Tag Archives | social networking

A 140 character message lacks the iconography of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin speaking from atop a tank during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, but Iranian twitters are nonetheless staging courageous acts. The clandestine tweets have inspired sympathizers from around the world to act in solitary by changing their location to Tehran to mask protesters’ identities.

The circumstances were very different in 1991, but cable news and radio played an important role in thwarting a coup by soviet hardliners. Cable news was the new media of the day, and coup planners were either unwilling or unwilling to stop domestic and international broadcasts that may have contributed to the plot’s failure.

Today, Twitter is being leveraged to baffle the old guard. The Iranian government shut down Facebook, but Twitter has remained in operation, and protesters have used the hashtag “#IranElection” to organize. People are attempting to overwhelm Iranian censors by changing their locations, so that the tweets (and Tweeters) will not be silenced (or harmed).

The U.S. State Department did its part by asking Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance that would shut down the service during crucial daylight hours in Iran.

If there was ever a justification for Twitter’s existence,  this is it. Tweets can be as banal as someone saying what they had for breakfast, or they can be a means for people to stand up for their beliefs.

Someone caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter today after he or she tweeted that California’s controversial Proposition 8 had been overturned by the State Supreme Court, crediting @LATimes. Slight problem–it wasn’t true.

The court has taken the constitutionality of the amendment under its consideration, so it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that the LA Times somehow gotten the scoop on its decision. That is what just one one careless person came to believe.

The culprit tweeter linked a story written dated May 16, 2008, when the court overturned a law barring same-sex marriage, because it violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

Any “followers” who clicked the link and examined the date on the story would have discovered that, but many chose to not take the extra step to verify what they read, and reflexively re-tweeted the “news.” Word inevitably made it way back to the LA Times’ own Twitter feed where its 19,700-plus followers began to see it– a perfect storm of misinformation.

There is a degree of trust built into the social mesh of Twitter, because people select who they want to follow. That trus does not substitute the fact that most people that blog about news on Twitter are not journalists, and do not have editors verifying their work. Twitter is place to find news, but it is not a news source.

Another root cause is the at-a-glance, all-the-world in 140 characters, aspect of it all. People consume information rapidly, and can react to something that they see on Twitter without thinking. Even friends make mistakes, and in this case, friends of friends propagated that mistake.

There are consequences when just anyone can post something online –consequences that could affect people’s lives, reputations, and even their livelihood. That is why print publications have editors, and television networks have guards placed outside of newsrooms. People’s emotions and legal rights were needlessly toyed with today.

I had a good time writing Ten Twitter Misconceptions, and I’m having an equally good time reading the comments on it–both the ones from Twitter enthusiasts and from those who remain skeptics. Some of the doubters, however, seem to be taking the story as me arguing that they should like Twitter. Other naysayers seem offended by the fact that some people like Twitter at all.

So maybe I should have added an eleventh mythconception to my list: The notion that there’s something wrong with disliking Twitter, or simply not being interested in it. I do think that some criticism of Twitter comes from people who just haven’t figured out how to make sense of it, With technology, as with everything else in life, it’s a good idea not to assume that something’s bad just because you don’t like and/or understand it.

But I’m proudly agnostic when it comes to technology, and don’t do missionary work on behalf of any product or service. (I’m always a bit befuddled when stuff I write about PCs and Macs inspires seething partisanship on either side–as far as I’m concerned, both Windows and Macs have their place…which, come to think of it, is probably why I use both.) If you don’t wanna use Twitter, that’s just fine with me. In fact, there’s no reason to bother with it unless it speaks to you.

(Okay, there is one reason to give Twitter a chance: Like a lot of worthwhile things, it’s an acquired taste. If you’d asked me about it during the first week I tried it, I would have mostly talked about how I didn’t understand its appeal. In fact, I stopped using it. But I’m glad I revisited it a few months later.)

Some of the tech thinkers I admire most are passionate advocates, such as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (the smartest and most entertaining Mac fan you’ll ever encounter) and Robert Scoble (who won’t be happy until everyone on planet Earth likes FriendFeed as much as he does). Me, I’m happiest when the people I write for find technology that works for them, whatever it may be. And I’m tickled by the fact that the Technologizer community includes plenty of folks who cogently disagree with just about every word I write.

Boy, you can’t take your eyes off Twitter for even a few hours without falling behind. I’m late on reporting on the fact that Twitter tweaked its settings yesterday so that tweets that begin with an @username (so that they address that person specifically, like this one) no longer show up in the feeds of third parties who follow the person who wrote the tweet but not the one it’s addressed to.

The weirdest thing about the change was not the tweak itself so much as how Twitter cofounder Biz Stone referred to it as a “Small Settings Update” in the blog post announcing it. Biz said that the change reflected how people use Twitter, and that it was made because many users find it disjointed and confusing to see a tweet from someone they follow that’s addressed to a random third party. I don’t presume to think I know more about what the average Twitter user wants than Biz Stone does, but I do know for sure that one of my very favorite things about Twitter is coming in in the middle of conversations between someone I know (at least as a fellow Twitter user) and someone I don’t know. It may be the single best way to find interesting new people to follow–it sure beats using Twitter’s “Suggested Users” feature to find Mariah Carey–and it was startling to hear its abupt removal described as no big deal. (Actually, Biz pretty much celebrated its death–he called it “confusing and undesirable.”)

Lots of other Twitter users were as dumbstruck as I was. They tweeted up a storm of protest, and Biz responded with a blog post this morning acknowledging their ire (and suddenly saying that Twitter made the change in part for technical reasons, a factor he didn’t mention in the first post). And in a follow-up post this afternoon, he reiterated that technical issues forced the change, and that seeing @replies to people you weren’t following was confusing. But he did say that the company is working on building better sharing options, nd he did throw a short-term bone to unhappy users:

…we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

The thing is, this further adjustment leaves things in a more muddled state than they were in the first place: Users will now see some @replies to third parties they aren’t following, but not all of ’em.

As I write, this is an ongoing story–and one of interest only to Twitteraddicts, in case you couldn’t tell–but it leaves me thinking that nobody but nobody has truly figured out what makes Twitter Twitter. Including Twitter. As I said in Ten Twitter Misconceptions, it’s somehow wildly popular and profoundly misunderstood at the same time, in a way I can’t remember any other tech product or service ever matching.

Poor Twitter! It may be the hottest service on the Web, but it’s also profoundly misunderstood. Lots of people cheerfully admit they don’t get it. Others emphatically believe things about it that aren’t true. I encounter confusion over Twitter every day, especially in the real world as I chat with folks who have either never used it, or have tried it and then walked away. It also pops up on Twitter itself (where, incidentally, I’m @harrymccracken and a feed of all Technologizer stories is available at @technologizer).

I don’t claim to understand everything there is to understand about Twitter. (If you don’t understand that it’s impossible to fully understand Twitter…well, then you don’t understand Twitter.) I have, however, formed some strong opinions about what I call Twitter mythperceptions. After the jump, my stab at addressing ten of ’em.

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