One word summed up my day on March 31, 2009

Unlike her older brothers, Matilda was pink, giving the homebirthing experience two thumbs up. Carter was home but hiding in another room (a choice that makes him tear up two years later), and Archie was blissfully romping around a friend’s kitchen after a sleepover. By the end of the morning, though, everyone had been properly introduced. Matilda’s support system was at full power.

Where’s the Ma~ in BlogSchmog?

This blog began 11 years ago in anticipation of our first child. Carter benefited from new technologies, like digital cameras, and greater free time to watch his digital footprint grow quickly. Archie, our second son, had fewer photos and posts. Our most recent period of blogging slack came at a bad time for Matilda. She is well documented on our twitter feeds, but there are only a handful of Matilda-related posts here on BlogSchmog:

• Caption Contest—Enter your captions for our first Matilda Megan post!
• Boys, girls, science and marketing—There’s no surprise that we’re not raising girls who think dangerous science could be fun- we’re too busy telling them cleaning is fun.
• Born to Boogie—While I’m quite certain Matilda has her own special dancing talent, it turns out, most babies do. From the Ice Age to present day, dancing and music have helped us not only have fun and connect, but also survive.

That trend may change soon. Matilda came back from a trip north to visit her aunt with much more conversational English. She counts from 2 to 9, and will generally make a go at anything she hears pronounced once. Matilda also slips in an extraneous “h” when telling people where to sit, which sends Nanna into giggles.

My first Matilda-focused blog post will highlight her two-week-old comprehension of joke telling:

Ma~: Knock-knock
Us: Who’s there
Ma~: Daddy
Us: Daddy who?
(pause)
Ma~: Knock-knock

or

Us: Knock-knock
Ma~: Who there?
Us: Daddy
Ma~: Oh (claps) Yay!

Happy birthday to my latest two-year-old.

Welcome to the world, Ma~

UPDATE 10/19/2009: Less than one year after writing this post, Twitter has zoomed past 5 billion. Granted, in addition to the nuances described for the 1B mark, Twitter has also artificially advanced the tweet ID count to deal with Twitpocalypse I and II. It will be a little while before Twitter actually reaches #5,000,000,000.

GigaTweet counts down to the billionth tweet

Australia’s Nathan Reed—who created popacular, a tool to that tracks popular links included in tweets over the past month—started a countdown clock over a month ago, projecting when tweet number 1 billion would show up. Presumably, it had been calibrated to account for the U.S. election surge in activity on Twitter, as it was within a few hundred of the actual status record IDs in the public timeline with an hour to go.

The honors go to someone with a private account, one the API won’t let me see. The first public tweet in 10 digits belongs to a bot (CrystalLake) that posted, “CL News: PR Newswire Summary of Technology Copy, Nov. 10, 2008 – StreetInsider.com (subscript.. http://snipr.com/5barm” at November 11, 2008 at 12:49a. The bot’s included link doesn’t lead anywhere. Sadly, the last public tweet with a 9-digit ID is also an automatic feed.

Very anticlimactic.

UPDATE 11/12: Blair Blends of Charlotte, North Carolina tricked the API into revealing the identity of the private account. Evidence from the API XML response is here.

It figures. Tweet 1,000,000,001 is a bot with bad link.

All of this is speculative, of course. Twitter keeps their official stats tight to the vest, and they have varied the ID count enough to be certain what will be celebrated as tweet 1 billion actually isn’t.

According to creator Jack Dorsey in late February 2007, the former CEO of Twitter claimed the first tweet at 4:02p on March 21, 2006 (“inviting coworkers”). That tweet was status update record ID 29, an indication that some tests were done on the database during development. Number one million is credited to rentzsch on February 28, 2007 at 10:07p. That record ID was 5764000. While Reed’s assumptions are reasonable, it is equally likely the real billionth tweet is still 3 or more days away.

Still, why quibble with success. Whether or not November 11, 2008 goes down in the history books as the day Twitter reached 10 digits in the tweet count, breaking that barrier is inevitable. Congratulations to Twitter on a fun ride, and to Nathan Reed for reminding us how far the community has come.

Who’s starting the clock to 1 trillion?

Joe Wurzelbacher: American plumber and internet meme

Watching a debate has never before been a social event of this magnitude. In addition to more traditional political gatherings to watch coverage, we now have microblogging—Twitter, in particular—to help give thousands of individuals a collective and immediate voice in the process. CNN pundits have to wait until the candidates finish talking before they can start telling the world what to think. For active Web 2.0 participants, the lag is measured in minutes, if not seconds. From John McCain’s lips to Twitter’s servers.

There were several ways in which debate tweeting was facilitated:

• Plodt, a new third-party application that uses codes in Twitter posts to track and graph user information, worked with NPR to create a real-time graph of responses to what was being said in the debate, as it was happening. What was most interesting about this was that Obama won 7.881 to 2.323 for McCain, which almost adds up to the 10 maximum scale of the graph without any requirement for that to happen. It is also interesting to see how participation dropped off in the second hour.
• The Twitter Election site, launched to coincide with the first presidential debate, filters the public timeline for tweets with keyword and hashtag references relevant to the national election. It is a push technology that allows the viewer to watch the tweets roll by without needing to refresh.
• Hack the Debate is a mashup of Twitter posts and live video of the debate from Current TV, broadcast online and through satellite and cable television. Using the hashtag #current, tweets were superimposed on the top of the two candidates, as they debated. A similar mashup with video microblogging platform, 12 seconds, is currently handling the post-debate response.

A fellow SOI grad student spent time Wednesday night capturing much of the data flowing through these channels for the two hours of live debate. We hope to produce some academic analysis of this phenom on several fronts, including how the lag time between broadcast speech and collective response propagates over the event.

Plodt and NPR teamed to create a live response to the debate

A map of digital identity. (source: Fred Cavazza)

Anonymity is one of the pillars of online communication. The ability to become someone else, mask some part of yourself, or lurk in the shadows increases paths to participation. The dark side of anonymity is irresponsibility, and we have already witnessed other social networks tackle Jon Swift problems by censoring their own communities to strengthen legitimacy. Even as we collectively accumulate personal profile pages that express our real identities, however, there are initiatives emphasizing anonymous disclosures. The Experience Project is designed around anonymity, asking members of the two-year-old community to connect through their experiences rather than extending existing social circles. In the end, though, this approach is about lowering barriers for people who could not otherwise participate in discussions. The impact of what is shared is dependent on the relationships we form with the identities we assign to ourselves and others.

The consequence of self-disclosure centers around the resilience of information.

Twitter, a microblogging service that exploded to a million members in about a year, uses the SMS constraint of 140 characters to lower the barriers to entry for potential authors. It is much easier to conceive of sharing a simple sentence or two than several paragraphs. The custom nature of the personal information stream (everyone can decide whose content they want to follow) implies a sense of control. However, the reality of Twitter is that the content is public. Even with private streams—where a member can require a mutual handshake before someone else can see their posts—the act of sharing content with anyone exponentially increases the likelihood that information will reach a public audience. The age of the intelligent web is here, and innocuous posts made in a semi-protected context one day can give rise to unexpected revelations in the future.

This has implications on future career paths, as comments in a Web Worker Daily article last September attest. Tim O’Reilly expects a Web 2.0 backlash and a return to private data. Perhaps. At the start of the year, Duncan Riley published a poll asking, should some things remain private in the age of lifestreaming. The nature of that flawed question led to a predictable response—less than 10% of respondents said “No”—and false evidence that we disclose too much about ourselves. A more relevant line of questioning would be what kinds of information should be private, for ourselves and from others.

Being naked isn’t only about what you publish online. Dartmouth’s Alice Mathias wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last fall that the only privacy setting in Facebook that mattered to her friends was the one revealing if they are logged in. She speculated that the ability to search anonymously is significantly more important than remaining anonymous when other people search: “If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town.”

Rob May had another take on the professional cost of social networking. Using the life of economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter as an illustration, May observed:

The web makes it easier than ever to connect with new people, but the flip side is that it also keeps us connected to people from earlier times… people who may not understand or support our goals. Is it possible that in some instances, social networks hold us back? In earlier times students could go away to school and carve their own path, but now with old friends judging every move we make, are we likely to be less unique, less aggressive, and perhaps not live up to our creative potential?

Molly Holzschlag prefers the term authenticity to transparency, criticizing the later as implying a reality that may not be present. There is some degree of self-censorship that goes into any interaction with the world, be it this blog, my Twitter account, or a conversation I have on campus. Throughout it all, I aim for authenticity. My own hypothesis is that greater transparency leads to more empathic censorship, not decisions to omit based on fear or power. Being open requires more awareness of our networks, which leads to a higher consciousness about communication.

Keeping track of locals depends on accurate self-disclosure.

My interest in Twitter revolves largely around microblogging as a conduit for strengthening local community. I routinely seek out Bloomington-area authors, adding them to a master list in the Hoosier Twitosphere and following many of them. Sometimes, it is reciprocated and our social circles join. We inspire each other through this ambient connection, planting the seeds of more meaningful relationships capable of addressing business, emotional and intellectual needs. None of this is possible without a transparent culture willing to share something as small but significant as their location.

The value of local connections cannot be underestimated. The impact of transparency is routinely exhibited on Homeless Man Speaks, a blog about a man experiencing homelessness in Toronto, as transcribed by a neighbor:

So, of course, the guy gets out of the car, of course he’s pissed at me, and I’m telling you, he’s six-foot-something and he’s got biceps that could crack walnuts. So he looks at down me and says: ‘I know you. You’re homelessmanspeaks.com.’

Small steps. The journey begins by gaining awareness of those around you.

What information do you keep private? What should others keep private?

source: The Gaping Void, by Hugh MacLeod (April 17, 2007)

Last week, Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web reflected on the evolution of personal publishing. He took inspiration from a claim by Twitter investor Fred Wilson that microblogging is something distinct, but grown naturally from blogging and social networking. Alex argues that sites like Twitter and Tumblr fill gaps in the space in between:

It represents a well known trend of verticalization. When new markets form they continue to be partitioned into niches. Since the gap between blogging and social networking was very wide, and the audience was quite different, microblogging emerged.

So impacting is this new channel that it has renewed the ongoing debate about the death of email. Twitter evangelists argue that email isn’t persistent, is indefensible against spam, and doesn’t work well for group interaction. Defenders of email see tweets as too short, lacking context, and potentially too low in signal-to-noise metrics. Robert Chien suggests email, while valuable, can learn a few things from Twitter, such as opening an API and adding permalinks to the mix.

Whether or not email remains the communications channel of choice, however, it is a fact that Twitter relies on email as part of its own backbone. As with most modern online communities, email is a minimal but effective means of verification that adds an important level of accountability and protection. Email exists allows Twitter to exist. It is also handy for getting around other barriers, such as the charges incurred for use of SMS with mobile phones. Email Twitter leverages email to circumvent SMS fees and service issues—a particularly timely hack given the recent problems with T-Moblie.

The interest in announcing one’s presence has given rise to other issues. Since Twitter is not the only microblogging service, message splintering is occurring as communities form around Jaiku, Pownce and others. A common solution being offered is to mass-produce messages and create redundancy in all systems. HelloTxt provides a single web form for message publishing that tries to centralize the process. It is yet to be seen if that redundancy dilutes a message or enhances it.

Some see text as too constraining. Seesmic facilitates video tweets by inviting members to not only announce what they are doing but say it in front of a camera. All of that detail, however, is not universally welcome. The United Arab Emirates banned Twitter, stating that its content is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values” of the nation.

Tweets are a signal that communication can occur, which is often much more important in establishing and maintaining relationships than the explicit message. Ian Curry’s description of Twitter is apt: “Like saying ‘what’s up?’ as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up.” A tweet is the start to a conversation, something web strategist Jeremiah Owyang calls a thread. These little interactions, regardless of form, can simply be left to dangle, or they can be lovingly crafted into a cohesive fabric. It’s a great analogy, demonstrating both scalability (connecting little actions to larger impact) and responsibility (we need to consciously cultivate and preserve the relationships we start).

By answering Twitter’s simple question, we are announcing to our corner of the world that we are ready to engage.

Although Twitter has not yet issued a similar challenge, their open API is already being used by some developers to examine the information stream in new ways.

Paul Rand describes the language of form

The language of form
Late graphic designer Paul Rand is best known for his corporate logo work for entities like Westinghouse, UPS, ABC, Next Computer, Yale University, Cummins Engine and IBM. A tribute film, archived on Adland, was created for his posthumous induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2007. In the four-minute short film, Rand talks about the relationship between content and form:

When you say design, everybody has their definition that doesn’t correspond to yours. There are many good definitions. One is the synthesis of form and content. In other words, without content there is no form, and without form there is no content.

A work of art is realized when form and content are indistinguishable. When form predominates, meaning is blunted. But when content predominates, interest lags. The genius comes in when both of these things fuse.
source: transcript of One Show – Paul Rand Tribute Film (2007)

Rand also goes on to describe the language of form: order, variety, contrast, symmetry, tension, balance, scale, texture, space, shape, light, shade, and color. These are the core building blocks that go into visual design. While the Twitter community has not yet reached a point where this language has been mastered, the more effective visualizations that are out tend to use these blocks to create or reveal new meaning.

Understanding the value of tweets
When it comes to Twitter, the content are the 140-character posts about the details of life—tweets—and the form is the information stream. The nature of the stream points to opportunities for good visualization to add value.

Microblogging content for a single individual comprises nothing more than a longitudinal diary. For an author filling her own stream, everything is already known before it is posted. There is no new information to be gained. The relevance is high, but the information entropy is low. By comparison, the public stream—containing all member tweets—is noisy and lacks context. Since almost every tweet contains new information, the entropy is high. However, the relevance is low.

The sweet spot in between is the personal information stream, comprised only of a member’s own tweets and those of the people she chooses to follow. Particularly when the in-degree (followers) and out-degree (following) are comparable, the tweets in the personal information stream are highly relevant with high information entropy. In other words, any investment in time to acknowledge new information will be seen as worthwhile. This is where most users spend their interaction resources on the site, whether by checking the Twitter web site or using a third-party access tool, like Twitterrific.

The biggest opportunities for visualization, therefore, involve finding ways to draw new information out of one’s own known personal tweets and extracting relevant information out of the torrent of public tweets.

TwitterMatrix views recent tweets from a Neo perspective.

Drawing new information
Among the earliest visualizations of the public timeline was TwitterVision. It uses a world map with the location information in the authors’ profiles to situate tweets in geography. TwitterFaces, Twitter Planet and Twitter Earth do this as well, albeit with different map platforms. Twitter Map places a permanent pin on Google Map, showing only the most recent tweet of each member. This was interesting because it leveraged an available but hidden bit of information—author location—and presented it in a way that was more engaging. Reading the individual tweet content requires a lot of filtering to find the relevance, but it is inherently easier to identify with a place. The map visualizations, though, require constant attention in order to benefit from the revealed information.

Twitter Poster is an example of an attempt to create new information through visualization. This site keeps track of the most central members of the community and uses their profile icons to create a poster graphic. Different sizes are used to indicate how important the author is in the twitosphere. This aggregation of user statistics has been done in several ways by other services, but those all use a spreadsheet or table presentation rather than letting the top member images do the talking.

Another example is Twitterverse, a web site that generates a tag cloud reflecting the current pulse of recent author posts. Twitterverse creates such clouds for both single word and two-word phrases. These kinds of visualizations invite short user sessions with return visits, rather than being something to monitor constantly.

In-house development by Twitter is limited but high quality. In late August, TechCrunch got early screenshots of Blocks, a Twitter visualization created by people who worked on Digg visualizations. Blocks displays the local neighborhood of personal information streams that connect to recent posters among those you follow. The top surfaces of the stacks are color-coded to differentiate between you and your followers. By clicking and dragging the screen, the entire block structure can be spun and examined from all angles. Each branch can be traversed to see the individual tweets of your neighbors, and other twitterers can be clicked to regenerated a new stream neighborhood built from that member. Blocks is a highly interactive tool for discovery of both content and other members.

TwitterMosaic uses member profile images as material for mosaic art.

Relevance of content
There are several services and resources leveraging the API access to improve personal relevance in the noisy public timeline. Twitter only allows filtering of the public information stream in one way: by deciding who to follow. Absent are ways to arrange content for specific contexts by building streams for specific groups or topics. That task is left to third-party development.

Twitter Digest allows personal information streams to be created from a list of usernames. For instance, the Makice family has a digest that is being used to help archive our microblogging by creating a daily snapshot of what we posted. This service addresses the issue of grouping users and control of the timeframe for viewing content, but otherwise it doesn’t add much value over the following function already in Twitter.

TwitterWhere, on the other hand, creates RSS feeds based on location of the authors. There is no way to do that through the Twitter site tools. Following Bloomington, Indiana, for example, is a way of discovering new local users, provided member profiles are first updated with a valid location. The in-house tools that come closest to providing this functionality are search and tracking. Search is a manual process that forces one to wade through pages of results to look for new matches. Tracking is currently only alerting a member to keyword matches through an IM channel, which is typically not the preferred means of interacting with Twitter.

There are a number of tools focusing on the text of the tweets. Initially launched in early October, Random Tweets uses a combination of computer randomness and human oversight to identify the ten best tweets of the day. TwitterBuzz and Twitigg look at the links authors embed in their posts, aggregating the appearances of popular URLs and allowing them to rise to the top of the list. Twitigg extracts links, resolving the shortened URLs first to show what links are popular by the hour and day. The site also separates forms of media. TwitterBuzz is largely viewing noise, however, given that TinyURL—the built-in integration that shortens long URLs posted in tweets—shows up at the top of the list.

TweetVolume is a simple bar chart comparing the frequency of keywords in tweets.

Situated visualizations
Artist Ben Rubin and UCLA professor and statistician Mark Hansen created a multi-media permanent art installation for the The New York Times headquarters building on Eighth Avenue and 41st Street. Dubbed “Moveable Type,” this visualization is about the physical space as much as the content flowing on its 560 small screens.

Two walls of monitors have been programmed to display snippets from both the Times archives and live feeds going into publication that day. Casual passers-by may notice the refreshing of text in patterns without understanding how the content relates to each other. That kind of understanding is only possible by moving in closer an spending time with the screens. There is also a clickety-clack of old teletype machines, bringing a notable ambiance to the newspaper offices. Because the content reflects the activity, both historic and current, taking place in the building, there is a sense about the physical space that might not be understood without the visual and audible presentation.

Twitter development is possibly moving in that direction. The high relevance-entropy of small streams is ideal for connecting local communities in a meaningful way. These connections will undoubtedly take place in different locations around the same town, perhaps revolving around smaller groups of Twitter authors posting from the same physical spaces. Visualizations—like the one we are currently designing for the IU School of Informatics—will have the dual role of connecting the larger community through the exchange of status awareness and imbuing a specific building with an identity unique to the collection of people working there.

Situated visualizations are meant to be seen by those attached enough to the room to visit, and therefore both the content and form should aim for the highest possible relevance for that particular context.

The New York Times display, Moveable Type, pays attention to physical spaces.