Business Week reported that LinkedIn said posts from Twitter can no longer be displayed on its site, as Twitter is trying to encourage users to visit its own services. I wonder who is next, as Twitter is increasing its focus on getting more users to look at tweets through its own website. This is to boost advertising revenue. Business Week wrote that the company expects to generate at least $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014.
So I did two things right off. First, I looked at my own Twitter pages and did not see any ads. I wonder why I am so blessed and where this revenue will come from? Second, I checked my Typepad blog and my tweets are still appearing there.
Now when I first saw colleagues using Twitter, I thought it was a waste of time. I compared the firehouse of tweets flowing through their site and wondered if we are we creating a Tower of Babel Babel Babel or can real meaning be covered in 140 characters?
Here is a summary of Borges work, Library of Babel from the wikipedia:
“…his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents. Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the “Crimson Hexagon”, containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God.”
Then I discovered Tweetdeck through some colleagues and it made sense to me. Tweetdeck was like Borges Crimson Hexagon. I could bring meaningful order to the fire hose flow. Twitter was one of the worst interfaces to its one data. Many of these problems remain, although I do go to the Twitter client for some purposes. I am afraid that if they kill off access to the other interfaces that provide order, that Twitter will go back to being a Library of Babel to me. That would be sad as I am a convert and use Twitter a great deal now.
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