Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Twitter as news delivery system

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

mathewi — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:48:32 -0000

Come on, Dave -- you can do better than that.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

dave — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:26:02 -0000

Another content-free post whose sole purpose is to get you on TechMeme. And btw, some of us like Scoble just the way he is. No need for your to suffer, just unfollow.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

mathewi — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:17:01 -0000

Thanks Mitch. There is definitely still plenty of noise, but at the same
time the signal is going up I think -- depending on who you follow :-) And
David's "accidental journalist" is the perfect term for it.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

mathewi — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:16:01 -0000

Those are all good points, Alan -- and a good reason why Twitter doesn't
replace a CMS, or any kind of regular media outlet for that matter. But it
is an interesting extension to one, I would argue.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

mitchjoel — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:38:52 -0000

Great post Matthew. There are moments when I'm not sure who to follow (and who to ignore) in twitter, but I find the more people I follow, the more there tends to be more news coming my way.

David Weinberger had a Blog posting recently about the Accidental Journalist - I think this falls right into that bucket.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

marcelweiss — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:08:47 -0000

actually you can delete tweets.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

alan Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:39:56 -0000

...here's a fun game: restrict a Google search to the public Twitter stream and then search on a phrase such as "so horny"... bet the Twitter users in question didn't think about this before they were so open about it!

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

alan Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:22:36 -0000

There are some problems with Twitter as a news delivery system.

Unlike a typical newspaper CMS platform, there's no undo and no delete with Twitter - try to edit an incorrect assertion, try to retract an opinion and you'll find you can't.

You can publish a follow-up post, but between Twitter users' attention flitting from one stream to another and Twitter's frequent downtimes, there's a good chance your follow-up post won't be seen, especially at times of high usage.

Unless you change the default preference, all the content you publish on Twitter is republished as a public RSS feed, indexable by search engines and republishable by anyone with an RSS widget. Plan on tweaking that series of twitterings into a pro story later and selling it to a magazine? Good luck: the magazine already has it if they really want it.

You retain the copyright to the content you publish on Twitter, but you have to delete your Twitter profile - and all the associated content with that profile - to remove just one message. Big decision to make after you've built up a following of thousands of users.

If you were to publish something incorrect, and needed to retract it to avoid legal action, you'd have to hope the entity taking the action was satisfied with a follow-up retraction post, since the only way to remove your post from Google would be to delete your entire Twitter account and content, and lose all the hard work and time you'd put into building a following. Not a great choice to make for an up-and-coming news blogger.

Here's my recent post about how Twitter really needs to lift its game on privacy and content management soon.