Clicking and Screaming

Consultant and web-person Malcolm Coles booted an internet storm into action last week with a controversial guest post at the Online Journalism Blog suggesting that newspapers should turn off their RSS feeds.

My newspaper futures fetishism has died off a little in recent weeks, but the headline drew me in – as it seems to have done for many. At face value, it sounds like a step which is both backwards and radical. The management and monetisation of online content may well make or break newspapers over the next decade and to suggest that they begin by abandoning the very technology which allows them to spread their wares sounds worryingly counter-productive.

RSS v Twitter

Of course, Malcolm isn’t arguing that newspapers simply post a story up and hope a combination of paid advertising and loyal readerships bring in the traffic. He wants them to use Twitter instead, a strategy he advocates because retweeting allows readers to separate the wheat from the chaff and helps promote the paper, Twitter can provide context despite its restrictive format and stories can be tracked.

For me, none of that is relevant because it can all be done – with varying levels of efficiency, admittedly – through RSS and related services. However, Malcolm’s final reason is an important one: Twitter allows a newspaper to engage in conversation after tweeting a story. This is a good thing.

But surely a Twitter feed and an RSS feed are not mutually exclusive? Why not get the best of both worlds?

Bad at RSS?

Newspapers, by and large, haven’t quite cracked RSS feeds yet, and this is the crux of Malcolm’s post. Subscriber numbers are low, and yet the number of feeds pumped out by newspapers is increasing. There is no doubt that they could be doing much more with their feeds, which should begin with better organisation and more flexible user-friendly management. The Guardian is leading the way on this.

Malcolm began by saying that there is little point in heavily promoting a tool on every page if one isn’t going to educate the readers in how to use it. However, turning the tool off rather than improving that education seems like the wrong way to deal with a readership’s lack of connection with a newspaper’s feeds. The papers need to promote RSS itself as well as their feeds, a point with which Malcolm agrees, as he has clarified since.

For me, the key to boosting newspapers’ RSS capabilities is more prominent links to feeds, a programme of general RSS education and promotion, and better organisation of the feeds available.

Waste of resources?

The problem, according to Malcolm’s post, is that these redundant feeds are wasting the newspapers’ resources. But I don’t think this is a problem with RSS as such, rather a problem with how it’s been implemented within the websites of major media outlets. Many seem to have treated it as an added gimmick early on, before really understanding what it does and how people want to use it. Used properly, RSS could be a vital tool in the newspapers’ battle for survival.

So why leave RSS feeds on? Because newspaper readers, as they continue to take their content online, will subscribe – but only if they know what it is and how it works. It’s in the papers’ interests to share that knowledge.

I also have a slight issue with the concept of ’subscribers’. Quite apart from the massively unreliable measurement from which subscription numbers suffer, the idea ignores the more complicated and creative uses of RSS. By shunning the chance to appear in search feeds, for example, the newspapers could be missing a trick. In other words, the investment is outweighed by the (potential) benefits. It just needs to be set up and marketed properly.

The climbdown

After fending off a wave of negative and occasionally over-the-top comments, Malcolm published a climbdown. As it turns out, Malcolm and I aren’t so very far apart in our assessment of the situation (but kudos to him for bringing it to our attention). He’s just paid the price for gambling on a linkbaity headline.

There is better to come from RSS, and there’s no reason why the (correct) use of Twitter should rule it out. But it’s in the interests of the newsmakers to make it work.

We’ve not talked about Wikipedia for a while but a couple of interesting articles caught my eye over the past few days which give a fascinating insight into the sort of person that dedicates their evenings to sharing and perfecting human knowledge.

The first came via Nicholas Carr, who flagged a piece from the New Scientist that looked at the psychological make up of regular contributors to the mass-collaboration project. Mainly the Israeli based researchers found that Wikipedians tend to be ‘disagreeable and closed to new ideas’ . Headed up by the wonderfully named Yair Amichai-Hamburger, Sammy Ofer School of Communication in Herzliya, Israel, the study surveyed 69 Israeli Wikipedians and compared them with 70 students, who matched them in age and internet usage.

The questionnaire aimed to establish if they felt more comfortable expressing themselves in the real world or online. Of the five main traits examined, openness to experience and ideas, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, Wikipedians scored lowest on agreeableness and openess. Leading Amichai-Hamburger to suggest that perhaps those pedantic tireless editors are not being altruistic, but rather compensating for not having a voice in the real world.

Which makes the following entry on a wikipedia discussion page perhaps slightly more understandable, if not any less palatable*.

What happened is just ridiculous. A man’s life doesn’t justify censorship of informations on Wikipedia. What are good reasons for censorship? The ones that Jimmy Wales chooses? What if someone who has ‘power’ decides that something must not be published, for his alleged “good reasons”. A life perhaps has been saved (are we sure that it was because of the media blackout?), but Wikipedia’s neutrality and freedom has been seriously undermined. Not counting the fact that the New York Times editor, with only several phone calls, succeeded in making all the other media not to publish the news.

Anonymous

The incident to which the anonymous user refers is the kidnap of New York Times reporter, David Rohde, by the Taliban  in November 2008. Following the kidnapping of Rohde and his driver, the NYT believed that publicity would increase Rohde’s value to his captors and negatively impact on his treatment and chances of survival. Keeping the story out of the mainstream news meant a discreet editor-to-editor phone call, keeping it our of Rohde’s wiki entry was far more of a battle. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, became involved at the behest of the NYT and he arranged for  Rodhe’s entry to be monitored. It was edited several times over the following months, usually anonymously and frequently from the same, similar, group of IP addresses, believed to be from Florida.

Last Saturday, Rohde escaped, prompting NYT to email Wales prior to making the news public. Wales personally unfroze Rohde’s entry only for  the anonymous editor to post information about the kidnap and subsequent escape with the following note.

“Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.”

Wales stated in the NYT article about the difficulties of suppressing the news on Wikipedia that they had no idea who the editor was or if they had no ill intent but they had no way of reaching out to tell them why they kept deleting their entries. I don’t know if it was the same person who posted that they felt that the life of one person does not justify censorship but it lends a tad more colour to Amichai-Hamburger’s study of the personality characteristics of wikipedia members

UPDATE: The talk page behind Rohde’s entry has evolved into a fascinating discussion on censorship and ethics and is well worth a read.

At Westminster today, the House of Commons is electing a new speaker following the increasingly hilarious decline of Michael Martin. Of course, things are a little different these days and Twitter – as if we wouldn’t have guessed – is playing a part in proceedings.

Public figures, by and large, are pretty terrible at Twitter and offer almost no value to followers. Richard Bacon, for example, obsesses to the point of madness about Twitter but essentially contributes nothing to the community. Proper celebrities, on the other hand, might as well ring my doorbell and tell me what they’re up to in person – I still wouldn’t care.

But some Members of Parliament are making a decent fist of things and seem to have developed a knack of actually saying something worthwhile. Rather than punting out platitudes, a selection of tweeting MPs have today actually given some insight into what’s happening behind the scenes at an important political event. I know from experience that the Houses of Parliament aren’t exactly a thrill a minute, but today’s vote will have repercussions and it’s great to get little morsels of insider info.

In truth, much of what’s being tweeted by our representatives is hardly breaking anything we can’t find out ourselves by switching on BBC Parliament, but the veneer of opinion adds a fascinating element. The easy way to follow comments now that a hashtag seems to have finally been settled upon is by watching #newspeaker.

So what are our esteemed representatives saying, and why does it matter?

Some, like Kerry McCarthy, are giving us commentary with plenty of side. Cracking stuff:

“The first of the Sir Alans is on. The Lib Dem variety. Dull. #newspeaker Now it’s Bercow. “Speaker should be virtually senile”, he was told.”

Jim Knight is following a similar approach:

“Beckett setting out her stall – experience, capable of implementing change, stateswoman, Parliamentarian … Tempting”

I’m proud to say that my local MP, Sadiq Khan, made his vote public and denounced tribal politics during moments of constitutional importance:

“Election of new Speaker today – I’ll be voting for John Bercow. As I said on the Politics Show, this is not a time for tribal politics…”

Even better, two tweeting Toms, Harris and Watson, have provided interesting insight into today’s Parliamentary procedure and linked it into blog posts and pictures, including this display of Tom Harris’ culinary preferences by his Watson-based namesake.

I suppose the fact that these people actually matter is the difference between their mundane tweets and the mundane tweets of Ashton bloody Kutcher. I don’t care what Kutcher is discussing over lunch, but for some reason it’s more interesting when the topic is one which matters. I like knowing that MPs chat about this stuff over lunch. I like that they share their opinions with us and, by and large, engage better with the ensuing discussion than proper slebs.

So take note, celebrities and brands. As far as you’re concerned, Twitter is about furnishing us with background details to which we ordinarily have no access. That is where the value can be added: in the complementary context behind events of genuine interest or importance. Not that you’re having a cup of tea with Danny Wallace.

It’s official! MySpace, the social networking website of choice for many a young person a few years ago, is entering a period of serious and vital introspection. As a final year student just as Facebook began to take hold of the higher education market in the UK, I signed up for Zuckerberg’s monster and gradually phased out my MySpace account. It is now deleted. And when Facebook opened the gates to non-students MySpace users – anecdotally at least – began to move on. Everyone I know certainly did.

And sure enough MySpace – owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – has been through a difficult week. First, Facebook overtook MySpace as the number one social networking website for users in the United States, a sure sign that the site’s decline must now be addressed. And then, that action began: new CEO Owen Van Natta announced that the company is cutting around 400 jobs, leaving behind a workforce of about 1,000.

It’s worth considering the natural life-cycle of the pre-Facebook social networking website. It seems to me that many sites have followed a similar pattern, including Friends Reunited, Friendster and, now, Myspace. Before Facebook, the successful social networking website typically launched, grew, became the next big thing, tipped and then got usurped. I say ‘before Facebook’ because Facebook is now so ubiquitous that it will break that pattern. But then we said the same about MySpace.

I also think the average web user is beginning to overdose on social networking sites. Had MySpace v Facebook occurred five years earlier, it’s possible that more of us would have retained both, joining Facebook along with everyone else while continuing to enjoy MySpace’s greater flexibility, youthfulness and focus on music. Today, the MySpace generation is increasingly eligible for LinkedIn, and we also have to balance our pure social networking with the latest and greatest which, these days, tend not to stand alone as fully-functioning social networks (Twitter).

So what on earth can MySpace do to save itself?

Continue reading ‘How music could save MySpace’

I’ve read enough ghost stories to know that when you disturb a buried skull whose previous owner died a violent death, you’d better put that thing back where it came from and walk away, lest you leave the surrounding area with a screaming skull. Or something. So when I read about the discovery of a mass grave in Dorset, not far from where I grew up, I posted a throwaway tweet about how I wouldn’t live anywhere near it unless they were left alone.

The bodies, and their separate skulls, were unearthed on Ridgeway Hill – in the shadow of Europe’s largest Iron Age hill fort, Maiden Castle – during preparation work on the Weymouth relief road, which is being built for the 2012 Olympics (Weymouth’s hosting some of the water-based events). And little did I know when I posted my facetious tweet that I’d soon be writing the road’s blog up as a potentially good case study in local council engagement. Spooky, huh?

That’s right, tarmac fans – the Weymouth Relief Road has its very own blog! Large road developments like this one are notoriously difficult in terms of opposition, nimbyism and even protest, though I’ve heard of no protests against the £87m road in Dorset.

As a result, engaging with local residents is desirable and beneficial. And as Andy Ackerman, Dorset County Council’s head of highways, noted to the BBC, a blog is one tool which can be used to do so. The public, says Ackerman, wants its information in different ways.

Click here to view the Weymouth Relief Road blog.

This case study is slightly unusual in that it will sing the praises of a blog which is just three posts and 10 days old. How much content is posted, and how much success it has, remains to be seen over time. But the theory behind aspects of the blog is sound.

Why so good?

There are many things I like about this blog. It’s on WordPress, not tacked onto the council’s website like some forgotten add-on. This helps to increase the council’s digital footprint and also encourages proper integration into the rest of the web, though this does not happen automatically. The tone, so vitally important to a good blog, seems personable and easy-going. For a blog covering important but painfully dull content, that’s essential.

Part of the integration into the social web involves hosting relevant content on social sites. While I’m not entirely convinced that Dorset’s residents will be overly interested in photos or videos of digging, but the technique here is excellent. Widgets have been placed on the blog showing Flickr photos and Vodpod videos, and linking to the relevant Flickr and Vodpod channels. Again, this creates an extended footprint and better social web integration. It also provides a path to the council’s other photos and videos.

In blogging, brevity is a virtue (and is something I’m bloody awful at). So far, the posts on the relief road blog have been brief and to the point. That’s a good thing for readers, particularly when the content is potentially so dry – pineapples excluded.

Any problems?

All is not perfect, however, and there are some recommendations I’d make to improve the blog. It could, for example, link to a selection of local blogs – I’ve not checked, but I can guarantee a few will exist. A more prominent RSS link would be advisable, as would a named author (for transparency purposes and also to encourage readers to relate to a human).

In my opinion, posting should be more regular. Even on a day when there is nothing to relate, rich content can be used to keep the site ticking over. A 30-second daily video of the construction work, or a brief slideshow of progress, would augment the occasional commentary and let visitors know that the blog remains alive.

All of this assumes a certain level of budget – not huge, but still possibly prohibitive – behind the project. Having said that, if someone is on-site anyway then shooting a minute of footage with a Flip camera isn’t a lot to ask. Top-level buy-in would be a perhaps insurmountable issue.

On top of all that, this blog must be promoted offline.

Uncertainty

Of course, it’s possible that this post is about a blog which dies a sudden and unnoticed death. But the framework is there for a good project and the thinking behind it is similar to my own. It will be interesting to see how it develops over the coming weeks.

The UK’s little corner of the blogosphere is pulsating today with analysis and comment on The Digital Britain Report, the blueprint for widespread improvement in the nation’s online, wireless and mobile infrastructure. So much has already been said, from the effect it will have on copyright in the music industry to the spread of mobile access on the London Underground, but I’d like to focus on one aspect: the increased speed and penetration of broadband.

To give a very brief bit of background, the report was preceded earlier this year by an interim report which identified five objectives. Number five, according to the new report’s executive summary, was:

“Securing universal access to broadband, increasing its take-up and using broadband to deliver more public services more effectively and more efficiently.”

The broadband speed currently is subject to geographical variations but averages out at 3.2 megabits per second (Mbps). It is faster in London but much slower in Northern Ireland, and areas distant from BT exchanges struggle to get broadband at all. This, of course, impacts greatly on rural areas.

Universal broadband access, then, is a big challenge for the UK. But providing as many people as possible with fast broadband is perhaps even more difficult. Somewhat surprisingly, Lord Carter’s report had an answer, and it’s one that’s been met with mixed reactions:

“The Government believes the fairest and most efficient means of ensuring that the overwhelming majority of the country has access to next generation broadband is to share some of that saving and create an independent Next Generation Fund, based on a supplement of 50 pence per month on all fixed copper lines. The Fund will be available on a tender basis to any operator to deliver and will provide a part subsidy for the deployment of next generation broadband to the ‘final third’ of homes and small businesses, bringing the cost of the initial deployment to the same level that operators face in the commercially economic parts of the market.”

In a nutshell, that’s a levy of 50p per month (£6 per year) paid by every person with a landline to contribute to a fund which goes towards the infrastructure expansion required to provide high speed broadband to as many people as possible. One third of the country would not be reached by commercial efforts to introduce super duper fast interwebs. Importantly, this should reduce the difference in quality of broadband between urban and rural areas.

This sounds sensible enough on the face of it but there are complications.

Politically, the move is bound to face opposition. In the UK we are witnessing the death throes of an increasingly unpopular government and one which is perceived by many to have squandered billions of pounds on a war which the public has disowned with the benefit of hindsight. It has also grown wary (and indeed weary) of “stealth taxes”, which is one criticism already levelled at this levy. How a tax which is called a tax and spoken about as a tax can be accused of being a “stealth” tax is beyond me, but hey, some people just like to moan.

Given the possible benefits (”Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholders’ Group, believes the tax will mean that 90% of the UK will be able to benefit from broadband of up to 50Mbps by 2017″), £6 a year is a minuscule payment. However, the nature of the criteria for taxation means that plenty of people with no interest in broadband whatsoever, particularly, I suspect, the elderly.

Then of course there are the people who oppose this on the grounds that they believe in tax cuts and a free market generally, and those that believe that government should redirect this money from elsewhere.

But all considered I think this is a decent proposal. The objective requires a bold solution, and this is a relatively inoffensive one. If it gives me fast broadband then I’m all for it. What does it mean for PR? Faster broadband enables richer and more innovative content. Let’s make the most of it.

This was supposed to be one of those posts which gleefully exposed a company for bad digital practice, pointing out that I’d have done a much better job and they’re very naughty. I was over the moon when I caught a large (well, punching above its weight – temporarily) company out recently, and instantly began plotting their bloggy demise. But the professional in me put the brakes on, and I called their press office. That’s when things got a little strange…

Astroturfing

According to Wikipedia, astroturfing describes “political, advertising, or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous “grassroots” behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass”. In a nutshell, if I were to go onto a blog, assume an alias and make a comment singing the praises of Porter Novelli, or of a client, I’d be astroturfing.

Here in the digital team at PN, we really frown upon astroturfing. There are a number of reasons for this, the most important few being that a) social media thrive on transparency and we want to execute campaigns which fit that ethos, b) if web users are offended by it, we just can’t do it and c) you will get caught.

The guarantee of being caught out doesn’t seem to occur to some people. Belkin were caught red-handed in January, something I wrote about at the time.

I’m not going to name the company I caught for two reasons. First, their response – though it initially knocked me for six – made me think. Second, they offered to meet me to discuss how they could improve their social media approach. For a number of reasons this was an attractive proposition to me, so you’ll have to excuse me maintaining their anonymity.

Discovering the astroturfer

The company in question was a little unlucky to get caught, but it just highlights the fact that someone, somewhere will find astroturfers. One morning, they sent me a press release. I ignored it, as I always do from them, because of their agency’s appalling blog relations. Not five minutes later I was browsing a forum to which I have moderating rights and spotted the same story, apparently posted by a user, with suspiciously similar wording.

The user had posted only four times, the kind of number which always raises the alarm when posting links to big corporates. I checked the previous three, and two of them posted links to the same company’s site – and related to the previous two press releases they’d sent me. One IP check later, and I’d discovered that the user was posting from this company’s headquarters. Bang to rights.

I also checked Boardreader, and found that the same activity had been carried out by the same person on three different sites. To the best of my knowledge, those site owners still have no idea. I did ask the company to make their activity known to the relevant sites.

The baffling response

Rather than go straight for the throat, I got in touch with the company’s press office, who quickly passed me on to the relevant contact, who kindly called me that afternoon. His response horrified me initially. I’d been expecting “we’ll find out who it is and have a word” but what I got was effectively “yes it was us, we’ve been doing it for a while”. It’s a signed off strategy!

But further into the conversation, my contact said something that got me thinking. The company in question had tried to engage with these web forums through accepted routes, but had met with a mute response. So they went ahead and posted anyway.

“Well,” said my contact on the phone. “Them not responding doesn’t change the fact that we need to engage with their members”.

In a way, he’s right. His objective is to engage with the members of a particular set of forums (a notoriously suspicious and difficult bunch, as it happens), and it’s not his job to maintain the integrity of the social web. So b*llocks to it. I have to say, that point makes a lot of sense to me even if I don’t agree with it.

What that does ignore, of course, is the possibility of getting caught and the ensuing PR crisis. It’s only been avoided in this case because one person is willing to concede that the company was wrong and agreed to a meeting.

So is it ever okay to astroturf? Setting aside the PR issue, is it ever possible to just say “sod it” and ignore the unwritten rules of the web? After all, you’ve got targets, right?

I still think it’s always wrong, for what it’s worth.

Read about Porter Novelli’s partnership with Entrepreneur Country at PR Week.

I’m delighted to report that Porter Novelli has announced its partnership with Entrepreneur Country. We’re excited by the partnership and it’s great to finally be able to write about it at Clicking & Screaming. To quote the press release from our lovely marketing team:

“Porter Novelli joins a list of likeminded companies across a number of industry sectors who have come together in partnership with Entrepreneur Country in order to support and nurture the game-changing businesses which will help drive the UK out of recession. Through a shared vision, Porter Novelli will help Entrepreneur Country shape the dialogue, create the connections and build a momentum that will give both new companies and SMEs a platform to build Entrepreneur-Led economic growth within the UK over the coming decade.”

Entrepreneur Country is a 27,000-strong community of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners and media which aims to support UK entrepreneurs. It was founded by Ariadne Capital CEO Julie Meyer, who has an impressive track record in this area and we’re proud to be working with Entrepreneur Country as global public relations partner.

“When Julie first approached Porter Novelli and outlined her vision, we were keen be involved. This is a great opportunity for Porter Novelli to be part of an ecosystem of companies who share the same belief and have come together to support the UK’s most innovative and exciting young businesses by giving them the inspiration and tools they need to succeed.” – Jean Wyllie, Managing Director of Porter Novelli UK

We will also be working with Julie on Ariadne Capital and BBC Dragons Den Online, which sees her step into the role of the entrepreneurs who helped make the BBC’s television series so popular.

I’m especially pleased to be working with Julie because she knows PR and, having been an account executive on the SpinVox account once upon a time, it’s fantastic to see that even Ariadne Capital (of which SpinVox is a portfolio company) has noticed the work we’ve done with a great client.

“For Entrepreneur Country, I could only work with the best. I had to choose Porter Novelli. What they have done with and for SpinVox, one of Ariadne’s portfolio companies is world class. They are redefining the business of PR and we wanted them on our side.” – Julie Meyer, Entrepreneur Country

Back in 2005, Business Week nailed its colours firmly to the mast of the good ship Blogosphere with its cover article ‘Blogs will change your business‘. While the magazine’s early(ish) recognition of the value of blogging should be respected and its grasp on the possibilities for business blogging applauded, the article itself carries claims no truer today than they were four years ago.

Make no mistake, blogging can be a big deal for the right company which finds the right blogger. Jonathan Schwartz turned around the fortunes of Sun with his corporate blog. Robert Scoble gave us a glimpse of the inner workings of The Borg with Channel 9, a video blog with unprecedented levels of access at Microsoft.

But a few high-profile successes shouldn’t twist our view of corporate blogging. Here at Porter Novelli, we believe in corporate blogging. However, it’s not right for everyone – and if I advised a client to blog for the sake of it and then saw a blog dying on its arse for lack of (engaging) content, I’d be mortified. It’s vital to ask yourself a whole bunch of questions before embarking upon such a project, ranging from “can I provide content as regularly as I like?” to “isn’t this stuff more suited to a press release?”

Twitter, of course, is subject to similar levels of hype.

Along with early adopters, PR and marketing folk have been particularly enthusiastic about this new channel for a while. In the last 6-8 months, Twitter has gone unmistakably mainstream. In the UK, a mention on national daytime television by ‘This Morning’ presenter Phillip Schofield (@schofe) was quickly followed up by the long-awaited television return of Jonathan Ross (@wossy), in which he discussed the virtues of Twitter with fellow celeb-Tweeter Stephen Fry (@stephenfry).

The realisation that they could tweet with celebrities alerted the easily entertained British public to the site, and its UK user base went through the roof – briefly. Globally, the Ashton Kutcher nonsense has dragged Twitter right into the public consciousness.

The Twitter talk has been bubbling for years now. Back in 2007, TIME had a slightly haphazard crack at explaining the burgeoning phenomenon. Since then, it’s been the subject of countless predictions, critiques and theories – some good, some bad – and is loved and mistrusted in equal measure.

How Twitter will change the way we live

At the back end of last week, the headline of another TIME piece on Twitter matched the bombast of Business Week’s famous blogging story.

But is Twitter going to change the way we live? Is Steven Johnson at TIME exaggerating, or are we talking about a truly disrupting subversive technology?

The first thing to point out is that the TIME article does suffer from the usual over-the-top complaints about the apparent “banality” of Twitter. At best, this perceived problem warrants a small mention. But the media’s constant harping about the infamous “breakfast” tweets shows a lack of insight and a staggering ability to buy in to lowest common denominator assumed wisdom. That’s clearly not the case with this author, which is why it’s a little disappointing to see it given top billing in this article – even though it’s to provide contrasting points.

And if I read another Twitter article that uses the word “Oprah” I might start frothing at the mouth.

However, as mainstream media explanations of Twitter go, this is a pretty good piece. Johnson expresses what many Twitter fans struggle to explain in the site’s defence when people don’t “get it” straight away. As he points out, Twitter makes a bad first impression and many (most?) users experience an early skepticism which is created by a few minutes of looking at a screen, empty otherwise, showing a tweet which tells you that you’ve just signed up for Twitter and “how does this thing work?”.

Johnson is also right to say that once that skepticism has been overcome Twitter has “unsuspected depth”. The site has organically developed its own culture and uses, and the functionality itself has been changed through grassroots innovations which have then been picked up and formally integrated (e.g. hashtags).

He deftly identifies one of these cultural developments. Twitter is fast becoming a useful web discovery tool (a “pointing device”) which thrives on shared links. Because of its opt-in nature, Twitter ensures that the many links now sent out as a matter of course go through two levels of quality control (you choose who to follow, and they only send out links they value). This is more powerful than it may sound, and Google will be well aware of Twitter’s growing use as a discovery site.

The piece also gives a neat explanation of the usefulness of third party applications such as search.twitter.com, Twhirl and Tweetdeck. The beauty of Twitter, I believe, is in its population and its portability. I don’t have to use the website, I am alerted to tweets by an application on my desktop. Were I of a mind – and many people are – I could read and post to Twitter on my mobile phone. That is why Twitter has immediacy, and that’s how one day it (or more realistically its characteristics) just might change the way we live.

Here are the major changes mentioned in TIME:

News and opinion

“Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar…will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.”

Personally, I think that’s feasible. I already take a fairly large proportion of my news via Twitter, though it’s far from being my “networked front page”. The diversity v polarisation point is a good one, though I would argue that letting the inquisitive nature of other humans – even those selected for their similar tastes of beliefs – rule your reading will still lead to a wider range of topics taken in.

The collaborative approach to news is already here, and Johnson is right to see a future for it.

Searching

“As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google’s approach to the search. If you’re looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you’re looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.”

While I agree that this is probably very true for some (there’s that “echo chamber” mentioned previously), I think there is a danger here of ignoring both the needs and skills of the average web user and the immense power of Google. Yes, if you know or happen to be in touch with a subject authority, going direct works. But I make hundreds of random searches a day on Google and I couldn’t possibly follow that many people on Twitter. I could search Twitter to get more up to date results, but I just can’t see Twitter rivalling Google in a search for general info. I’m aware that I’m in a shrinking minority on that one – it’s not that I don’t think Twitter is massively useful, I just think Google or Bing (snigger) remains better for the kinds of searches I do all day long.

End-User Innovation

“Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It’s as if Twitter’s creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising.”

Here, I agree wholeheartedly. Twitter is a breeding ground for innovation, and the site itself benefits. There is also plenty of scope for the doing of good (Twestival, for example) and for political movements.

Although this post comes across as critical, I actually think Johnson’s article is a good one once you look past the headline – it’s just not worth repeating all the excellent points he makes.

The thing is, I think we’re all expecting a bit too much of Twitter. It’s a great thing, but let’s not drown it in bullsh*t. It won’t change the world or the way we live, though its immediacy and collaborative approach will be present in the tools that do. Until then, let’s just see it for what it is, not what we’re told it could be.