twitter Archive

Nova-M Radio, the radio syndicator for Randi Rhodes, crashed and burned to the great delight of a gaggle of right wing talker fans everywhere. Moe Lane at Redstate took mock credit for its demise, claiming an appearance by “our own Mark Impomeni…shut it down cold.”

The #tcots on Twitter were all a-twitter too. Free Market At Work, they crowed. And they’re right, but its not because there’s a lack of appetite in the country for liberal ideas or thoughts, it just there’s a lack of demand for it over old delivery methods.

The correct paring of medium and message was one of the main reasons for Rush Limbaugh and neocon-talk radio’s rise in the first place. When Limbaugh began doing his brand of political talk, old pickup trucks still had AM-only radios.

Let’s digress a moment, and quote Wikipedia’s entry on buggy whips:

Though similar whips are still manufactured for limited purposes, the buggy whip industry as a major economic entity ceased to exist with the introduction of the automobile, and is cited in economics and marketing as an example of an industry ceasing to exist because its market niche, and the need for its product, disappears. — Wikipedia on Buggy Whip & Coach Whip

The buggy whip didn’t disappear overnight. There was this period where whip manufacturers were failing, and those most successful in staying in business hewed to markets where their product was still in demand, and they did what they needed to be premier in that market.

It would be as if a smart buggy whip manufacturer would identify the Amish market and do what ever it took to best serve their needs. Even naming themselves—in a not so subtle nod to their remaining market—Ordnung, the German word for order.

Ordnung, if you’ve been keeping up with your Mennonite apologetics, is the Amish name for their set of rules for living. What a great name for a whip, if you’re Amish!

So take no joy in watching libtalk radio go over the cliff, righties. It was just the weakest buggy whip company in the business: it deserved to die. But the lesser Rushbos aren’t far behind.

Back when game shows were as simple as three people, a spartan set and a couple of cameras, You Bet Your Life featured the witty Groucho Marx, announcer George Feneman, and a mustached prop duck that was flown on a pully up above the lights. At the start of the show a “secret word” was announced sotto voce by Feneman, but kept secret from the contestant.

If the contestant said the secret word, which was usually a common but random word that had little to do with the game or the contestant’s life, they got an extra $100.

A stagehand lowered the duck into view of the camera and contestant. The duck had a hundred dollar bill in its beak. (Big money gameshows–and in those days big money was $64,000–didn’t come along for a few years).

Today, I got followed on Twitter by @diabetesnews, whom I didn’t follow back. I don’t have any war with @diabetesnews (or diabetes either, at least yet) and if I were diabetic or involved as a caregiver to someone who was, I might have sought them out. Its good information, in a reasonable amount, well linked.

But what troubles me about this is that I probably got selected because of an offhand snarky comment I made back to @WillPao over his “What age does it become inappropriate to eat Lucky Charms.” It was my answer, I suspect, that got me the follow: “The day you’re diagnosed with Type II diabetes. ”

Maybe I’m just being tech paranoid, and since I made my tweets public, I can hardly be outraged that people follow me. There could me other reasons, and I DM’d @DiabetesNews to inquire. But what worries me is the possibility that it was a bot that made this choice on the basis of a random, offhand remark. I said the secret word, and the duck came down.

I’ve come to love Twitter, which has supplanted other services and software. Its become my tip service, which I tune by deciding whom I follow and hoping that the right people follow me back so that I can return the favor in interest areas I watch closely.

Therefore losing followers and dumping people I follow is probably a good thing. Others are deciding that my content isn’t tuned to their life, or somebody else out there is doing a better job, and gaining followers isn’t necessarily a good thing, because if they picked me because of what I say and what I think, there’s a high probably I’ll like them just as much and will follow back. The incoming stream is already bigger than I’d like.

As Twitter matures, there will be more and more refinement in the art of finding the right mix. Atherton Bartelby’s Mashable post on Follow Fail is an excellent example. We’ve already had the first great security breech, and those of us who didn’t think security was an overriding concern (I mean, its just little txt messages) have been taken to the virtual woodshed.

What we don’t need, is an environment where every tweet is processed by sea of algorithms run by a world-wide collection of special interest groups,  and each day your last few days of tweets are reflected in a wagon-load of tangential follows.

Twitter is at a critical juncture, between security issues, the right mix of commercialization vs. pure social interaction, and just plain too much success. I wish them nothing but luck. They’ve got some serious problems on the horizon, but they’ve also got a lot of users out here who think they’re cooler than a mustached duck with a hundred dollar bill in its beak.

I got my report from Mr. Tweet today. If tweeting, Twitter and and the whole concept of social networking with an extensible API is foreign: the short version is its a way to drop 140-character messages into a virtual world where people who “follow” you see them almost immediately and others can search and find.

I knew about Twitter just from the background noise of the net, but when Tim Elliott of Winecast sent me an invitation, I accepted, even though I couldn’t see any benefit to it. Twitter just seemed silly. But I also knew Elliott was a smart and talented early adopter. If he liked it, I was probably missing something.

Over the last few weeks, Twitter has demonstrated itself as the next step in this evolution of connectivity, and I am now seeing the new apps that fill in the blanks, like Twitter Grader and Mr. Tweet: virtual appliances that ferret out folks on your wavelength and make it easy to include them in your own staccato-statement world.

And another truth was starting to reveal itself. The more these appliances make suggestions on people to follow, the more often I know who they are, and the more they’re “the usual suspects”–people I know (in a ! IRL way) from my last waystations along the early adopter highway.

Like the #1 suggestion on my first Mr. Tweet report: Robert Scoble. I am already following Dave Winer. Can the prompt to add Adam Curry be far off?

Next will come the wholesale monetization of Twitter, which was deftly avoided by them waving off Facebook’s offer of cash and pseudo-cash, but sooner or later, they’ll take the bait and tweets will suddenly sport more product placement than America’s Biggest Loser.

And that will be my cue to move on down the road, where I’m sure to find all the usual suspects on my next stop along this information superhighway that gets smarter at every turn.

Back when radio was a medium of some importance, there was a great gotcha line. When the transmitter failed, you could usually get a false start out of a fledgling announcer by saying, “Quick, go announce that we’re off the air.”

Hoisted myself on my own petard this morning when I found twitter down and had the overwhelming desire to share that fact by tweeting it.