Is Twitter A BlogBuster?
It seems like these days everyone tweets (except for me, I hate Twitter). I won’t be surprised if people start having 140 characters conversations (I’m sure mobile companies would hate that idea). And to be honest, to this day, I can’t understand why would anyone want to express themselves in such a limiting medium.
Twitter has been around for a couple of years. When it first came out, it was a geek thing. Many asked themselves what was the point of twitting. You want to share something with others? Write a blog, send an email, call a friend. Never the less, Twitter caught on like a Californian wildfire.
Much of the blame on Twitter’ss success can be attributed to tech blogs. They pushed it early, when no one else was really interested. They thought it was cool and used it to complement their blog’s content. Whenever a blogger felt lazy, they’d just twitt something meaningless and make their news-addicted, Ritalin-induced readers momentarily happy.
But then something unexpected happened - Twitter started becoming more popular than the blogs that created all the buzz around it. Readers attention span became shorter and shorter. The crowd wanted quick, short updates. And before you know it, blogs became arcane - too much information, too infrequent updates, too late. Bloggers had to adjust. How? by writing shorter posts, more frequently. On a long enough timeline, they’ll turn to yet another Twitter account.
When that happens, many blogs will disappear. Readers will become less interested in long, insightful articles. They’d want the punchline, without the setup, and the sooner they get it, the better. Bloggers will shift from producing quality content to looking for instant, exclusive content. And they will lose, because a single blog, as powerful as it may be, cannot compete against the gigabytes of information generated by the crowds at any given moment. Today,a tech blogger has his ’sources’ within a company that leaks exclusive inside information. Tomorrow, that source will just twitt the news, anonymously. Twitter shortens the time information flows from the point of creation to the point of perception by cutting the middleman (bloggers, reporters).
You could argue that what bloggers do is reduce the entropy of systems like Twitter - with so much information flowing out of Twitter, it’s almost impossible to filter out the noise. Google reduced the entropy of the world wide web, using a unique, very simple idea - use weighted backlinks to determine the quality of a data source (e.g. Pagerank of a web page). The next Google type service will be able to identify the most reliable, accurate and timely sources of information on Twitter, and present it to users. I’m sure there are already services trying to achieve this, but when one of these services will create the wow factor (the same one that Google created when it first launched), news, sports and technology blogs will become totally irrelevant.
In one of our next posts, we will try to describe how such a service, our BlogBuster, should look like. Register to our RSS feed to read more about our Twitter BlogBuster and other technology news.
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