Twitter as collaborative filter
I don’t get the point of twitter. Why do people tweet? So they can share their exciting lives with the rest of the world? So that they can keep in touch with friends? So that they can exercise an influence over others? So they can feel as part of some #community?
I think a good portion of the users are blatant advertisers and self/friend-promoters. Check out my article… check out this website (which my friend told me to twit about)…. check out this product….
Then there is the self-interested group of people. “Just had a meeting with so and so” ok… good for you bro, why are you telling the whole world about it? Why don’t you tweet every time you go to the restroom. “I just had a wonderful piss, it was necessary too because of all that #beer”.
Now since I don’t have a need to promote any website (yet?) and I don’t feel like blogging about the minutes of my daily life, I just don’t get twitter.
There is another cool aspect though and that is link-sharing, or if you prefer the more buzz-word like name “collaborative filtering”. If you find a cool article that you want to share, you can post it to twitter. Real time news fit into this. Links to good news articles too. Links to thoughtful blog posts also.
It would be interesting to have some “twitter app” that can separate the wheat from the chaff.
You still “follow” someone, but filter their vanity-tweets (a.k.a i did this and that…) and their promotion tweets.
What remains should be only quality material no?
One could even rate users based on their Signal-to-Noise ratio.