2009-02-12
Idea Raft talked with some guy wearing a Twitter T-shirt. A transcript follows. To appear more scholarly, we have added some footnotes near the end.
Idea Raft: What can you tell us about Twitter?
T-Shirt Dude: As you probably know, Twitter was originally a research project. One of our realizations was that humans have a thirst for useful know.
IR: Useful know?
TSD: Ledge. Useful knowledge. Sorry, it’s that pesky 140-character limit. It becomes a habit. I will try to speak in longer sentences.
IR: No problem.
TSD: Anyway, humans have a thirst for useful knowledge. And the more thorough and reliable the knowledge, the longer they are willing to wait for it. At one extreme there are slow but ultra-reliable sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica, which give you excellent information. It can takes years to edit and publish a Britannica article, but it’s worth waiting for.
IR: The Wikipedia is pretty good too, isn’t it?
TSD: Well, yes. The Wikipedia gives you updates within days or hours. It often contains errors, but it’s pretty timely. And it contains plenty of goo.
IR: Goo?
TSD: D stuff. Sorry, I meant good stuff. It contains plenty of good stuff. So people tolerate its many deficiencies. Sorry, it’s that 140-character habit again.
IR: What you have said so far sounds like just basic common sense.
TSD: Our first breakthrough came when we realized that there is actually a mathematical equation that relates the reliability and thoroughness of knowledge to its timeliness. In simplified form: The faster you give information to people, the less accurate, less thorough, and less reliable it needs to be. To a first approximation, the equation is a simple one: the usefulness of knowledge multiplied by the speed with which you get it is a constant. We call this constant the Twitter Constant or Tc. So, usefulness U times speed S gives Tc.
IR: So if you provide information really slowly, it will always be accurate and useful? Even if you do a sloppy job really slowly?
TSD: Not necessarily. The equation is not only about the information itself, but also what people expect. You can provide worse information than predicted by the equation, but people will not accept it. And if you provide better information than predicted by the equation, people will not trust it.
IR: But basically, you are saying that the faster you get information, the less reliable it will be. Do you really need an equation to figure that out?
TSD: An excellent question. This is just a first approximation. There are a number of complicated higher-order parts of the equation that would take too long to explain. But yes, the basic idea is simple. In the case of Encyclopedia Britannica, usefulness U is high, but speed S is very low. The product is the Twitter Constant Tc. Higher speed means it takes less time, by the way. If something takes years, the speed S is very low, numerically. In the case of the Wikipedia, speed S is pretty good, and the usefulness U is quite good, though not the best. Multiply them, and you get the Twitter Constant again.
IR: Where do blogs fit into this?
TSD: Well, there are the bloggers who sometimes keep their blogs updated to the minute, but what they write is rarely useful. On the slower blogs we find less nonsense and we also find an occasional gem. For the blogs that we looked at, we found our equation to be true. The ones with more crap were updated more frequently. U times S always gave us the Twitter constant.
IR: Where does your Twitter service come into the picture?
TSD: We considered the range of available information, and we saw that the existing sources of knowledge went from very useful to fairly worthless, and in speed they went from glacially slow to very fast. On the face of it, that’s the entire spectrum.
IR: That about covers it, doesn’t it?
TSD: No, and that was the eye-opener for us—our second breakthrough, the big one.
IR: What was that?
TSD: At the extreme end of the spectrum, we found a huge gap—a void. We found that people had a desire for instant meaningless gratification—a thirst for completely useless information that they could get really really fast. An unfulfilled void that just had to be filled.
IR: An unfulfilled void—really?
TSD: Indeed. And the result of our realization is what you know today as the Twitter service. It’s useless, but it’s quick. Usefulness U is a low number, very close to zero. More useless even than the crap you see in the blogs. But it’s instantaneous, which means numerically the speed S is very high. The equation still holds. U times S still equals the Twitter Constant. Essentially, we give you pure real-time crap. The instantaneous speed makes up for the uselessness of the content.
IR: It’s amazing that something as practical as Twitter would have such a theoretical basis. Does the Twitter service contain anything useful at all?
TSD: Nothing is perfect. Even the most reliable reference works, like Britannica, occasionally contain errors. In the same way, the Twitter service will sometimes contain little isolated bits of real information. Fortunately these are few enough that on the average the usefulness of the content is pretty close to zero.
IR: Could it ever be exactly zero?
TSD: A very perceptive question. We think not, unless we could get the speed up to infinity. And even then, probably not, because you can’t multiply zero by infinity. The mathematics of that doesn’t work. And in any case, we are limited to the speed of light. So very likely it’s impossible to get the usefulness down to exactly zero. We are pretty close to it, though.
IR: How does Twitter compare with Facebook?
TSD: That brings up the higher-order parts of the Twitter equation. We hypothesize that there is a type of crap, that we call Dark Crap, that is observable only indirectly. As much as eighty per cent of the crap in the universe may exist as Dark Crap. It’s hard to observe Dark Crap directly, but it distorts the space and time near it, and we think we can observe that distortion. Sit and watch a Facebook page for some time and notice how it seems to get blurry after a while.
IR: These are indeed exciting times for the Internet. Let’s talk about numbers. How big is your service today?
TSD: We estimate that about half of all people on the Internet are familiar with the Twitter name.
IR: Familiar with the Twitter name? Are they all Twitter users?
TSD: It doesn’t matter. Since Twitter users are getting essentially no useful information, those who don’t use Twitter aren’t missing anything. Except, of course, our users get it in real time and the non-users get it not at all. But substantively, there is no difference, so we count as an effective user anyone who has ever heard of Twitter.
IR: An ingenious calculation method. But as you mentioned, useful bits of information do occur now and then. How many people does an actual Twitter user have to follow to get something significantly useful out of the service?
TSD: Since useful information occurs only in rare isolated bits, to get anything useful out of Twitter, a user has to follow many others. We estimate that to get one item of significantly useful information, a user would have to follow five million others for a year. But since the whole point behind Twitter is to get useless information, most tend to follow only a few hundred at a time. This satisfies their need for real-time crap, and they can always go to the Wikipedia for real information.
IR: It’s truly impressive that you have all these numbers at your fingertips. Where do you think your work will lead you next?
TSD: Well, now that we have reached essentially the limits of the uselessness of information, we think there might actually be a type of information whose useful content is even less than zero. The complete Twitter Equation is mathematically symmetric. For each type of useless information with a positive sign, there is a type with a negative sign. It seems impossible that the usefulness of useless knowledge could be less than zero, and yet, that’s exactly what the equation predicts.
IR: So if you could find this type of useless information with a negative sign, what would that mean?
TSD: We would call it anticrap, the opposite of crap. And just like matter and antimatter, when crap and anticrap came into contact, they would annihilate each other.
IR: Yielding pure energy!
TSD: More likely, just a bad smell. But this is all just theory at this time.
IR: It’s fascinating how the universe works.
TSD: That’s not even the half of it. If anticrap existed, you would get it even faster than the crap you get on Twitter, which you get in real time. So anticrap would have to come faster than real time. That would mean that you would get it before it was sent.
IR: I can’t even imagine how that would work.
TSD: This is a very active area of research. The anticrap phenomenon might allow news to be reported before events happen. But this is very speculative at this time.1
IR: Truly fascinating. And exciting. And a bit scary.
TSD: Research like this always is.
IR: What is Twitter’s business model?
TSD: You might have heard the old saying: “Information wants to be free.” To that we add: “So does crap.”
IR: But without a business model, how long can the Twitter service go on?
TSD: We’re not entirely discounting having a business model. But as our web site explains, we are holding off on generating revenue because we don’t want to get distracted by it.2
IR: Revenue can be very distracting.
TSD: Yes, very.
While researching this issue, Idea Raft staff came across a widely-discussed video from 9/11 in which the BBC reported, in a live broadcast, the collapse of a 47-story building about 20 minutes before it occurred. ↩
Idea Raft staff checked Twitter’s web site and we found3 this: “Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.” ↩
At this URL: http://twitter.com/about#money. ↩
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