Does Twitter have an information overload problem?
Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter. Lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day.
The promise of Twitter -- the reason Google and Microsoft  have paid to be able to search millions of Tweets -- is that it gives the best approximation of the pulse of the world: How popular is the new iPhone? Did Kanye West make a spectacle of himself at an awards show? What is it like when there is a shooter loose on an Army post?
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: Look for the phrase "Fort Hood," for example, or maybe an agreed-upon label, "#fthood," within tweets.
Yet during events like the [recent] shootings at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead, this method is useless. Hundreds of "relevant" tweets pop up every minute, most repeating the same news reports over and over again or expressing concern from far away.
Which is why a new feature that Twitter says it could introduce in the next few weeks -- "geolocation" -- holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.
The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cell phones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their search by location.
"Proximity can be this proxy for relevance," said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a "fairly small team" of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. "We are about delivering the right information to the right people."
Even now, before the geolocation feature has been released, visitors to Twitter.com have been able to limit searches by location based on the profiles that Twitter users provide when they sign up.
That simple filter made a huge difference in what a visitor to Twitter's search engine discovered about the Fort Hood shootings. After limiting searches to those from within 15 miles, or 25 kilometers, of Killeen, Texas, a town near the army post, you easily find messages sent by soldiers describing what it is like to be on lockdown or worrying about their children at school on the post. (continued...)
© 2010 International Herald Tribune under contract with MarketWatch. All rights reserved.
|
