Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform

Twitter has gotten a lot of mixed attention lately, both as a rising phenomenon but also for failing to fix its capacity issues as quickly as people seem to expect. The issue at hand, as expressed by Twitter Dev, is that the platform was not originally written as a messaging system. Indeed, it was built on a content management model.

Recall that Twitter was originally about posting what you are doing at the moment. As such, it was essentially constructed as a public microblog that happened to include mobile support. But very quickly the Twitter user community realized the power of broadcasting and co-opted this feature to grow a very large social netwoork. Twitter became an extension of sms and all of the new API clients that started popping up.

Now with almost 2 million users, many of whom are tweeting multiple times a day, the content management system is maxxing out. Imagine if 2 million people were posting 160-char messages to Blogger daily… Frankly, it’s amazing that Twitter is doing as well as it is. So now the Twitter dev team is rebuilding every component from scratch to explicitly construct a robust global messaging system.

What’s really interesting is that the Twitter community has effectively turned Twitter into something it wasn’t intended to be. The desire to rapidly communicate with affiliates across the globe is so strong, and the power of broadcast is so compelling in the web2.0 era, that the very DNA of Twitter is being forced to mutate to support this demand. The spark of “what am I doing right now?” set flame to social media and the connection of communities. We want to know what’s going on with all the people we’re interested in. We want to know them professionally, philosophically, and personally. And we want to speak our mind and emotions and will to them.

I’m constantly taken by the casual intimacy of Twitter friends – people I’ve never met yet I know that they had a rough interview, or their cats are hungry, or they are giving a lecture tomorrow, or just saw a crazy person dancing on Wall St., or that they think Indiana Jones represents the Marxian class struggle. Normally you only get this spread of data about someone if you’re close friends and physically near them on a regular basis.

We want to socialize and share and we have an instinctual feeling, waking up from the haze of 50 years of corporate push-media, that life itself in all it’s minutia is far more entertaining than anything Fox or NBC can throw at us. Or at least, it’s just as entertaining and engaging and, at it’s core, so much more real. The simulacrum cannot mess with us, ala Real World where we were sold scripted caricatures in the guise of “reality”. Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, etc… These are the new reality media platforms and we’re all the new empowered content creators, scripted or real. Culture is going digital and the once-static web archive is waking up as a dynamic organism managing and sharing the very whims of it’s creators.

Through this process we’re getting to know each other and ourselves and our world very quickly as knowledge is distributed globally and minds are linked across worlds with zero lag. Culture is iterating faster than ever and we’re only at the very beginning of what is clearly becoming a huge revolution for all of humanity, whether or not each person is immediately touched by the wires. Life is virtualizing and the abstracted mental content of our world is increasingly archived and shared and commented upon and iterated on itself from all across the world. The power and reach of our minds is expanding out through our devices and the exocortical software agents we now have managing so many of our subroutines. We are cyber even without the implants and wetware. The individual is wiring into groups, like cells aggregating into functional bodies, towards greater communicative and iterative power.

The human species is beginning to truly know itself and grok it’s identity and function. As our eyes open up to perceive more and more of our world, we gaze at our creations and atrocities and the spark of soul sits in judgment, our conscience asserting itself. The democratization of media and the transparency of behavior is fundamentally altering the power balance away from the dominant elite towards the will of the people. In a very strange and sweet way, Twitter is part of this process of sharing and reinforcing the similarities between us all.

A Little Virtual Spice Please

To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:

I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces – and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.

I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.

We Make Money Not Art

I’ve been enjoying the playful edge of the bleeding digital arts scene vicariously through we make money not art for some time now, but I have to give them renewed props for their site design. Love the aesthetic!

Logosagogo! The Hyperstition of Philip K. Nixon

Alterculturalist, sonic datamasher, and cat lover, Wes Unruh has posted his latest work in the Philip K. Nixon project. Logosagogo! The Hyperstition of Philip K. Nixon is a Matrix-meets-machine-elf aural memescape that slices and dices the zeitgeist like television chopped into glass & oil. Somebody in Hollywood needs to hire this guy as an SFX developer…

Win Joe Rogan’s Isolation Tank

Props to Joe Rogan who is so vastly cooler than his Fear Factor persona might betray. You can also see him ranting about DMT here.

The tank makes me see how we often live our lives on the momentum of the past, constantly defining ourselves by how we have already behaved, constantly cycling through a pattern of pre-determined thoughts moving around on these pre-arranged tracks, instead of running our time on this planet through a well considered, best-case scenario approach.

“I want to live my life in a way that, were I not me, and I saw that behavior, it would inspire me to be a better person.”

…The human systems go in a pretty predictable pattern that starts with my personality, and then connects to the various people I come into contact with in my life, and as I pass over that, I eventually branch out to an overview of people in general; egos, relationships, self discipline, then it starts to drift away from individuals, and go to examining cultures, human motivation, symbiotic life, universal consciousness, then slowly but surely it gets to “the place.”
“The place” is the ultimate goal – a state of consciousness at the center of it all where your “mind” doesn’t exist. It’s a place where the ego is temporarily forgotten, and where in the complete absence of sensory input you converge into “everything.” The more I get in the tank and go through the process, the deeper I can go, and the freaky thing is, it doesn’t seem like this experience has an end point. Every single time I get into the tank I get a little bit further, and a little bit closer to the source.

Parting Notes on ETech

This was a great conference and the most consistent collection of speakers and topics I’ve ever experienced. Very fun and inspiring. Lots of hip 30-somethings trying to dream up tomorrow and make it real. It was a a very balanced, yet cutting-edge talk aimed at an eager (and surprisingly mixed-gender)crowd. I noticed that most folks were using Mac laptops – this part of the edge seems to prefer Apple – and it was fascinating to watch many who were blogging the talks while pulling up references dropped by the speakers, tweeting out to Twitter, and snapping/downloading/posting photos in real-time. As speakers dropped references I was pulling them up on my laptop and dropping links into my blog notes.

In the lobby a team was showing off a data viz video mapping real-time communications connecting NYC to the rest of the world. Andrea noticed that a surprising number were with an Italian city called Perugia. Maybe next year they could map the live feed of all web traffic from ETech. Imagine the bitstreams rising off such a gathering of digiterati.

Maybe it was just the Sudafed coursing through our virus-ridden veins (thank you Portland) but ETech was a total intellectual turn-on, from ambient objects, Asian mobile media, green policy and sustainability, hardware hacking & drone building, Austrian post-Situationists, neuroengineering, and the digital salvation of Democracy itself.

I hope I can go back next year!

Heading to San Diego for ETech2008

Hacking brains & iPhones, building DIY aerial drones, ambient data streaming, data viz and crowd movements, ARGs, Vegas, and the Self awakened to it’s own tech. Oh baby!

With the help of my special lady friend (who got work to sport for the hotel, pass, and air) and the help of my employer (I’m doing some booth shifts on the floor in exchange for a pass – I get to rep Adobe AIR), I’m leaving tomorrow morning for sunny San Diego and a week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference! I’m psyched. I’ve wanted to go for the last few years but couldn’t afford it. All this time, I should have just told my corporate overlords they needed to send me on the company ticket!

I’ll be sending photos to the urbeingrecorded portal via tumblr, and I’ll likely post some keen bits here. Otherwise I’ll be fast hacking my iPhone to control a robotic crowd-sourcing drone I will use to track the culinary habits of tech luminaries and international political dissidents whose footpaths I’ll be datastreaming to various dynamic art installations and ambient devices.

From their site:

How does technology help you perceive things that you never noticed before? How does it help you be found, or draw attention to issues, objects, ideas, and projects that are important, no matter their size or location?

At the 2008 version of ETech, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, we’ll take a wide-eyed look at the brand new tech that’s tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us:

Body Hacking. Genomics Hacking. Brain Hacking. Sex Hacking. Food Hacking. iPhone Hacking.
DIY Aerial Drones. DIY Talking Things. DIY Spectrum. DIY Apocalypse Survival.
Emerging Tech of India, Cuba, and Africa. International Political Dissidents.
Visualize Data and Crowds. Ambient Data Streaming.
Good Policy. Energy Policy. Defense Policy. Genetic Policy. Corruption.
Alternate Reality Games. Emotions of Games. Sensor Games.

ETech 2008 will cover all of these topics and more. We put on stage the speakers and the ideas that help our attendees prepare for and create the future, whatever it might be. Great speakers are going to pull us forward with them to see what technology can do… and sometimes shouldn’t do. From robotics and gaming to defense and geolocation, we’ll explore promising technologies that are just that–still promises–and renew our sense of wonder at the way technology is influencing and altering our everyday lives.

w00t!

New Face & Portal at Urbeingrecorded.com

I’ve revamped the design and set up urbeingrecorded.com as a portal for my primary online activities.
So far:
- links to all my websites (this blog, Fine Hatery, chris23tumblr, and N8UR)
- an rss feed from all of the above
- a picture feed from Tumblr

I’m using Tumblr as a place I can send any mobile content I want to push online from wherever. I can send content from the beach and it gets posted to Tumblr, then pushed out to my homepage and RSS. Sweet!

{I’ll be redesigning this blog soon too…]

Convergence Mobil in Tokyo

From a post at Electroplankton about high convergence functionality in Japanese mobile phones.

Claude is a 27 y.o. Japanese male… (His) typical day starts with him checking his email on his phone. He gets all his daily tasks and calendaring events this way. He then syncs it with his computer. He pays for the subway by placing the phone on a kiosk granting him access past the gates. The commute is spent watching TV on his phone by rotating the screen. A small antenna extends up and catches the wireless digital TV signals (something we will never have here in America). About 45 minutes later, he’s in Tokyo and heads to a vending machine to buy fresh fruit and water. He places the phone up against a pad. The vending machine reads his bank information which is tied into his phone. He then places his thumb on the phone’s tiny thumbprint reader to verify his identity. As he makes his way to the office, he waves the phone near the door handle to unlock it. During a 10 minute break, he’s flips thru a magazine and sees something he wants to buy. The item has a tiny stamp size barcode pictogram next to it. He scans the pictogram with his phone. A receipt and shipping confirmation hits his email minutes later. As the day ends, he syncs with his work computer and goes grocery shopping paying for items with his phone. Before heading home, he heads to a bar his friend has invited him too. He uses the phone to give him step-by-step directions. The day is finally over and his phone’s battery is nearing the end of its life. He plugs it in and goes about the rest of the evening relaxing before bed.

you want some of this? you want some of the glowing??

Korean scientists, clearly infected with toxoplasma, have brought the feline species one step closer to world domination.

The two Turkish Angora cats now glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light. The scientists believe the process could be used to develop treatments for human genetic diseases and could help reproduce rare animals.
…To clone the cats, Kong’s team used skin cells of the mother cat. They modified its genes to make them fluorescent by using a virus, which was transplanted into the ova. The ova were then implanted into the womb of the donor cat.

hello mr. president

This is why the total information state will lose. There’s always some young hot-shot punk kid with a limber mind that will slip right through the chink in your black wall of iron.

An Icelandic teen, MSNBC reports, figured out President Bush’s private phone number, and called it recently, leaving a message saying he was the president of Iceland and wanted Bush to call him back. When police visited the teen, after being alerted by Secret Service, he would not say how he learned the top-secret number.

tokyo baby

more pics here.

(written last week with sporadic web access)
We’ve been in Tokyo for 5 nights now and could easily stay another
couple of weeks. The place is absolutely amazing on so many levels.
Tokyo gives new meaning to the word “metropolis” as the city extends
off in every direction beyond the horizon. It’s simply gigantic,
covering 2187 sq km and contains approx 12.5 million people – that’s
about 6000 people per sq kilometer. So the subways and trains are
almost always packed and the major civic centers are thronged with
people constantly moving in time with the pulse of the crossing
signals and train schedules. Yet somehow in spite of all this the
place is remarkably peaceful, respectful, incredibly clean, and
exceedingly polite.

We’ve been to Harajuku, Akihabara, Shibuya, Ebisu, Roppongi, the Edo
Tokyo museum, the Imperial Palace, many restaurants, numerous vast
shopping districts, and countless rail and metro stations along the
way. Every day has been painfully packed with activities and the
amount of walking required has been brutal on the feet and legs. The
sheer level of detail is overwhelming, from the architecture &
skyline, the kanji adverts & signage, the constant people-watching, 6
floor department stores, 7 floor toy and manga shops packed to the
gills with product, and the crazy buzzing nerd-dom of Akihabara’s
Electric City. The scale and density of the city is recapitulated on
every level here. With 12.5 million people, apparently you need entire
districts devoted to towering stores full of manga & electronics.

Most cars on the road are service vehicles & taxis. Rail and metro are
the dominant transport and they become impossibly packed during rush
hours, but it’s quite refreshing to be free from the gas beasts we so
adore at home. Everyone is constantly using cell phones and although
talking on them is not typically allowed in trains and stores they are
constantly interfacing with them, texting, reading novels, browsing
the web, or watching tv (their cell phones have antennae that
pick up digital tv). In fact, finding any open wireless nets is quite
difficult since everyone has web access on their mobiles. And yes, the
toilet in our hotel room has a remote control. They’re years ahead of
us.

The city layout is exceedingly complex and chaotic, like a tangled
mess of udon noodles. There are no rectilinear grids of streets. It’s
just a wild criss-cross that loosely tracks the underground rails.
Thankfully the public transport is exceptional and the trains run to
the second.

Today we take the shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto for a 5 night stay
there. It should provide a fascinating contrast to the hyper-neo
metropolis of Tokyo, yielding to the deep traditions of classic Japan.
Until the mid 1800′s Kyoto was the capital, proudly rooted in
thousands of years of tradition. Then emeperor Meiji move to Edo and
renamed it Tokyo. This marked the shift from old Japan into the new
age when the country began to open up to the west and march towards the
industrialized superpower it is today. Tokyo is the new and Kyoto is
the old.

After that we have 7 nights unplanned which will either take us to the
beaches in Izu, or perhaps the mountains near Nagano, but most likely
back to Tokyo for one last week in the metropolis. Every day in the
city so far we have packed full to the brim. And every day we learn of
more we wish to see and explore and experience. Kyoto will be a nice
retreat and respite but the shiny crazy glow of NeoTokyo is magnetic
and irresistible. I’ve never met a city like this!

Neo Tokyo

I've been studying many maps like this underground rail map of Tokyo. The same chaos of these lines is mirrored in the streets & avenues above them. Aerial images and line maps of the city look like a frenetic, writhing organic sprawl, like a mix between unrestrained Banyan trees and the semi-conscious muscles and tissues that wrapped around Tetsuo as he grew. I think a time lapse of Tokyo urban development over the last 100 years would show ever-emerging serpentine growths lashing out and wending their way towards the throbbing and expanding pulse of the city center, bubbling at and away from the great Imperial Palace. To date, 23 wards have pressed away from the sea and out to the foothills, filling in the remaining gaps steadily.

These 2 hi-res NASA radiometric images of the city illustrate the sheer density, revealing it as the most populous metropolitan area in the world. So many people with such a seeming civility. I saw a quote somewhere to the effect that Japan has learned to defend it’s history and the precious traditions it has crafted over so many centuries against the constant onrush of modernity. Thus, the multifaceted and somewhat schizoid state of it’s capital, at once bleeding right over the edge of digital hyperspace and simultaneously reposed under the austerity of Mt. Fuji and the calm sine of clarity hung on the tune of the temple bell. Japan is rooted in a deep and old animism. It’s electronics are alive.

I called Cingular to see if I could use my phone over there. They told me none of the US phones worked in Japan because their cellular system is so advanced that no-one else has caught up. I think they’re using 5G. Seriously. I may be able to rent a phone when I get there. Apparently this is a reasonable business model catering to technologically savage foreigners like myself.

I honestly can’t believe I’m going to be right in the middle of it all. I’m beginning to understand the locations of these semi-mythic places I learned from Gibson – like Chiba Prefecture, Akihabara, Shinjuku. Names like ono sendai. I’m re-reading Mona Lisa Overdrive just to get back into the fringes of those hyperkinetic streets, still just a collection of shadowy images in my mind.