Machine speak and the battle for the soul of Twitter
Chris Messina’s post on the debate over machine-readable tweets is a densely-layered delight and really required reading for anyone curious about the future of Twitter and social search. In a nutshell, the guy who invented Twitter hashtags is arguing that an attempt to come up with a standardized, machine-readable lexicon for Twitter isn’t such a hot idea. “My greatest concern is that there won’t be enough people who can “speak” the “tweaked” syntax, leading to a lot of effort spent building parsers that will be data-starved,” he writes.
I think he’s right and wrong at the same time.
Turning Twitter into an algebra problem would be a huge mistake. As someone who uses Twitter to communicate with friends, rather than share info (I do enough of that at work) I can’t see myself bothering to learn a machine-friendly lexicon. It would be madness stuffed with discomfort.
But it could a fantastic basis for some other, new sort of social network. Imagine a sort of amalgamation of Digg, Twitter and Facebook that had tools in place to help ordinary users translate whatever was on their minds into machine speak. Now imagine all of those standardized messages, correlating with one another in a data-cloud. It could provide a unique window into our collective unconscious. We’re talking noosphere. Or it could just be another really cool way to do market research. Either way, I’m perilously close to having a nerd black-out from the excitement. Imagine the possibilities. Dream with me.
Does use machine-babble on Twitter have any hidden upsides I’m not considering? Would you use a network that translated your updates into machine-readable messages — provided you never had to learn the language? Am I off my rocker on this one?
Image credit, Elenathewise, via iStock
Posted by Andrew Hansen on January 19th, 2010 at 11:04 am
I think the key is the customer experience. Twitter is easy to learn and use, and has to remain that way to stay viable and grow its reach and impact. Any added step between tweeter and tweeting is likely to cause lower perceived value, not raise it. An alternative to the extra step you suggest might be an option within Twitter itself (and the various tweeting platforms) to create a machine-friendly version of tweets. I’d add that if these machine-readable tweets laced with code and technobabble, then they should be hidden somehow. So only the machines that can read them are likely to see them. The human-readable versions would be what the end-users see.
Posted by Jesse Stanchak on January 19th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Andrew — I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m all about the technology — I just never want to see it. Funny how that works.
Posted by Chris Messina on January 19th, 2010 at 11:44 am
Y’know, a long time ago I really wanted to turn Twitter into a mobile, social command line. I still think this might be possible or even useful for power users, but as I pointed out in my post, a lot of people have a hard enough time “remembering to use hashtags” that I’m skeptical that the effort put into the command-linization of Twitter would actually pay off…
That’s not to say the idea doesn’t have merit, but that Twitter might be the wrong tool for the job.
See also: http://yubnub.org/
Posted by Jesse Stanchak on January 19th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Chris — You gave me a lot to think about today. I’m sure this is an idea I’ll come back to again before too long. I’m a bit of futurist, so I can’t help but get excited by the possibilities — but I think you’re right to put usability at the forefront. Maybe I’m putting the cart before the horse. Thanks for passing along Yubnub.
Posted by » Blog Archive on January 22nd, 2010 at 8:52 am
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Posted by Chris Messina on February 5th, 2010 at 2:40 am
Y'know, a long time ago I really wanted to turn Twitter into a mobile, social command line. I still think this might be possible or even useful for power users, but as I pointed out in my post, a lot of people have a hard enough time “remembering to use hashtags” that I'm skeptical that the effort put into the command-linization of Twitter would actually pay off…
That's not to say the idea doesn't have merit, but that Twitter might be the wrong tool for the job.
See also: http://yubnub.org/