I've been watching Google page rankings algorithm evolve for years now. I don't advertise myself as an SEO (search engine optimization) expert, but if you check "renewable ammonia" or some of my other interests you'll see I tend to take control of the things that interest me.
The link formation and advancement of search results bears some resemblance to how our brains organize long term memories. Short term memory, a highly dynamic, bubbly sort of process where things rapidly shift had previously been accomplished with a variety of human communication methods – email, blogs, journal article publications. The required rapid, dynamic connection forming was there, but it was fragmented and obscured.
Twitter won't completely take over that space, but it is open, extensible, mobile, and amenable to both human and programmatic interaction. And that makes it very, very special.
Oh, dear, we seem to have started a social media consulting operation named Progressive PST. This diary is some of the theoretical thinking behind the operation. I'd like to thank those who've been showing up to pooh pooh the value of Twitter these last few months while we've been working up to today's announcement in Cheers & Jeers.
If you look at Twitter as I do, from the perspective of a software developer, it's a database of tweets. Each has a source that is identified by a unique user number, a name that can be changed if the user desires, and up to 140 characters of text. There are what Twitter founder Biz Stone calls organic conventions. No one from Twitter ever said that putting a '#' in front of a word made it a searchable hashtag, but people started doing it, Twitter optimized their software for it, and now we're injecting news and information for each Congressional district directly to the appropriate hashtag.
Where Twitter crossed the line into a behavior that was more like a neural network than a simple relational database was with retweeting. User began placing "RT .@" before something someone else said, followed by their username and the tweet's text. This reinforced the message, spreading it to the retweeter's followers, and explicitly declaring a link between them and the source of the message above and beyond the follower/following relationship. That linking and strengthening coupled with the transient nature of the individual tweets provides the closest approximation yet to how short term memory functions.
Twitter also succeeded in decoupling this 'thinking' from being stationary. The 140 character tweet limit was always about integration with mobile devices and their SMS messaging capabilities. The level of connection between your Twitter account and your iPhone or Blackberry can be set; maybe you're seeing nothing, maybe you permit direct messages, and perhaps a certain subset of tweeters you follow are so important to you that you've permitted a direct conduit from their keyboard to that cell phone in your pocket.
Twitter has access to long term memory, too. URL shorteners like http://bit.ly or http://tr.im allow arbitrarily long URLs to fit inside the 140 character tweet limit. I prefer tr.im myself – if you're tracking your tweets and using it you can easily determine how many hits are driven to a URL that you mention. I recently discovered that I can take a photo or video with my Blackberry, send it to a particular email address at Flickr, and have it automatically appear on Twitter complete with the tweet text I enter when sending the photo. Extensions to Firefox permit the easy conversion of the page you're currently viewing to a shortened URL complete with a dialog box providing the right amount of space to create a tweet on the spot.
Twitter's mobility, bi-directionality, and expanding rich media interface permit the beginnings of two long term science fiction staples: telepathy and telekinesis. I'm writing this on the Massachusetts turnpike, but if I want to share a picture of a pretty New England fall day with Larry Bruce in Arizona, a few simple keystrokes permit me to do that. I can send it privately or I can stage whisper it to him, permitting the 600+ people following me via Twitter some insight into what my day is like.
That publicly visible rich media telepathy can turn to telekinesis when the right motivations are present. @StopBeck spends some time each day guiding the boycott against Glenn Beck; his thought, his tweets, then comes collective action.
Twitter recently sprouted a feature called lists, a way to point to groups of accounts you don't explicitly follow or to make a subset of those you do follow available with an explanatory label. This is a form of long term memory, in the sense that a URL receiving a good page rank in Google is; it's hosted on Twitter, depending entirely on information contained there, but it lacks the ephemeral nature of the tweets themselves. The Blog Workers Industrial Union did this listing for all House, Senate, and Governors, collecting as many of the incumbents and challengers as could be found, and then we sought out @Klout to rank them all in terms of effectiveness.
That ranking is just a hint of what political campaigns will do with this new form of 'collective thinking'. If you look at my twitter account you see 600+ followers, about 450 that I follow, and with external tools you could determine that 300 of those are mutual relationships. Hunting in my lists you'll find one entitled 'in my blackberry' that holds about 10% of those mutual relationships. These are the close personal contacts, the specialists, the interesting characters I've met via Twitter. I have another private list that's even tighter and I wrote a little tool of my own that checks every sixty seconds, broadcasting any urgent thought I might have to them.
So a political campaign will collect followers, and then a sorting will begin. Which are donors? Sign placers? Door knockers? Phone bankers? Which ones can be counted on to pounce on a letter to the editor if it is receiving a lot of right wing attention on a local newspaper site? That last one, that's the first way a small campaign will use a flashmob. The Obama campaign had this kind of access to supporters in 2008; Twitter will permit the smallest, least well funded House campaign the same infrastructure for as many followers as they can draw into their 'telekinetic circle'.
This technology, it's going to be a game changer. Thinking about this evokes a quote from Firefly's River Tam: "My mind is a weapon". Yours is, too, if you choose to pick up the sharp instruments I leave laying about and learn how to wield them.