“The best of Twitter in your inbox” – Thanks, but no thanks!

 #Blog2012, Breaking News, Geospatial Analysis / Mapping, Real-Time Journalism, Twitter  4 Responses »
May 152012
 

Surely you’ve seen this: I got one of those emails. As far as I’m concerned it’s spam and I’ll be disabling it.It is not

  • Timely – what good is a summary of last week’s tweets?
  • Revelant – I don’t see any evidence that it tracks the topics I care about. And, of course, if I did care about a topic, I’d be tracking it on Twitter via search, in my RSS feed reader, via search engines, on email lists and even in face-to-face meetings.
  • Personal – It’s a damn email autoresponder, fercryingoutloud! Sure, it knows my name and Twitter handle, just like every other email autoresponder I’ve ever joined.

I think this is a giant leap backwards for Twitter. Email marketing represents everything a lot of us hate about the Internet. It’s annoying and for the most part a waste of the senders’ time as well as the receivers. I’m on probably a dozen or two email lists / Google Groups relevant to my interests. But I rarely give out my email address any more to, say, download a “free white paper” or some other “content marketing” gizmo.

Twitter has an email list of hundreds of millions of addresses. How long do you suppose it will take phishers to copy the emails, hook up databases of Twitter handles and email addresses and start pumping out fake “best of Twitter” emails? How long do you suppose it will be before advertisers want “Promoted Stories” sent out to this mailing list? And if you’re using GMail to read these emails, well, Google is making advertising dollars on Twitter’s back! What’s up with that?

I haven’t seen many complaints about this so far in the tech blogs. I think the focus is on Facebook’s IPO and Yahoo’s attempting to fire its way to growth. But I think it’s a bad idea, and I’ve unsubscribed.

If I were working at Twitter, I’d go the exact opposite way. Instead of building a “weekly news magazine”, I’d build a breaking real-time world news ticker. Give me a page with a map of the world. Capture an average of tweet rates by geotag, time of day and day of the week in a database. When the tweet rate takes a sharp increase at a location, light it up on the map and give me a link to search for the tweets.

The Future Of Journalism – Geofeedia or Overview? (Updated 2012-05-18)

 #Blog2012, Books, Computational Journalism, Geospatial Analysis / Mapping, Java, Knowledge Discovery, Real-Time Journalism, Ruby, Twitter Streaming API  1 Response »
May 142012
 

Updated 2012-05-18 14:54 PDT:

I missed this when I wrote the post, but the algorithm Overview uses to cluster the documents is a new one. Here’s the write-up:

Hierarchical Clustering and Tagging of Mostly Disconnected Data

If you’ve been following my tweet stream, you saw me tweet this:

At $1450 a month for five seats, I think the service is overpriced. Moreover, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube or Yahoo/Flickr could easily build this into their web sites and deliver it for free, essentially by-passing two middlemen – Geofeedia and the news organization subscribing to Geofeedia. And a clever RSS / Yahoo! Pipes hacker could build something like this for use in a newsroom. For that matter, if you limit yourself to Twitter you can do most of this with Twitter / Advanced Search.

I must admit that I love the idea and think this could evolve into something game-changing. I wrote about the potential for this back in January 2010!

The Twitter Streaming API — How It Works and Why It’s A Big Deal

To get an idea what this could become, check out Knowledge Discovery from Data Streams by Joao Gama.

Moving on, I don’t know how I’ve managed to be a tech blogger writing about computational journalism without discovering Overview until last week, but it happened. Twitter serendipity at work – I was watching my Interactions page and saw a tweet of mine retweeted by @overviewproject. The Overview project is led by Jonathan Stray. You can see the entire team here.

Overview is open source, lives on Github and appears to be a mix of Ruby and Java. I’m currently testing it out for potential inclusion in one of my computational journalism appliances. It’s a browser / desktop application, so most likely it will end up in the successor to Data Journalism Developer Studio  2012LX. If you want to work with it yourself, the instructions are here.

So which of the two represents the future of journalism? Both, of course! With the proper underlying database and real-time knowledge discovery algorithms, Geofeedia could be a game-changer. But in the long run, as a for-profit service, I think they’ll either get acquired or duplicated by the big players..The Overview project, on the other hand, is an open source project. It’s well-funded by the Knight Foundation and Associated Press, and the team is led by one of the well-known names in computational journalism. Overview is certainly going to be part of my future.