into something useful.

dealing with information overload, aka “thinning the herd”

during a recent PIH gathering, i had a conversation with some colleagues about information overload. it’s a conversation i have had many times before, but one of the first with folks who are largely non-technophiles. i always assumed that the information overload problem (except for email) was unique to folks really hooked into the tech realm, but it has become clear that with the proliferation of social networking and information sharing technology, the problem has started to bleed over into the rest of the online world.

the issue, at its core, is this: what do you do with a deluge of potentially useful information? reading it all is a non-starter — you’d spend most of your life just consuming. filtering based on source (website, author, etc) is tricky, because not all content is useful, and it would be a shame to miss a true diamond in an otherwise uninteresting site. you could rely on the mechanical turk or “crowdsourcing” model like that employed by digg or reddit. many people go this route, but i find that the interests of the masses tend toward the middle of the bell curve, whereas my interests (and, honestly, some of the best information) lie on the long tail.

what i really want is to find a select group of people that share the same interests as me (or an one in each interest area) and then together, we’ll share the load of chewing through the mountain of information. if we each take a slice, the value to work ratio will be significantly higher. this is, in essence, the distributed computing model. the difference is that unlike digg, which uses an unbounded pool of computing resources, i want to hand-pick my pool of ‘computers’.

what about Facebook? you have control over your network there, right?

Twitter vs Facebook

in my old post, i said that “the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing”. at that time, Facebook wasn’t really promoting their “status update” feature, and my notion of Twitter was that it was solely focused on the “what are you doing?” question. now, Facebook has started to ramp up the prominence of the status message in an attempt to tackle Twitter. in fact, the new site design (which should roll out next week) removes the notion of putting your name as the first noun in the status message, allowing you to post Twitter-like messages.

unfortunately–even with these changes–Facebook does not quite do the job, because your network there is comprised of your friends, and your friends do not all share your interests — which is OK! Twitter actually does a much better job of letting you manage information flow, because you do not have to be friends with someone to listen to their feed — you subscribe to someone if you’re interested in what they have to say and unsubscribe if you’re. Sure, one of your friends might be upset at you if you don’t follow them, but if you are willing to take that risk and realize that Twitter is not a social network but an information dissemination tool, you can use it to help tackle information overload.

of course, i’m not saying Facebook is without value. as i said before, Facebook allows us to keep informed about friends and acquaintances who do not have the time or desire to manage a blog. in fact, on Facebook i am very interested in what my friends are “doing right now”. however, in the fight to parse a mountain of information, Twitter–without the overhead of social networking–succeeds where Facebook cannot.

in which i blame Shaq

i consider myself a technophile (aka “nerd” in the minds of many), and in many ways an early adopter of technology, but i also have a realistic view toward my productivity and propensity toward procrastination. given that, i have held back from exploring certain technologies in the spirit of keeping my job, family, hobbies, etc. — social networking and multi-player online games are the two main areas of caution. i will engage in the former when i feel that the value outweighs the cost (read: risk of wasted time), and the latter is right out. don’t get me wrong, i love video games. i just like video games with an end.

but i digress. in order to get invested in a social networking technology, i need a catalyst: either someone to give me a push or overwhelming evidence that real value lies within. so just as my cousins were the catalyst that pushed me into Facebook, The Big Aristotle pushed me toward Twitter. i had heard rumors that his Twitter account was really him, not a poser or someone ghostwriting for him, but it wasn’t confirmed in my mind until recently. being hooked up to the mind of Shaq has been a surreal experience, to say the least. all i need now is for Sir Charles to join Twitter and i’ll call the experience complete.

so i signed up. i’m late to the parade, but i figure that i can’t properly critique something if i’m looking at it from the outside.

there was, to be fair, another reason that i joined. i have been involved for almost a year now in the Global Health Delivery Project (and more specifically, GHDonline). the GHDonline site has been up since June, and we have a great member base and a decent flow of discussion in the communities, but i wanted a way that we could communicate about progress on the site to those interested. since Twitter has started to be an essential part of marketing plans these days, i figured we should carve out a space of our own.

blogging, microblogging, and nanoblogging

so my own Twitter account is something i’m using as an extension of my blog — more in keeping with the idea of microblogging. i’m trying to keep the focus on technology, health care, and other work-related items, as opposed my blog which has historically been wide-ranging in subject matter. of course, i cannot promise that other topics will not creep in over time. but here’s the distinction and the reason i finally saw the light: in the end, my “tweets” will be less about what i’m doing and more about what i’m finding.

as i mentioned above, information overload is a huge problem, and one of the things i strive to do in my blog is to distill out the items that i find interesting and of higher value. of course, interest is purely subjective, but the hope is that others will find some information of value. so if i use Twitter as a means of providing smaller snippets of this information, i am extending the reach of my blog’s purpose. tweeting about where i am and “what (i’m) doing right now” has far less potential value.

what i have found about blogging on topics of interest to me is that–as with this post–writing a full blog post takes a bit of time, which is of course a rarity. as a result, the blog post ideas i have emailed to or texted to myself sit in my inbox, stressing me out as they await the day when they are either acted upon or deleted in a fit of mercy. with Twitter, however, i can post a note about them as soon as i find them, rather piling them on top of my always-growing todo list.

and in conclusion…

the Daily Show on Twitter