This particular post, however, is heavily influenced by discussions I’ve had with Bob, who is the only man I know completely capable of interrupting himself, and doing so with panache and flair.

Of late I’ve been having some interesting experiences with Twitter, particularly in the context of being able to acquire things remotely and getting them sent to me.

First off, some weeks ago, I was trying to source a hard-to-get CD. I have this strange fondness for Canadian folk/rock, the consequence of growing up at a time (early 1970s) and a place (Calcutta) when Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen and The Band were part of every respectable music listener’s staple diet.

With that sort of upbringing, when I read about a new star on the horizon, Taylor Mitchell, I planned to listen to her. After hearing a couple of songs on her MySpace site, I tried to buy her album, but it was not available online anywhere. Then I found out, only a few days later, that she’d died, in very tragic circumstances.[Please do consider contributing to her memorial fund, which you can do here.]

Now I was even more determined to acquire her CD and listen to it, my own way of paying homage to her undoubted talent. But I was in Windsor, UK and the only shops that sold it were in College St in Toronto. So I tweeted it. Were any of my Twitter friends in Toronto that day? Were they prepared to do me a big favour and sacrifice time and effort to get me the CD?

Yes. Unbelievable, but it happened. Someone I only knew via Twitter, a New York resident, was in Toronto that day, saw my tweet, went to the shop, bought the last copy. And managed to get it to someone else who worked 100 yards from me in London.

More recently, some weeks ago, I was thinking and praying about my godson Noah. I was going to see him just before Christmas, and I wanted to get him something special. I’d already spoken to his mother, and I knew that he was in a creative Lego mood. But which kit? And what could I do to make it memorable and different?

The answer came serendipitously. I was scheduled to have dinner with Cory Doctorow and his wife Alice, and I was idly catching up on his Boing Boing writings while waiting for them at Saf last week. [Excellent company, excellent restaurant]. And then I saw this:

So I read the story. And I knew I’d found the perfect present. But could I get it anywhere online? Nope. Only available bricks and mortar in Japan.

I tried for a few days, and then yesterday I tweeted my need. Anyone in Japan right now and likely to get back to the UK before 17th December and willing to acquire the Muji-LEGO mashup? Answer came there one. And wonderfully, magically, the present is now winging its way to me.

These are just instances. What really matters is the emerging business models. how people are innovating in this space. Over the last fortnight or so I’ve learnt about a couple of examples:

Lug-it, a cloud-based physical haulage system: “a P2P package delivery system on top of your extended social network”

SendSocial, which promises to let you “send anything, anywhere, without an address”.

Which brings me all the way back to Bob Frankston and the reason for this post. Bob’s always drilled into my head the concept that the addresses and numbers we use should never be considered routing; instead, I should consider such things to be nothing more than hints, clues as to the best way to get something to someone. Reading about SendSocial reminded me about his dicta, with their focus on getting things from person to person without an address.

Similarly, seeing what the people at lug-it were doing also filled me with glee. There was something so tellingly small-world-experiment about it, something intrinsically valuable about social networks and their P2P characteristics.

So now I have cause to think. About what this means for social networks. About what this means for digital communications.

And I have cause to celebrate. About the beauty and simplicity of the ideas that are blossoming in this space. Lug-it, SendSocial, I hope you succeed.

                          

As I’ve grown older, I’ve picked up my fair share of idiosyncrasies. The most recent one is a doozy. Whenever I think about something, I preface it with a question. How would I explain it to my 10-year old daughter?

So when it came to the question What is Twitter, I decided I would try and explain it with a photograph. Or two.

I think Ayan Khasnabis has captured what Twitter is really about. Friends together. Having a chat. Some speaking, some listening. Easy, companionable, familiar. Open and relaxed. Meandering from subject to subject. Accessible to all.

Everything else is secondary.

                          

In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea,
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines,

So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine,

We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine,
We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine.

And our friends are all aboard,
Many more of them live next door,
And the band begins to play.

Yellow Submarine (Lennon/McCartney) The Beatles, 1966

Yesterday I spent some time talking about how I viewed Twitter now, having used it for a while. Today I thought I’d follow up with a brief explanation on how Twitter is my Submarine changes the way I treat Twitter.

As my last post details,  I view Twitterland as my personal ocean, and Twitter itself as my personal submarine and periscope. Once I understood this, it wasn’t long before I understood a few things:

1. In Twitterland, I am in control of the pollution that enters my personal ocean. I choose the tributaries that make the rivers of information that go into my own ocean. I can turn the tributaries on and off. That made me think of what I would consider polluting habits. Twitterland has many Polluting Habits.

My first change of behaviour, therefore, was to start looking at everything I did in Twitter from the viewpoint of pollution of personal oceans, I wanted to identify the polluting habits.

2. The first one is Industrial Pollution, where my personal ocean gets filled up with other people’s automated tweets, the expulsion of particulate contaminants into my personal water. You know something? I like automated tweets, the way they take human latency out of the process, the way they tend to come error free and context rich. But you know something else? I want to choose whose automated tweets I get; more importantly, I want to choose which particular themes the automated tweets are about. Today I get one person saying “I am here.” “Now I am here.” “Now I have moved and I am here”. A second person is signalling “I’m live, come talk to me” as if they’re some seedy chat line. A third is into “I’m playing this piece of music now”. And this one. And this one. The issue is not the content as much as the frequency of publishing. One day I will have the tools to say “Please turn off tweeter A’s music tweets, tweeter B’s food tweets, tweeter C’s location signalling; they’re all very nice people, they’re my friends, but the reason they’re my friends is that we aren’t alike in all our tastes!”. But until that day arrives, I need to let my friends know that a little tweet sensitivity will go a long way towards helping keep many of our personal oceans clean.

My second change of behaviour was to choose to avoid all automated tweets; instead, I signalled my movement to a higher-tweet-frequency place such as blip.fm or last.fm, and then tweeted the odd sample or two, not the whole session.

3. The next source of pollution was the introduction of Waste Products into my personal ocean. This was where people I followed kept up high levels of shameless self-plugging and personal advertising, making my ocean uncecessarily bigger. I said Hey (Hey) You (You) Get off of My Ocean.

My response was to unfollow the people, in the hope that anything useful they said would be retweeted by someone else. Waste Producers tend to have large numbers of followers, so it’s not difficult to find someone who will filter their waste for you.

4. The final source of pollution was people who Shone Light into My Darkroom. Shining lights is a Good Thing. Except in darkrooms, especially when you’re a photographer. I found that Twitter was not just a place I went to in order to find things out, it was also a place I went to in the hope that there were things I would *not* find out. I expected people who understood about “spoiling” and how to avoid it.

My response was to be very careful about spoilers, to make sure I was considerate to others when tweeting.

And you know something? That about sums it up. Twitter is a collaborative space, where many personal oceans overlap. We have to learn to be considerate to each other in that collaborative space.

There’s another big subject I want to write about, the role of Twitter in Knowledge Management, but that’s not for today. I’m done for today. Views and comments welcome as usual.

[Incidentally, I have not been able to find the person who took the wonderful photograph above, I found it on the web without any accreditation for me to use and thank....help please].

                          

I like Twitter, particularly because of its publish-subscribe nature. A few weeks ago, I described Twitter as:

a newspaper. a bulletin board. a club. an “adda”. a telephone network.

Twitter is all these things. It brings me the news. It is a place where people publish notices. It’s a place where I meet my friends, and where we talk to each other. It is many things to many people. But. And it is a humdinger of a but. It’s a lot more than that.

To me, Twitter is fast becoming my personal submarine and periscope to the ocean of the World Wide Web, the personal areas I want to go to defined by my relationships to people and ideas. It doesn’t mean that I don’t use the rest of the web:  Twitter is an adjunct to the web, a very important adjunct, but an adjunct nevertheless. The way I use Twitter teaches me something, something about the way things may be going. Let me explain what I mean.

1. Twitter is my feed aggregator. One of the ways I interact with the web is through RSS, and over the years I’ve tried to find better and better ways to filter the firehose. Inspecting blogrolls. Shared OPMLs. You name it. I’ve used a number of different aggregators, now I use Twitter as a pseudo-aggregator.
2. Twitter is my attention enhancer. One of the ways I interact with the web is through collaborative filtering and voting, some way of getting the right stories to the surface, stories from people I don’t know, stories about people I don’t know. Again, over the years, I’ve tried to find better and better ways to let other people filter the firehose for me, using tools ranging from StumbleUpon to Digg and a whole lot in between. Now I use Twitter to surface the stories that matter, particularly with the growth of retweeting.
3. Twitter is my bookmarking service. One of the ways I interact with the web is through the use of bookmarking services, some way of identifying stories I want to get back to later. The use of tags has helped in this regard, particularly when combined with search engines. The ability to save bookmarks at browser level has also helped, but caused its own problems for a while, when the bookmarks used to be locked into the specific machine. Now those problems have been solved with bookmarking services, but I find I’ve tended more and more to discover the stories via Twitter. So now I “favourite” the tweet instead.
4. Twitter is my emergent searchable web and engine. One of the ways I interact with the web is through the use of search engines, particularly Google. So to some extent I am reliant on how sites and pages are tagged, spidered, indexed. But now something else is happening. Instead of metatags embedded in sites, I have tweets. 140 characters of description written by someone, 140 characters of freeform searchable text available via Twitter Search (I still think of it as Summize, I’m old that way). So when I look for something, one of the places I go to first is Twitter Search.

There are also many things Twitter is not, and these are also important to note.

Ads: I enjoy the fact that it is ad-free; the way I look at it, if it becomes ad-full then someone else will build something that is ad-free. Because one of the reasons I like Twitter is its ad-free-ness. It’s important to me. And I would probably stop using it overnight if that changed.

E-commerce: Twitter is not where I go to in order to buy and sell things. I have the whole of the web for that. Twitter is a personalised place, a private place, a segment of the web where I am in conversation with my friends. No place for multi-level-marketing, no place for people to Makoff with my money (assuming, of course, that the past tense of Makoff is Madoff).

Stories: the Web is the library where my stories are located, stories cast in video and audio and text. Twitter is the catalogue for my personal interests, defined in two ways: my personal profiles and preferences, along with the ambient influences of my friends and associates. I was particularly taken with the description of Twitter in Clay Spinuzzi’s blog recently, where he spoke about Twitter as a means of assessing ambient status. I had the opportunity of meeting Clay in Austin over the summer (we take our summer vacation every year in Austin, I love that city); he is a very clever man with some real insights into the way human networks work.

Twitter is not a replacement for the web, nor will it ever be. Its publish-subscribe nature helps us have capillary conversations, (aso written about here and here) and this is very important. The tweet, the @friend message and the DM replicate human conversation more realistically than many prior forms of communication, that and the pub-sub nature gives its capillarity. The ability to compress context via snurls and bit.lys and tinyurls is not intrinsically part of Twitter, but I see it more used in Twitter than anywhere else. The asymmetric follow helps us improve our capacity to sense ambient status, which also helps us in many ways.

When you come down to it, a social network offers you six things.

• A directory of people, a subset of which you know.
• Some way of grouping or classifying those people in overlapping subsets of group or network or interest or whatever.
• A way of communicating with those people, two-way, multi-way, broadcast.
• A way of scheduling events where you meet those people.
• A way of sharing status across a whole slew of things.
• A way of keeping track of changes to all those things.

Early telephones came with directories, gave you opportunities to group and classify, let you communicate. Event scheduling and ambient status sharing were absent, as was the ability to share information about change.

The ability to connect directories with scheduling became available in early office productivity environments like PROFS or CEO, and reached critical mass with Microsoft Office, Outlook and Exchange.

Ambient status sharing became possible when “chat” and IM became popular, and Bloomberg, ostensibly accidentally, saw the value of connecting communities with chat facilities.

We had to wait till Facebook came along before someone saw the value of alerting the community to changes in each of these areas: joining or leaving the directory; forming or re-forming relationships and groupings; adding or subtracting ways of communicating; signalling attendance or non-attendance at events and meetings; sharing status. So the News Feed came along.

Twitter is a news feed, but with a difference. With many differences. Which is why I think of it as a submarine with a periscope.

And I think one of the most important things about Twitter is its size. There are 140 good reasons to like Twitter. Which makes it a submarine, fast, fleet, agile.

                          

Huberman et al come to a finding that’s not surprising: the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

This by itself is not surprising: as the authors point out, every community, every social network, evinces a similar pattern. We send e-mail regularly to a very small portion of our address book; we call a very small portion of our mobile contacts; we reach out to a very small portion of our Facebook “friends”. This sort of behaviour is true even in other communities; for example, there are a number of opensource projects that behave similarly.

So why should Twitter be any different?

Let’s take a look at this diagram:

This would suggest that as the number of friends increases, there is apparently no loss in reciprocity. Yet, when you look at this diagram, there is a suggestion that the number of friends is constrained in Dunbar-like manner:

I’ve tended to believe that if anything, social software would help raise the Dunbar number. The studies above suggest this is not the case. But I’m still holding on to my hunch.

Why? Because I think we live in an age where there something wonderful happening, something that just has to affect the Dunbar number, something that is accentuated by social software.

Most people would agree that the development of language as a means of communication affected the Dunbar number, raised the Dunbar number.

Most people would agree that the evolution of language from oral to written cultures had a significant and positive effect on the number.

It is not difficult to make a case that there was further improvement when writing turned to printing (with an intermediate growth phase as scripts becames codices).

It is reasonable to suggest that when we got the world’s biggest copy machine (as Kevin Kelly called the internet) we would see another shift.

I think there is one more shift of significance. The ability to search and retrieve communications cheaply and quickly. Something that has just started happening.

                          

One of the Raj “traditions” that used to make me laugh was the insistence that the First Secretary of the Bengal Government could not see visitors until after he’d fiinished the day’s Times crossword. Never proven, but fun to think about, particularly if you were in a queue in Writers’ Building.

There were many apocryphal stories; one set (of three stories) in particular was of considerable interest to me, given my passion for words and puzzles.

• Charles Napier, when capturing the province of Sindh in 1843, was meant to have sent a telegram with just one word on it: Peccavi.
• Colin Campbell, similarly, is meant to have sent one that just said Nunc Fortunatus Sum when he arrived in Lucknow.
• And, to complete the set, Lord Dalhousie is credited with sending just Vovi when annexing Oudh.

Peccavi. I have sinned. Nunc Fortunatus Sum. I am in luck now. Vovi. I have vowed.

There are many arguments as to whether any of these events actually happened, with people focusing on particular angels and particular pins. For example, it is said that a 17-year old girl named Catherine Winkworth wrote in to Punch to say that Napier should have said Peccavi, and that the Punch cartoon published in May 1844 was directly as a result of the letter, that Napier never said it.

I don’t know the answer, there is no evidence that Napier actually sent the telegram. But there is evidence that Napier was born in Whitehall, that he went to school in Celbridge in Eire, a place with a history of 5000 years of habitation, a place that had a school since 1709, that “Ireland’s richest man” then, William “Speaker” Conolly, built his mansion there at the turn of the 18th century. So there is some likelihood that Napier was educated enough to have said it. As I study the other pronouncements attributed to Napier, I tend to have some sympathy with the view that he actually sent the message, even if Miss Winkworth did write a letter a year later.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t actually matter whether Napier said it or not. What matters is the accessibility of the story.

In the past, the Peccavi story would only have made sense to people who understood Latin and who had a facility with Empire history and geography. A limited set of people.

Today, if Napier were alive and he used Twitter to send his message, he could have sent one that looked like this:

This ability to compress context and associate it with communication is critical. It is an example of what David Weinberger was referring to when he said “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies”.

The implications for accessibility should not be underestimated. In the past, Peccavi was an “in” joke amongst well-read people. Now, it can be shared by all, with links providing the context and background required to “understand the joke”.

I think this is a big deal. It is one of the reasons why the web is different, the ability to associate content and communication with compressed context.

                          

Some wonderfully evocative phrases:

• allen bowling feeling bitter
• woodfull declining warners sympathy
• one side unplaying cricket ruining game
• time decent men get out game

So where is all this from?  Here’s the story:

Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam programs directly to the United Kingdom. The main station was situated in Paris. One of its advertisers was the Gillette Safety Razor Co. which sponsored reporting of the controversial 1932-33 cricket series played between Australia and England in Australia. These were the days before live radio and television broadcasts of international sporting events. Each day a reporter cabled very brief descriptions of play to Paris where they were transformed into full scripts which were then broadcast to the United Kingdom.

The State Library of New South Wales has seen fit to make the cables available to the world at large, a great and laudable gesture. You can read all about it here, and get to the original cables as well. How wonderful.

Looking at the cables reminded me, at least in part, of Twitter, in terms of the brevity of message, the use of abbreviated words, the terseness of communication. And I couldn’t help but smile at the “business model”, which, bluntly put, was “Typescript, commissioned by Gillette Safety Razor Company”. How long before I receive sponsored news on Twitter, with just a few tweaks on the 1930s model? One way becomes two way, the subscription process is democratic, the subjects covered are infinite, and the writers are global microbrands in HughSpeak?

My thanks to Lloyd Davis for tweeting me about it, and to CityofSound for covering it in the first place, where Lloyd saw it.

                          

Zeuglodont: A type of carnivorous whale. Now extinct. Also referred to as phocodontia.

Aristology. A word I first came across when I was about ten, when I started reading Rex Stout. Although Stout first used it in Three At Wolfe’s Door, that was not where I happened upon it. It was when I was reading The Doorbell Rang, surely one of the ten best mystery novels ever written.

It was in the reading of Nero Wolfe that I developed a keen interest in food, in all aspects of food. And, I daresay, sometime in my life I will start growing orchids for similar reasons.

What has any or all of this to do with Twitter? It’s like this. Some time ago, during the debate on continuous partial asymmetry triggered by James Governor’s post, Stu Berwick, an old friend and colleague, made a crucial comment. By keeping it short and to the point, he crystallised something that everyone knows but not everyone appreciates. Twitter is both a communications medium as well as a publishing platform.

Now for me one of the ways of testing something as a publishing platform (as opposed to a communications medium) is the depth of language used, the breadth of subjects covered. So I started “testing” Twitter. What I did was enter “random” words into Twitter search, and observe the results. I converted that into a game. The rules were simple:

1. I had to know the word and what it meant
2. It had to be a word that had found its way into the language proper, as opposed to one that was “technically” included, that made its way only because it formed part of an obscure branch of science.
3. The number of results returned had to be zero.

I read a lot. I have been reading voraciously for over forty years. I read widely. And I have a good head for words, coupled with a decent memory. Years of playing around with crosswords and Scrabble have, if anything, sharpened my vocabulary.

Yet it took me several attempts before I found a zero. Aristology was my best for some time, with just one result returned, until I tried zeuglodont. Bugloss returned two, which was pretty good.

Try it. You’d be amazed at just what Twitter already contains. Which bodes well for its existence as a publishing platform, despite the number-of-characters limit.

[Why would I even know a word like zeuglodont? Simple. The way I remember words is by remembering their size and “shape”, where the shape is a pattern represented by the consonant-vowel sequence. When I try and recall a word, the first thing that comes to me is the size of the word. Then sequences of letters come. And finally the whole word emerges. That process is not alphabetical, although I can sometimes help it by going through the alphabet once I have the word’s length and shape. -UGLO- is a very unusual shape in this context, occurring only in two words as far as I know, bugloss and zeuglodont.

                          

Today I “met” someone via Twitter. Dallas W.Taylor. The Dallas Taylor, as in “Crosby Stills Nash and Young Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves“. The Dallas Taylor who played drums on that album shown above (Deja Vu),  on the first album Crosby Stills and Nash, on the first Stephen Stills album, and on the two Manassas albums.

[And not the Dallas Taylor who was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for a short while in 1953. Or any other Dallas Taylor.]

I’m delighted to learn that there’s a new band in the works and that there’s new music to come. For sure I will be buying it, I want to support a childhood legend. My wish to support him grew even stronger when I found out what Dallas has been doing in the decades since. Go here if you want more information on the work he’s been doing on addiction intervention.

An aside I can’t resist, germane to this discussion. I read an article in the Times today trashing the Long Tail, referring to a study I studiously avoided mentioning till now; it smelt of trolling. But now I can’t resist. The headline was, believe it or not, Long Tail Theory Contradicted As Study Reveals 10m Digital Music Tracks Unsold.

Turns out the study was done by Will Page, Chief Economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance. Yes, as in the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Right Society.

Now I shall resist the temptation to say that it’s a bit like reading a report on why cigarettes don’t cause cancer written and published by Philip Morris, or maybe on why gas guzzlers have no impact on climate change written and published by General Motors. I won’t say that. Having successfully resisted that temptation, I will state that what I can glean about the study looks quite reasonable. Except for a couple of points. A couple of big points.

First, Long Tail actually requires you to make the right Long Tail things searchable, findable, sellable, buyable. Not just any old things hanging around in inventory like elephants-without-colour. The right things. Too much of past inventory management focused on what was sold, what wasn’t sold. Whereas what should be measured is intent, not sale or purchase. How many things, Long Tail things, didn’t get sold despite the intentions of buyers? Mary Modahl, in Now or Never, a worthwhile book written at the turn of the century, makes that point very well. Nowadays, understanding buying intentions is at the heart of VRM, particularly unfulfilled intentions.

The Long Tail may not always be visible in a business environment that has been Hit Culture dominated, at least partly because industries in such environments are so far away from the customer and her intentions. How else can we explain the fact that it would appear no one considered that it would be worth while to re-release the Jeff Buckley and Leonard Cohen versions of Hallelujah as physical CD singles last week?

Long Tail is about what happens when the costs of discovery and contracting drop in an environment where inventory can be managed flexibly and dynamically, making the case that there’s a lot of people wanting to buy a lot of things that they can’t buy because of unavailability, high search costs, high fulfilment costs and so on.

Second, even if the study’s conclusions were right, they will not continue to be right. Because people like me will buy the songs and albums of people like Dallas Taylor, even more so if he starts connecting up with the Greg Reeves and Chris Hillmans and Joe Lalas and Al Perkins and Paul Harris and Fuzzy Samuels.

You see, these people are part of the Long Tail. Many today have not heard of them. But enough have. Even measured in readers of this blog, there are enough. Even measured in Facebook friends, there are enough. Even measured in Twitter followers, there are enough. Enough to form a Long Tail.

So people will buy their music. And not necessarily through traditional routes either.

In the meantime, I will continue to relish the sensation of being in touch with someone whose name used to adorn my wall as a teenager.

                          

And then today, a few minutes ago, there it was, in all its splendiferous glory, reproduced here for newcomers:

Sightings are getting rarer and more fleeting. So, according to traditional scarcity economics, we should soon be willing to pay to see it, right? :-)