The annual social clean-up is in progress. I’ve already shut down my Posterous and Tumblr accounts to focus on my blog. Now it’s time to deal with Twitter.
I love Twitter. It covers such an incredible spectrum of information; but recently it’s begun to feel out of control. The signal-to-noise was wrong and stuff from people I cared about was being drowned out.
I started by unfollowing a few heavy/active users. But I enjoy a lot of the stuff they share so it didn’t feel massively practical. Then @sermad suggested I made more of lists. I created a few and moved a bunch of people over.
Great! But my timeline was still too noisy.
I tried unfollowing a few more people but couldn’t create a clear mental criteria in my head.
Take my friends and ex-colleagues at glue as an example. I don’t want 180+ people on my timeline, but once you start to add a few, you’re into a strange mental world of… If I add X, I should add Y, because we did X together. In the end I was trying to do something ridiculous like:
People I worked with for more than 4 years + that I regulary went out for beers with + that use Twitter regularly + but not so much that they drown everyone else out = Following.
It wasn’t working. I got frustrated.
So I went BIG and unfollowed everybody.
WOOHOO!!
It might’ve been a bit impulsive but it’s democratic and I can slowly add people back over time.
I have a nagging doubt though. It’s counter intuitive. Lists guarantee I see peoples stuff; but they think I’ve unfollowed them. Not great really. But I needed to wrestle control back of the timeline so I’ve taken the plunge.
WEBGL Twitter visualisation + real life holographic installation data eye candy goodness.
The goal of CNN’s Ecosphere [cnn-ecosphere.com] by Minivegas and Stinkdigital is a real-time Twitter visualization that aims to reveal how the online discussion is evolving around the topic of climate change. More specifically, the visualization aggregates all Twitter messages on the topic of #cop17 (in case you wonder, this is an abbreviation for “The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)”.
The online visualization consists of an interactive 3D globe, described as a “lush digital ecosystem” that closely resembles the look and behavior of real plants and trees in nature. In practice, the virtual plants in the 3D Ecosphere grow from those tweets that are tagged with #COP17. Each tweet about climate change feeds into a plant representing that specific topic or discussion, causing it to grow a little more.
The result thus becomes an mesmerizing, real-time visual representation of how the world “sees” climate change (try clicking on one of the tweet messages), or… an interactive Tron-like Lindenmayer forest, whatever you fancy the most.
This little thing popped up on Twitter recently. A small icon next to a hashtag. Kinda interesting and opens up lots of possibilities for them.
- Will they start to categorise more big events?
- Is this how Promoted Tweets might work?
- Shows group opinion well and makes the stream easier to scan read
- Rewards people that use the Twitter website instead of a 3rd party client
It’s so easy to forget about how much personal information we hand over to Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. My mind was sharply focused again today when I read today that MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale.
The truth is that we really have no idea how these companies will use our data for in the future.
Here’s a video which makes Google look a bit scary.
