There's been a lot of twittering and tweeting on DailyKos about Twitter over the last few days as folks try to digest exactly what it is. I've long thought on reputation economics, inspired by the writings of Bruce Sterling in his novel Distraction. I'm going to try to get a little writing done on this subject in between looking at Twitter related SMS messages and trying social networking applications on my new iPod Touch.
We've had reputation economics for a long time. You've most likely got a credit rating. You've probably got a social security number and the attendant data trail. Maybe if you were unusually energetic or particularly unlucky during your misspent youth you've got a criminal record of some sort. These are hard data – dates, times, amounts, actions described in precise legal terms, and the like. The other sort of things one thinks of when the word reputation comes up matter, too. How do your neighbors view you? Your peers?
The world before the internet lacked a means to convey the soft reputation economics information at all and the hard data required a formal inquiry. The internet has changed all of that ...
The internet had a complex system of information distribution in place before the creation of the world wide web in 1993. Email had long existed and files were distributed via FTP. Services like gopher and WAIS, the Wide Area Information Service, provided search features web users would recognize today, only with a text based interface to them instead of a graphical one.
Today, eighteen years after the first spam was sent and sixteen years after the first web page went up, the internet is scarcely recognizable to those who remember the old ways. The breadth, depth, and interconnectivity today, both electronic and human, would have astounded us in 1985 as we sat in front of our TVI 905 terminals, grateful to have dodged a class taught using punch cards by one semester. And reputation economics is a common thread through all of it.
One of the first places that reputation economics appeared in any sort of formal sense was the online auction house Ebay. I heard of Ebay in 1997 and I began using it in the summer of 1998. At first you could register without a credit card and feedback was not transactional – if you 'knew' someone you could give them a positive feedback just for being a good guy. That got abused in short order and the system we see today of positive, negative, and neutral feedback on a transaction by transaction basis only involving sellers with non-transient identities evolved in response. A reputation economics repository has to carry information viewed as valid, at least in some sense of the word, and it has to associate that information with some sort of identity.
Reputations aren't just for humans. A corporation can have a reputation – its name, its brand, its credit rating, and its stock value are aspects of that. Corrupting this is the heart of the fraud of biblical proportion on the part of Wall Street which we're watching unfold. Ratings agencies believed untested mathematical models, bond insurance firms like AMBAC, MBIA, and FGIC got into the business of insuring derivatives, and the rest ... well ... you can read all about it in the rec list these days.
So humans and virtual person corporations can have a reputation. Can you think of something else that might? One of the biggest internet wins ever in the financial sense of the word is Google and the whole premise is that they track ... the reputations of web pages. The volatile, interlinked nature of the web coupled with Google's page ranking is a curious sort of neural network – a collective brain for the human race, which 'thinks' and 'remembers'. There is no quicker path to the top of a Google search than to couple a unique turn of phrase with a DailyKos rec list diary. Curious how well it works? Check out "stranded wind" or "national renewable ammonia architecture" as search terms.
The non-transactional (at least in the financial sense) activities are where the real action is on today's internet. Consider the following systems and their attendant reputation metrics:
DailyKos – hundreds of diaries daily, some qualifying for the rec list via raw voting by all readers, others make the front page via the Rescue Rangers' search for well written but lightly trafficked diaries, and still others gaining attention by being collected into the various special interest round ups. Users gain reputation both formally via collecting enough recs to reach trusted user status and informally via name recognition. Once a trusted user the policing of the site becomes a prerogative, punishing misbehavior via the hide rating.
DailyKos has a tag system that is useful in the moment but over the long haul history could be handled better. I've started a piece of software that might one day morph into a sensible editing system, whereby diary tags can be used to organize diaries into 'books' of 'chapters'. All it accomplishes for the moment is pulling out all of my diaries for easy access, but as I start massaging that stuff into a long overdue book I'm sure it'll advance.
If you write here long enough and well enough you can work up escape velocity from the blogosphere. Kossack Orangeclouds is a fine example of this, with her new book coming out shortly, and I've managed a bit of an escape myself. I now get time on the Sci-Tech section on The Cutting Edge News, which puts my writing in front of no less then 50,000 readers each week that I get a piece accepted.
Where does Twitter fit into all this? As someone pithily noted earlier this evening Twitter might very well contain someone confessing that they're having a satisfying scratch of their private parts. This is one potential use of the service but if you're seeking power and influence this Moulitsas fellow seems to have figured it out.
Markos is only using Twitter in its 'scratch' mode perhaps a third of the time, reporting on what he is doing. Another third of his messages are conversations with fellow Kossacks, and most interestingly a third of his messages are links to articles which are not placed anywhere on DailyKos. The flow of Tweets is rather like a peek into his short term memory; not the post worthy results, but access to some of the material that goes into the making of those posts.
So where is the reputation economics in Twitter? Right now the system is light, fast, and simple. I think it'll stay that way – you get to follow people, you get to be followed, and there is no direct way to make anything of a Tweet other than to reply to it. Oh, and you really ought to take a look at who Markos follows: His third follow is interesting, as are his fourth and ninth.
I suspect there are many, many other uses for Twitter beside this one, but in the interest of pumping my own stature in the community I'm going to keep an eye on our fearless leader's tweets and follows to see what he gets up to with the service.