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The Twitter Mission

November 11, 2009 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 7 COMMENTS

Maybe I'm late to this game, but in a post describing the design decisions behind the new retweet functionality, Evan Williams articulates the Twitter mission in a way I had never heard before:

This last point [the need to have structured data around retweets] is not obvious but is particularly important for fulfilling Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow your friends, organizations, public figures, or strangers you find interesting. … The perfect Twitter would show you only the stuff you care about--relevant, timely, local, funny, whatever you're most interested in--even if you don't follow the person who wrote it. And, of course, it would give you ultimate, fine-grained control in how to do so. We want to give you more ways to help the good stuff bubble to the top.

This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, and most obvious, it puts them in direct competition with Google's stated mission of "organizing the world's information." Second, I've been fairly obsessed with the concept of discovery and agree that, at this point, Twitter is just about the best discovery engine (as opposed to search engine) that we've got. With that said, I have some serious worries about Twitter only showing the stuff I care about because it implies that it's only going to show me that which I already care about, which to me kills much of the value of the serendipitous nature of Twitter.

Tags: discovery, search, serendipity, twitter


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COMMENTS

1Anjali Ramachandran

Twitter as a discovery engine, yes. I was thinking along similar lines today when I was playing with Socialmention after ages, which is a real-time search engine - which, at this point, Google is not. I cannot fathom for the life of me why Google isn't real-time yet. Is there a case for relevancy over timeliness? Is that why Google is holding out? I wonder.

November 11, 2009

2Jenesys Group

Making twitter work

November 11, 2009

3Jenesys

I have some interesting comments on twitter here as well: http://www.jenesysgroup.com/blog/page/3

November 11, 2009

4Todd Krieger

Thanks for posting Noah. But is discovery, the same as organizing? And I think the big difference between the two companies is that Google (rightly or wrongly) thinks they're better than you - the human being. Twitter knows it's not (better) and that it's you or at least the yous that make up the twitterverse that are the platform - this is some of what I would consider to be essentially different and I think @ev carefully chose his words there.

Google will give you data in relation to what it appears you are doing - Twitter will give you information in relation to what you are interested in.

There's a whole longer bit which I think I'll go post over on hi-tek and link to now that you've given me something to write about!

November 11, 2009

5Bill Petti

I'd question to what extent Twitter is the best discovery engine (actually, it may be the best relative to what currently exists, but it isn't optimal). Like with any social networking platform, most of what you are bumping into is the result of who you friend or follow, and therefore subject to the same potential 'strong tie' issues that reduce the chances of bumping into different ideas and people.

That being said, I think by adding more structure around retweeting and the information we consume on Twitter it gives people the option to continue bumping into new people and ideas, but to also organize parts of the information firehouse they now consume.

When you talk about serendipity, though, I think there are two issues: 1) needing an efficient way to be exposed to ideas and people outside of your current circle/mindset, and 2) once you've been exposed to ideas, a platform that can provide reliable information regarding what sources of information about those ideas is credible, reliable, etc. Ideally you want the functionality of both, and getting the mix right is key (and, potentially, profitable).

November 12, 2009

6Noah Brier

@Anjali: Could also just be scale ... To go real-time with the number of searches they do is mind-boggling ...

November 16, 2009

7Taylor Davidson

It's also interesting that "Twitter's goal of helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible" was not the original goal of Twitter, and I'd fathom to guess, won't be the same goal in a year or so.

November 17, 2009