"What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine."
Tech Crunch has a great essay on the revolutionary potential of Twitter. While Google and other search engines capture people's intent, Twitter acts a kind of global thought stream--collecting the shattered musings of a global audience to events in real time in a manner much more immediate than blogging will ever hope to be. The problem--with all masses of data--is separating the signal from noise. Tools like TwitterTrend are a good means of doing so, but functionality and customization have a long way to go.
Additionally, Twitter's weakness is also self-selection. While social networking is a whole is immensely popular, only a small minority of people actively blog, Twitter, and flickr. There is a world of difference between, say, a teenager posting pictures of a party to her Facebook or Orkut account once every couple of weeks and a user constantly uploading content. Still, as a tool of distributed cognition its success is truly amazing.
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