At tonight’s New York Tech Meetup, I will be talking about performing data analysis based on Twitter’s revolutionary data set. As part of my preparation work, I noticed that a number of interesting location-based services could arise from Twitter’s data set if twitter allowed each tweet to be associated with a specific latitude and longitude.
You are probably thinking that Twitter already lets you specify a location. You are right, but that location is just a default location assigned to each user on registration. What I am suggesting is allowing twitter users to submit updates that have a specific latitude and longitude associated with each update. A third-party client on a iPhone can easily do this by querying the iPhone’s GPS system.
Why would this be helpful?
Here’s a quick example:
During the Atlanta gas crisis, users on twitter started using the #atlgas tag to identify gas stations that weren’t empty. The logical next step would have been to create a map of these tweets. But, since the locations were being written in the tweet, it was a serious challenge to accurately parse the messages and auto-create a map. If each of the tweets accepted lat/longs, it would have become a trivial exercise to produce an extremely helpful map.
Obviously Twitter has a lot on its plate but I continue to believe that it needs to do a better job of making its existing data set more useful to non-Twitter users. Adding more meta-information to each tweet would certainly help those third-party developers build more interesting applications.
I’m sorry, but my “normal” friends don’t get Twitter. They got Facebook, they got YouTube. But, when I show them Twitter, they have no idea why anyone would use it. The few of them who are social enough to broadcast short messages like to do so privately and to their friends (i.e., Facebook status updates). So, is Twitter done? Not at all— it’s just getting started. Twitter doesn’t need to worry about getting everyone to start broadcasting messages, they need to focus on making their amazing data useful to everyone else. That’s what YouTube did. YouTube succeeded not because it got everyone to contribute videos but because it took the videos of the few and made it useful to everyone else.
A few weeks back I created a graph, based on Twitter data, that helped people determine what time they should try to eat lunch at Shake Shack. Really simple exercise but I got emails out of nowhere from friends that have never even heard of Twitter saying they were forwarded the chart and how useful it was.
What I did learn from my experience is that making twitter data useful is difficult. It’s not structured or organized and it’s hard to imagine how Twitter will ever get it’s users to structure the data themselves (hash signs will only go so far). In other words, Twitter needs to do it themselves or someone needs to do it for them. Twitter is headed in the right direction, the purchase of Summize to provide a Twitter search engine was fantastic and the new Election ‘08 page is interesting but not incredibly useful. There’s way more to be done.
In terms of practical advice for the Twitter folks, I recommend they talk to the really smart guys over at Pluribo. They are using cutting-edge artificial intelligence to summarize Amazon product reviews. Perhaps Twitter could encourage them to focus their time on the tweets fire-hose. Imagine typing a phrase (like the recent debate or a movie) on Twitter’s search engine and getting a summarized view of thousands of people’s thoughts — pretty interesting.
Based on a random sampling analysis of twitter accounts I conducted, 6 out of 10 twitter followers aren’t actually following you. That would imply that Barack Obama, who has the most twitter followers at 80K, really only has 30K “real” followers.
I decided to take a closer look at the top three twitter tech-heavyweight (figuratively speaking) bloggers based on Twitterholic’s top 100: Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis (#7, 34K followers), Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble (#8, 34K followers), and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (#13 at 25K followers). Even though Calacanis has a slight edge on Scoble, looking at their “real” followers was a completely different story. Robert Scoble has significantly more “real” twitter followers (13.6K) than Arrington (8.6K) and Calacanis (7.5K). On average, they were reaching 68% less twitter accounts than their follower counts indicated. This isn’t a comment about them, they are fantastic. It’s a comment about how twitter follower numbers are misleading.
Twitter users are pretty proud of their follower counts and they put it on their blogs next to their RSS reader counts. I’m pretty proud of my twitter account and I only have 57 followers. Twitterholic even puts up a leader-board of the top 100. But, the not-surprising truth is that like RSS reader counts, not that many people are actually reading what you are tweeting.
As Twitter continues its impressive expansion and twitter accounts start to become businesses, it will be important to have a more accurate view of the reach of specific twitter accounts.
Several services are making progress on this front (Twitter Grader, Twitterholic) but there’s a lot more to do.
Note: For the purposes of this sampling, I defined a “real follower” as someone who follows less than 300 twitter accounts and is active as measured by having a status update submitted in the last 3 days. It’s definitely not a perfect definition but I hope it was good enough for the purposes of this demonstration.
