The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

While grumpily working through the US Labor Day "holiday," your editor noticed that the sky, as seen through the basement window, had turned a rather sickly shade of orange; the smell of smoke followed shortly thereafter. Drawn away from the keyboard for a quick look, your editor could not miss the fact that a large fire was burning in the hills to the west. While Colorado does not do forest fires on the scale of places like California (actually, we don't do anything on a Californian scale), wildfires are still a serious threat. When the sky fills with smoke, it's natural to want to know what's going on.

What was going on is now known as the "Fourmile fire"; it burned something like 6600 acres (2600 hectares) of heavily-populated foothills and destroyed over 160 homes. Definitely worth knowing about.

Unsurprisingly, the local newspaper's web site was not particularly illuminating. Neither were the television stations. In these situations, TV can be counted on to show impressive videos of slurry bomber runs and burning houses in the evening, while the newspaper provides still photos from the same videos the next morning. The local community radio station was a bit more helpful, but, when disaster strikes in one's neighborhood, it's hard to have too much information. In desperation, your editor went to Twitter and typed in "boulder fire."

The results were interesting; the Twitterati were already well engaged in conversation about this emergency. People were reporting their observations and posting pictures from various locations. Evacuation orders were being relayed through the site; given that the local "reverse-911" phone notification mechanism failed outright, it's possible that some people learned of the need to flee their houses via Twitter. A local journalism professor was listening to police and fire radio traffic and posting the interesting parts. Information on evacuation centers and shelters for large animals (horses, for example) was broadcast. The destruction of a fire truck was reported. All within the first hour or so.

In other words, Twitter was carrying a great deal of useful information which was available nowhere else. It was enough to keep your editor hitting that "NNN more tweets since you started searching" link over and over again.

That said, this information was not as easy to get at as one might like. The signal-to-noise ratio was quite low for a number of reasons, the first of which appears to be an artifact of how "routing" is handled in the Twitter environment. The "follower" relationships lead to a strange topology made of vast numbers of one-way links; one can only broadcast a message to those who have created inbound links. So Twitter appears to have reinvented the old Usenet flood routing mechanism, but without the "I've already seen this" feature. This mechanism, called "retweeting," comes down to people continually rebroadcasting anything that they found interesting.

The result is a huge amount of duplicated content, perhaps with a trivial comment tacked on to the end. After a message has gone by 100 or more times (literally), it just isn't quite as interesting as it was the first time. But everybody somehow still feels the need to retweet it for the benefit of those people who hadn't yet caught on to the #boulderfire hash tag. This process goes on for a very long time; messages which were only relevant to the early stages of the fire were still circulating days later.

Beyond that, much of what was posted was not particularly useful. Quite a few people felt the need to get into the limelight with "that #boulderfire sure sucks" posts. Local construction companies wanted to be sure we all knew that they are available for the rebuilding of destroyed houses. We were all encouraged to send texts to various numbers to donate money which, they promised, would go to fire victims. Local TV stations assured everybody that they had the best slurry bomber videos. There was also a significant traffic in posts about how all this demonstrated "the power of Twitter."

A community of this size - even this sort of temporary community - must necessarily contain at least one troll and at least one nutcase; it's written in the laws of physics somewhere. The #boulderfire "channel" did not disappoint on this score, though many of the participants were quaintly surprised by the presence of these people. The troll was shouted down with impressive efficiency. The nutcase, seemingly representing a local "news" outlet, was able to sustain a regular stream of posts about discoveries of charred bodies (there were actually no serious injuries) and said news outlet's refusal to bow down to the "Twitter police."

Need it be said that all of this stuff was mercilessly retweeted dozens of times?

In summary, maybe one message in 50 was both original and interesting. That reduces the value of the channel considerably. For added fun, the journalism professor was blocked as a spammer, while the actual spam continued, seemingly unimpeded.

Identi.ca is meant to be a free-software-friendly alternative to Twitter. Naturally, your editor had to wander over there to take a look. The good news is that the massive "retweet" traffic was absent; the bad news is that most of the useful traffic was absent as well. Information was sparse at best, and, in general, it seemed more heavily spam-laden than what was found on Twitter; one gets the sense that there is a budding industry in setting up pages allegedly related to breaking news and posting links to social networking sites. In summary: identi.ca was not a useful resource for anybody who wanted to learn about why they were breathing smoke thick enough to obscure the view of the monitor from the desk chair.

One might argue that it is a matter of network effects; people post to Twitter because that's where the readers are. Your editor would respond that this situation is unsurprising: identi.ca looks an awful lot like a taillight-following exercise. It may serve as a useful demonstration platform for StatusNet, but it offers no real reason for Twitter users to switch. "Source available" is not a compelling feature for most of these users, and identi.ca lacks anything else which is sufficiently shiny to motivate them to change. In this setting, at least, identi.ca was not able to offer a competitive service.

That said, your editor is still not a Twitter user. The fire is mostly controlled, so attention has returned to less noisy information sources - linux-kernel, for example. The value of Twitter is a little more clear, but what is really clear is this: there must be room to do broadcast messaging in much better ways. High-quality information about unfolding local disasters may be a bit of a limited use case - though it's one most of us are likely to want at some point in our lives - but the simple "what's going on?" question is more broadly applicable. If we, the free software community, could come up with a messaging platform which was less noisy, less subject to manipulation, not centrally controlled, and more efficient in getting news to all interested listeners, we would have something worth tweeting about.