OK, OK, not really. Mike is a good friend whom I've known for--- wow--- coming up on 20 years. You may have known him for nearly as long through his various professional works (see synopsis and links at http://elganmedia.net/).
When I met Mike, he'd recently left the world of newspapers for the greener (ha!) pastures of magazine publishing. But some part of Mike has always remained connected to news reporting.
So, why am I pseudo-cursing him?
Mike is an earliest adopter: He's always among the first users of new and emerging technologies. Some people consider me an early adopter, but I can't hold a candle to Mike.
Or rather, I could, but it would be an actual candle, while Mike would have a solar-powered, high-intensity, laser-guided, eye-mounted, thought-controlled LED floodlight pointing back. Or something.
I stay current with my professional stuff, but I'm generally much slower to update my personal gear. For example, I have a strange, Luddite aversion to do-it-all phones. I want my phone to be a (gasp!) phone, and a good one. If I want to send a text message, I want to use a real keyboard, not a compromised phone-sized one. If I want to take a photo, I want to use a real camera, not a compromised phone-sized one. If I want to surf the web or watch movies, I want to watch a real screen, not a compromised phone-sized one. I want my phone to make and receive phone calls well, and not have that primary function compromised with other they-sorta-kinda-work (but-they're-oh-so-trendy!) features.
I even have my cell-phone ringer set to sound like an old, analog desk phone; you know, with the two-tone bells. I like the irony.
Then there's email. For years, I lived on email. At the peak of my newsletter business, I'd get around a million emails a month (no joke!). Many were crap, and I had an elaborate set of filters to winnow them out, some at the server level so they'd never even reach my inbox. Many that did make it through were related to newsletter activity (subscriber signups, address changes, etc.); and could be handled by bots and little custom programs I wrote. So, I never actually had to personally open and read a million emails a month, but that was the volume that came pouring in.
This was one of the happier days in my professional life:
That's a graph showing how my email volume fell off (red) when I sold my newsletter business. (It was a momentous-enough day for me that I preserved the graph.) The green line shows that during the previous month I'd had a day--- one very busy day--- with over 45,000 inbound emails.
Because of that experience, I've been averse to the various chatterbox types of communications: IMs, Tweets, and such. The last thing I wanted was to re-immerse myself in a constant flood of messages, each demanding at least a minimal amount of attention. Been there, done that, don't need to go back.
I successfully resisted for years. I did set up some IM accounts so I could understand the technology and its applications, but never used them as a personal tool. And I had accounts at Facebook, Linkedin and the like, but there too, it was to see what the fuss was, not to use them personally.
And likewise, I'd looked at Twitter so I could see what it was about, but steered clear of any real use.
But then Mike sent me an innocent-looking message mentioning a little applet he'd created to nourish his own news-oriented roots: it was a small web page that used the Twitter API to auto-refresh Twitter feeds every minute or so. Mike suggested I try it by signing up for any of the many Twitter news feeds and then using his self-refreshing page to constantly update the feeds. With the news feed page open on my desktop, I could watch news stories develop in near real-time. The news "tweets" were often hours (and sometimes a full day) ahead of the "breaking news" stories carried online by more traditional news organizations.
A few days later, Mike said he'd found a beta version of a commercial service that he liked even better than his home-brew news feeder. It's free and is called TweetDeck. (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/) So, I created a Twitter account and set it to "follow" about 30 of the separate news sources available there:
USAT_Breaking / USAT Breaking News
BreakingNewsTDC / Breaking News TDC
techTF / tech TwitFix
Slate
CBSNews / CBS Breaking News
ForbesTech / Forbes.com Tech News
GreenTechNews
Drudge_Report / Drudge Report
Breaking_News / Breaking News
pablorueda
BreakingNewz / Breaking News
msnbc_breaking / msnbc Breaking News
iDesk / CNN iDesk
zdnett
RSS_TechCrunch
guardiantech / Guardian Tech
ondeadline / USAT On Deadline
mike_elgan / Mike Elgan
BreakingNewsOn / BNO News
bbcbreaking / BBC Breaking News
WSJ / Wall Street Journal
Reuters / Reuters Top News
foxnews / Fox News
wired / Wired
CNETNews / CNET News.com
nytimes / The New York Times
cnn / CNN.com
bbcworld / BBC World News
googlenews / Google News
I fed my news-oriented Twitter account info into Tweetdeck, and it logged on for me and started displaying the most-recent Tweets from the sources I'd followed.
Mike suggested setting up Tweetdeck in 1-column mode, and sticking it to the side of my screen. It looks like this (click to enlarge):
It updates every minute, and most minutes, something new is happening. It's not uncommon for first news reports to show up on Twitter before anyplace else. After a delay of minutes to hours or longer, the same information will start showing up on more traditional news services. I have a custom Google/News page I follow, too, and it updates every 10 minutes or so; but I don't think I've ever seen something important show up there that wasn't already pointed to, in abbreviated form, much earlier via Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck's downside is obvious: It's an attention-diverter, and can be a way to waste nontrivial amounts of time as you move from the Twitter blurb to a full story, and onward through associated links until your curiosity is satisfied.
First reports via Twitter are often sketchy, too, and sometimes just plain wrong. That's the nature of seeing the raw, first-draft info as it develops.
And I can't say that Tweetdeck has replaced any of my other news sources: It's just a kind of early-warning, headline clipping service, really. Hell, in addition to my custom Google news page, I still read two daily newspapers, several online newspapers, two weekly news magazines and a couple of weekly specialized journals. Tweetdeck just adds to the mix without reducing the need for more in-depth news reporting.
But, damn, Tweetdeck's up-to-the-minute urgency is compelling, and sometimes seeing a one- or two-sentence blurb draws me into an interesting story I might otherwise have skimmed over in a different format. Twitter/Tweetdeck exposes you to a *lot* of news.
So on balance, I'm enjoying Tweetdeck; enough so that I've kept my Twitter account alive--- something that, before Mike's email, I wouldn't have imagined happening.
If you're a mild news junkie like me or a hard-core-news-in-the-blood person like Mike, Tweetdeck might be worth a try.
And then you can join me in shaking your e-fist at Mike.
Curse you, Mike Elgan! 8-)
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteI have long looked for a decent news source. Newsvine doesn't cut it. Google news keeps feeding me the same news stories WEEK after WEEK and CNN is pathetic. I don't know why no one has developed a decent news story sorting system with clickoff functionality for when you've read a story or don't want to receive news from certain sources such as gay rant blogs. Google knows how to group stories but keep offering the same story groups for weeks on end. How is that NEWs?
So the twitter feeds sound interesting. Once again, thanks Fred.
The twitter signal to noise ratio can be poor, but there's a lot more signal, which may make the net result OK.
ReplyDeleteIt's free, anyway: Doesn't hurt to try.
(But I'm going to have to retrain myself to call Twitter messages "tweets," which is what Twitterholics say. Until recently, I've been calling them "twits," which reflects my erstwhile aversion to high-volume messaging services. Tweet!)
I've certainly seen Mike evangelising about Twitter, but I'm terrified of it as it looks like a bottomless time sink to me. My theory is that Twitter, and also things like Facebook, are primarily for people who work for someone else and thus are happy to spend time on other things during the work day. If you're self-employed, though, who has the time? (I know Mike thinks Twitter is even *more* important if you have a business. If so, God help me.)
ReplyDeleteSometimes I love to be a lotech (do you remember Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson?)
ReplyDeleteJohnny Mnemonic! Yes indeed. Like all Reeves movies, the, um, characterization was a bit weak. (Major emotional display = sotto voce "Whoa.")
ReplyDeleteBut it was the first big-screen portrayal I know of that showed what are now being called haptic interfaces and full-size gestural input devices.
This tech was shown in far more developed form in "Minority Report," and has even come home in real life in the Wii and iPhone. But I think Johnny Mnemonic was the first major Hollywood portrayal.
Hadn't thought of that movie in a long time. thanks for the memory refresh. ;)
I agree about the film and in my opinion Gibson's best book is "Virtual Light".
ReplyDeleteP.S. sorry for my poor english by I'm not use to speak it. I read it well but write is another thing.
After reading the post I tried tweeter for a while and it is ok. For me I prefer to use this webpage: http://monitter.com/
ReplyDeleteI guess you could use Tweeter to become aware of an event, but once you have a keyword, I like Monitter for its raw tweets from people on the ground.
IMHO
Al