TWEET!!!

When I read about Google, I often encounter a claim that Google's emphasis on engineering and mathy stuff has hobbled its ability to keep up in the social media world, and is in danger from Twitter and Facebook--although maybe Google+ will change that. It's usually something like this from the NY Times (italics mine): But Google has been criticized for failing to understand the importance of social information on the Web until competitors like Facebook and Twitter had already leapt ahead. Larry Page, Google's co-founder, regrets Google's failure to lead in this market and has spent time…

With the uprising in Iran using Twitter, there's been a lot of Twitter triumphalism running amok hither and yon through the intertubez. Tom Watson has a very nice takedown, but there are two other themes worth discussing: the conduit by itself isn't revolutionary; and, a medium with 140 characters shreds the culture of political literacy required to overturn existing political orders. Stirling Newberry observes: Twitter is a pager for the Web 2.0, and useful in the same way that pagers are. By the same measure, pagers are only as useful as the people on the ends. They do not add to the…

So I recently joined Twitter. So here's some random thoughts about it: De facto blog aggregator. It's actually a good substitute for an RSS feed, and because it's very low cost for someone to recommend a post (i.e., they don't have to blog about it), it's a really good way to be exposed to posts by people whose blogging you find interesting. Blog aggregation isn't enough. If all your feed is your blog or business feed, I'm not interested either. You can Tweet too much. My rule for adding people is that I look at their feed. If there's too many tweets (>~8/day), I usually don't add…