The Flap over Twitter

Twitter is a relatively new Web 2.0 service whose catchcry is to answer the question "What are you doing now?" Let's start with some basics. Twitter is essentially a centralised broadcast system - uers simply sign-up by creating a password-protected account with a username. The username can be anything, and people may use an alias or their real name if personal branding is important.

After you have your account, you can start sending tweets, which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Twitter gathers your tweets on a page in chronological order, so over time your tweets create a diary or log of your activity - what you are doing, where you have been or going, what you are reading, what you are working on, and so on.

At this point your tweets aren't doing very much. There is a central search function so other people with Twitter accounts can run searches across all tweets, including your own. The next step is to get followers. Followers are other Tweeters who subscribe to your tweets. Each tweet you send is then distributed to all of your followers by Twitter. Tweeters typically use a dedicated Twitter client to aggregate the tweets of all the people they are following, which are presented as a stream of tweets. Many tweets consist of a short observation followed by a link (suitably shortened by a service such as) , so tweets become a links into Web 2.0.

Twitter also allows you to send a direct reply to a tweet, or also do a retweet, which is where you received a tweet from someone you are following and then you send it on to all the people who are following you. Tweet first and ask questions later.

Twitter Usage

Marketing firm Hubspot recently published a report on the state of the TwitterSphere for Q4 2008. They estimate that there are currently 4 to 5 million Twitter users, about 30% of whom are new or intermittent users. From the graph below, Twitter user growth has increased dramatically since March 2007 with 70% of current users joining in 2008.

Between 5 and 10 thousand new users are being added each day, which sounds impressive, but keep in mind that Facebook is adding 700,000 new users per day. It was recently estimated that Twitter would take 36 years to achieve the same user base that Facebook has at present.

Nonetheless Twitter boasts a broad user base from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, to Stephen Fry, the reader of the Harry Potter series amongst many other things.

Most users follow less than 25 other people, but there are a group of power users who have between 20,000 and 100,000 followers. All but 1% of users have less than 1000 followers.

Twitter Risks

Twitter is an unauthenticated service in that you can register for an account merely by creating an unallocated username and supplying a password. If you create a user called Muhammad Ali and start talking about boxing, Twitter won't be checking if you were really rumbling in the jungle with George Foreman in 1974.

An account was recently set up in the name of Internet legend Vinton Cerf, which was eventually suspended by Twitter staff once it became clear that the account a front promoting auction search sites. Security guru Bruce Schneier recently had to post on his blog that

This account "bruceschneier," is not me. This account "schneier," is me. I have never posted; I don't promise that I ever will.

This impersonation problem is not unique to Twitter but people are starting to treat the information received as authoritative. The real point is that enough people are creating data capital in web 2.0 that can be wiped out with a few bad posts - pre-Web 2.o famous people can just shrug it off. Highlights the problem of lack of a general Internet authentication mechanism, and perhaps also reminiscent of cybersquatting with respect to domain names looking for a big sale if the service went well. However in this case there is a better vetting process then with Twitter that is using the honour system.

Recently the first phishing scam emerged on Twitter which directed users to a Twitter look-a-like page registered in China and tried to phish out passwords. The author comments that

This may go without saying, but consider how many third-party Twitter services you use? Seems it’s about time for some kind of verification / validation for applications using the Twitter API - so you can be sure you’re passing your credentials to the right people. I’m guessing this particular phishing scam is not using the API (but there’s no way for a user to properly verify).

Indeed there is a Twitter ecosystem developing which to participate usually requires that you give in your Twitter username and password. The problem of authentication is not just restricted to twitter users but Twitter applications as well.

I have gathered quite a few references to risks facing Twitter and I will post more on this topic later this month.

Related Posts

• Twitter as Your Personal Content Proxy
• Scoble's Law of Twitter
  

Moore's Lore and Attention Crash

In his 2007 article on Attention Crash, Steve Rubel predicts an imminent bursting of the web 2.0 information bubble since our attention does not scale in proportion to our inputs

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

I assume Rubel is referring to the generic notion of scheduled exponential growth which Moore's Law has come to symbolize in the microprocessor industry, and more generally, the computing industry as a whole. The metaphor is more apt than perhaps the author originally intended.

Moore's Lore

Moore's Law, formulated in 1965, states that transistor density will double every 1 - 2 years. By 1970 Moore's Law was being interpreted as computer processing capability doubling every few years - a subtle change in prediction from exponential component decrease to exponential processing increase. The latter knows no bounds while the former operates in the physical world dominated by fundamental constraints and hard limits.

Moore's Law recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with much fanfare in 2005. We can divide this history into 3 epochs which we will call the Narrative, Prophecy and Legacy epochs. During the Narrative epoch Moore's Law provided an accurate description of advances in the microchip industry - graphing the data followed his predicted curve. During the Prophecy epoch, Moore's Law became more of an industry mission statement rather than a narrative. The industry was actively planning and investing to fulfil Moore's Law and it came to symbolize the advancement and promise of the industry as a whole. Ensuring the next doubling of processor speed became mission critical.

In the final epoch of Legacy, our epoch, the assumptions of Moore's Law are in decline. The reason is that chip makers are approaching the fundamental limits of increasing computer processing speeds through crafting smaller components. The hardest limit is simply that component size bottoms out at the molecular or atomic scale - nothing can be made smaller that follows the same physics. Further, issues with power consumption, chip cooling and production costs will invalidate the assumption that smaller components are the most cost effective strategy to increase processing capability. In fact, Mr. Moore's Intel is already delivering dual-core and quad-core processors which increase computing power by providing more chips per device rather than more transistors per chip. The future then lies with more chips of a given complexity not with a chip of increased complexity. So Moore's Law may actually be maintained but not for the reasons that Moore predicted.

Fundamental Attention Limits

When we start out connecting, subscribing or otherwise attaching ourselves to new web information sources, we are able to absorb a great deal of new information. We may even begin participating in the production of additional web content for distribution and consumption. We feel more informed, more empowered, and more enamoured with the promise of the omnipotent web. The web 2.0 narrative has worked its magic and we tacitly commit into a seemingly virtuous circle of information inflation.

After a honeymoon period we start to feel the burden of keeping up appearances on the web. We still subscribe to new feeds, extend our blogroll, sign-up for new services like Twitter, embed ourselves in social networks, fret about our followers and labour over posts. In our peripheral vision the virtuous circle is acquiring a vicious hue. The web 2.0 narrative becomes more belief and prophecy than tangible benefit. But belief and prophecy can be strong motivations and we continue on connecting, subscribing and participating in new web information sources.

After passing through the Narrative and Prophecy epochs, we finally reach the Legacy epoch, where our initial assumptions are invalidated. As with Moore's assumption that computing components can be exponentially decreased for the foreseeable future, the initial assumption that our time and attention can be exponentially fragmented into smaller meaningful units collapses. While this took 40 years in the case of Moore's Law, we live on compressed and accelerating Internet time, and this lesson can be learnt from one birthday to the next.

Unfortunately as humans we don't have the luxury of switching to dual- or quad-core brains. We are stuck with one and its inherent capacity to process at a given rate of input and granularity. A Sub-Time Crisis is upon us and we need a bailout, or at least the presence of mind to opt out.

Related Posts

• The Cobbler and The Shoe Assassin
• The Restaurant at the End of the Web
• Twitter as Your Personal Content Proxy
• Scoble's Law of Twitter

Social Media Data in Flight and at Rest

Adam Singer over at the TheFutureBuzz blog has published 49 statictics on social media usage - you thought he may have striven to find one more to round it out to 50! He remarks that

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the Internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.

Sometimes it is easy to get lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

Some of the notable statistics include

• 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index
• 2,000,000,000 (two billion) - very rough number of Google searches daily
• 684,000,000 - the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
• 112,486,327 - number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)
• 133,000,000 - number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 1,111,991,000 - number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)
• 150,000,000 - number of active Facebook users
• 700,000,000 - number of photos added to Facebook monthly

My personal favourite is that it would take someone just over 412 years take to view all the content on YouTube that was available in March 2008. By now, you can probably add a few more centuries.