My Main Stream
Twitter is my Internet
Twitter has become my Internet.
If I had the time I would create a way to monitor how much information I get from Twitter versus the actual internet via a web browser.
At the onset of the public Internet way back in the mid 90’s lay people would ask me who was sitting behind their big bulky computer screens helping to find stuff across what was a pretty shallow sea of information.
The perception was that the internet was powered by little people who lived in computers and were able to take a request and get you back a semi decent result to your query.
In some cases this is how early search worked.
Back in 1994 search engines like Infoseek and Yahoo tried to get a leg up on natural language search by allowing web masters to submit content in realtime and used actual human beings to write descriptions for every URL indexed.
A few years later Larry and Sergey realized that search, using back links and ranking based on citation, authority and reliability would be a smarter way to navigate the web, we all know what happened after that.
Today, social media drives much of the way we interact with the web. Friends and influencers have the ability to take large networks on journeys throughout the web that do not rely upon chance curiosity.
Like bees we find, share and then swarm.
A single Tweet can change an entire company and start a groundswell of traction that can catapult it into fame or complete destruction. Even brands are monitored by the public like hawks for any kind of infraction. Even the news breaks before it breaks, alerting us well before the actual news can put a spin on a story.
Twitter is my internet.
I have carefully curated those who I follow and appreciate those who follow me. I have naturally selected the kinds of information that I am interested in by crowdsourcing sources on Twitter. I don’t go looking for information anymore because it seems to be able to find me.
Twitter has become my digital pulse and extends itself far beyond “the stream” in which I primarily access it from. I see it on signs, on TV and almost everywhere I go.
Twitter Cards have become the new website, containing everything I need to decipher if I want to engage further with the content or not and it fits perfectly on the small screen I am mostly in front of.
Every time I think about a new idea or tactic that would be optimal on a mobile device my mind references Twitter and the way it uses brevity and constraint to engage, it speaks volumes to its approach as a mobile realtime content network.
As Twitter has grown beyond its 140 character limit it still manages to stay true to the short form, real time intention of its reason for being.
It is the the perfect combination of humans and computers working in a completely synchronistic way to serve up the internet to one another rather than to have to mine it ourselves.
Twitter is not a social network, it is the social internet.
