From Twitter to Facebook…

I have been living on Twitter for almost two years now and had found it to be a satisfying means of expression. Some introspection is due if I consider what I say important enough to record for all time because these two years of tweets are all but gone (to me at least). In most cases that is fine but often I wish I had recorded some of these thoughts more permanently for my own reference; something like the difference between one's unrecorded actual life and one's personal diary. If you don't put it in your diary it is only a memory, and my memory fades and distorts.

New Twitter, the recent upgrade, is much less satisfying to me than the old Twitter. Refining one's input with lists is better but as a means of expression I find it worse, mostly because I get less feed back—but also because of the so-called "hourly usage limit" which only occasionally works and when it does often it is totally unfair. So I've decided that when that happens I will switch to Facebook.

On Facebook I've begun a few longer dialogs, commenting on various things. I'm still a beginner and am slow to add new friends, afraid I will be overwhelmed. I've realized that some of these longer comments are worth saving and rewriting on this blog. So I'm going to rewrite some comments that I made on my quest for the nature of God and post them here next.

Searchable now

Today my Twitter account became searchable again after following instructions here: It was easy, first submit a help request here. Then:

Send a polite tweet to @delbius by tweeting this text (with YOUR ticket number where indicated): @delbius I'm being filtered out of search. @andilinks says you can help? My ticket number is #____. Thanks! Info @ http://bit.ly/3TIWEE

Best of luck

Twitter Irregularities, Unsearchable, Censored

For quite some time, months, my tweets have not appeared in Twitter Search. Additionally it has seemed that at some time my tweets began to get far too few responses for the number of followers that are recorded for my account. I would occasionally meet other users with similar experiences. Since most of my tweets are of a conservative nature I began to worry that the Twitter management being mostly liberal had begun censoring users that were more effective. Certainly there have been many stories that Google scrubs its archive and cache of items damaging to the Obama Administration and so it is entirely plausible that Twitter may also do the same.

So I have begun collecting emails from people who seem to have similar experiences by occasionally soliciting them with a tweet. It has been slower going than I had hoped but at some point I will have collected enough to have a statistically significant sample. In the mean time I will begin analyzing the emails that I do get to determine how widespread the problem is and to sort out the few mails that describe other problems not related to the one I'm having.

I am compiling and saving all these emails. I back up the list regularly and will be sharing a tabulation as we approach Twitter management with our complaints and develop a media strategy should Twitter be unresponsive.

I will add to or edit this post as I make progress but will not begin a new post on this subject until I have reached some conclusion, though not necessarily a final conclusion.

Return to email form

Twitter Emergent Behavior

I am beginning work on twitter & self-organizing systems/emergent behavior. My first document is a list of relevant definitions compiled from Wikipedia and other sources. A work in progress it is the kernal of my working glossary.

I think that in the end emergent behavior and consciousness will be a function of brute force computing power. Once there is enough working RAM and there are enough nodes with content a gradual awakening will occur.

The Collective Consciousness of Twitter

The term "collective consciousness" has a long history in social theory and has gained some common usage but I am particularly interested in its use pertaining to Twitter. When I was in high school around 1990 I read a book by Marvin Minsky titled The Society of Mind which describes a theory of human intelligence. About that same time there was talk of an "information superhighway" that would be built upon something called the Internet. I put these concepts together along with some other ideas from science fiction and projected that this new thing would become a giant thinking "brain" that would eventually develop its own behaviors and come up with ideas on its own. In other words I thought the internet would develop its own consciuosness. Well back in 1990 I figured that by the year 2000 this would surely have already come about. Now I think I may be lucky if I ever see it happen within my own lifetime. But make no mistake, I think it is happening and I think Twitter is currently the leading edge. I'm still very excited about this, in fact I'm probably more excited than ever. I am going to continue to blog about this concept and I am going to promote it on Twitter. This is one reason I have decided to take a break from my Twitter habit to further develop this idea. When I do finally get back to Twittering on a regular basis I will have an additional focus.

Twitter, AOL & Me Online

Since quitting Twitter I have been thinking and reflecting about what it meant to me and how I am going to replace it as an expressive outlet. I have concluded that I will resume Twitter at sometime in the future but it will be different. Defining my political positions in great detail and building a polemic framework are important and Twitter has been very useful for that. If I approach it more methodically and have my arguments better organized it may be more satisfying on the second go round.

I am tempted to tell my entire online life's story here on this blog and I may eventually get to that. I do now have enough history to identify patterns and how one medium like Twitter can at first intrigue, enthrall, and obsess me for a while only to turn frustrating and unsatisfying. The four month Twitter experience is so much like a compressed version of my six year experience on AOL that I absolutely must explore the parallels. My early AOL experience was as a naïve and curious teenager in 1993. Among other experiments I engaged in some blatantly sexual and exhibitionist behavior and while I managed to quickly supress that aspect outwardly I think there is such a subliminal thread occasionally running through my online presence to this day.

I am going to make an outline and index of all my andilinks tweets and begin a plan for my next Twitter round. It probably won't begin until I'm well settled in my new home, I'd guess around September 1. I will record many of my musings about this here on this blog.

Finished with Twitter

I will not be deleting my account because a situation may arise where I will want to make posts but the mode I had been following over the past several months is finished. I was spending too much time for too little return.

I do appreciate my followers and I want you to know that I will miss those of you who interacted with me from time to time. I will likely be visiting the financial blogs posted on the andilinks home page and will be posting comments on those blogs.

Where is Twitter Going?

Twitter's versatility is amazing and that's why so many people are using it and why it has reached a tipping point where everyone will have to at least have tried it and have an account. Where it really shines is during a national or global event when you really want to connect with all those people you've come to know on Twitter.

Different users use Twitter differently, yet it seems to work for most. Sometimes I feel like I'm evesdropping on an IM comversation, other times I feel like it's a chatroom and then it becomes a newsfeed or a series of blog posts. And there are many functions I haven't touched upon...

The search feature will certainly develop more capabilities so once the index becomes large enough it will be a powerful search engine that can rival Google in many (but not all) circumstances. I've just tried to elaborate on that and have realized that it's an area of prognostication too complex to even begin.

Twitter Reconsidered

Right now I feel a lot like I did in late 1992 after I had witnessed some dialog on Compuserve and The Well and became enthused about the potential. I promoted this thing among everyone I knew and even the polite responses were little more than blank stares. Even in 1993 when AOL was using a Mac-like GUI people still couldn't see the potential...

I ignored Twitter for a long time, I didn't get it, I even blogged recently that I didn't "get it." People on Facebook more or less "get it" but largely still don't understand the potential. It does take some work to figure out the potential, and you may well not realize it for a while. But this is the first time I've been excited about a new development on the web since Compuserve was DOS and AOL was Macintosh.

Ev Williams was on Charlie Rose last night, the interviews take a few days to be posted so it's not on the site yet.So, if you haven't put a little effort into "getting it," you should or you risk having to play catch-up somewhere in the future.