You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
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.