Twitter, Curation, and Horizontality

I'd like to start off by quoting The Boston Globe as reported by Tim Leberecht on The PopTech Blog: "Just as technology is giving us the ability to amplify every word we utter we have nothing really meaningful to say." While we could simply label this injunction as yet another irascible Bostonian diatribe, I think there is a good point here and it's not (of course) that no one is saying anything interesting anymore. The point is that people are saying SO MUCH that maybe we need some sort of filter or curator to let us know what is interesting and worthwhile and separate it from what is not. Does Twitter need a curator to make it meaningful?

We are already seeing some web-sites and applications which are doing exactly that. Breaking Tweets lists links to people are are tweeting about global "news worthy" events. Alltop lets you know about the celebrities and bloggers whom you "should" be following on Twitter. Applications like TweetDeck allow you to create your own filters so that you can organize your tweets and Facebook updates into categories like "news" and "friends" and "ridiculous" (there's a lot of that). From this, one can extrapolate ways in which other Twitter users could use websites to access tweets about various subjects: botanists could more easily access tweets about plant research, and journalists could access tweets about global events. Right now, the only way to filter tweets is by keyword searching for hash tags, but that can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.

While I can definitely appreciate the increased accessibility that such websites afford to Twitter users who have a specific interest, I also think there is something to be said for the horizontality of the current state of Twitter. All Twitter users have only 140 characters in which to express themselves, and no one is given more or less space based on their social status or another other factor. There's something egalitarian about the current state of Twitter and I think we're losing something important if we start imposing a hierarchical system of selection.

While I stated in last week's blog post that I like the idea of individual Twitter users curating web-content and posting it on Twitter, the idea of placing filters on Twitter itself seems to miss the point of Twitter altogether. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, the co-creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, talks about the original concept of Twitter (this is a lengthy quote, but I feel like it's worth reproducing in its entirety): "The concept is so simple and so open-ended that people can make of it whatever they wish. They seek value and they add value. I've always said that Twitter is whatever you make of it. Because the first complaint we hear from everyone is: Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother's eating for lunch? But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled -- you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share. So if you decide to hook your plants up to Twitter and have it report when it needs to be watered, then that's a valid usage, or if you just decide to report what you're eating for lunch, that's a valid usage too." I think this gets at what I think is the uniqueness of Twitter - it's a giant behemoth of little snippets of information which the user must wade through to determine what he or she does or does not find interesting or useful. I don't know that we've really seen anything like this before, and I'm worried that if we start using websites that filter tweets for us, Twitter is going to become just another news website.

Twitter recently announced that it is, in fact, saving everyone's tweets. I like the idea of having one long, historical feed of 140 character blurbs with no form of organization apart from a date stamp. I think it will afford a unique, unfiltered way of looking at history.