see a puffin eat a fish

Twitter has personal/social/networking uses but lately i’ve been really digging its real time news and information capabilities. Simply put, if I want to know what is happening I type it into Twitter. Very quickly, with low overhead or commitment on my part, I find out what’s going on.

Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

In the current online video landscape of ustream, justin.tv and seesmic, WayMarkr is old news (not to mention incredibly poorly supported). But when we put it together a few years ago, it was way ahead of its time not to mention open source meaning people could do whatever they wanted with it. It’s cool to see that people are still building on top of it:

Thanks Carolina for the link!

WayMarkr technology was most recently showcased in the Olafur Eliasson show at the MoMA.

“Each weekday during the course of Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, MoMA and P.S.1 lend selected visitors special cell-phone cameras to wear as necklaces. These devices take pictures at random intervals, documenting the visitors’ journeys through the exhibition in a candid and experiential way. Selected images from these visitor experiences later appear in the background of the online exhibition.” — from Take Your Time

Click here to view the more passively generated documentation made with WayMarkr technology!

The WayMarkr bro makes a comeback.

Thanks for trying WY20!