Shooting at Bubbles

It’s understandable that we get excited about new things but at some point that newness wears off and reality sets in. Well the newness of Twitter is long over and yet the hype and silliness surrounding its importance continues to roll on.

Today came the non-stop fawning over the fact that Google was going full tilt into this social search idea with Twitter results showing up real-time (yet another misconstrued idea that is giving everyone a woodie it seems) as you sit there staring at your Google search results page.

The rapture around Twitter as our guiding light to the illustrious future of living in the moment is sometimes stupefying and yet it continues unabated.

So it was nice to read this bit from Kent Newsome yesterday

What I totally and completely do not get is why whenever people talk about real time, the next word you hear is Twitter. . .

First of all, the large majority of substantive Twitter posts are links to other content.  That has been posted somewhere else.  Already.  So by definition and math, much of what is posted on Twitter is not only not real time.  It’s after the fact.  Wouldn’t it be better to talk about real time results from the actual source of the content?

Secondly, does anyone without skin in the game really- I mean really- think Twitter is all that informative?  To index and serve search results of Twitter posts, in real time or otherwise, is like recording elevator conversations and calling them feature films.  I search Twitter from time to time to see who’s talking about topics that interest me (alt. country music, my hometown, etc.).  80% of the results are spam, 15% are other nonsense, 4.9% are things I’ve already seen and .1% are things that might interest me.  That’s a really bad success ratio, particularly compared to a regular old Google search that generally gives me relevant results.  Or used to.

Thank you Kent for bringing some semblance of sane thought to the table.