Fubaredness Is Contagious » blogging

The Ultimate Twitter

Dmitriy — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:46:13 +0000

Microblogging started in large part as a medium to keep a close circle of friends updated on one’s activities and whereabouts on the go (in other words, without access to a computer). Since that time, as most know, it grew and expanded its scope to include meeting new people, forming new clubs and communities both online and offline, marketing, branding and image building, and much more. Nobody using Twitter gets surprised these days by notification emails about strangers starting to follow you, or by @replies from people many timezones away whom you have never met or heard of.

Yesterday I read a great post on ReadWriteWeb about reverse network effect that comes with scale. It’s something that I am sure many people have been thinking about, but Bernard Lunn was the one who skillfully put the thoughts together in his post.

My conclusion after reading it? Twitter as it exists today is just a beginning, and in its current form it won’t be able to realize full potential of microblogging. Twitter is currently constrained to following individual Twitter accounts. We assume that we want to hear everything this person or brand says. But this thinking applies only to close circle of friends (see the first paragraph). In the future, I want to follow topics, themes, places, discussions, communities, threads, news. And I don’t want to do it on the client side (hashtags, keywords) but on server side (semantic recognition, associations, weights). I think this “ultimate” twitter eliminates reverse network effects by design.

This might as well be impossible using technology and academic research available today, but I am happy that we as a society made the first step to improve distribution of information, and that there is room to grow!

Site Reorg

Dmitriy — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:57:50 +0000

I have done some reorg on the site. If you are reading this in a feed, you might have received old entries from my blog as new. There is no way around that, I apologize for inconvenience.

New address for this blog is http://somic.org. Old URL will redirect here with 301, so I expect all links to work properly.

Now On Twitter…

Dmitriy — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:47:17 +0000

… at http://twitter.com/somic

Yan’s 5 Reasons to Have a Blog

Dmitriy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:32:27 +0000

Yan over at skwpspace.com, who also works at CohesiveFT, wrote an excellent post on 5 reasons you should blog. I would add another to his 5: I view this site as well as my blog as a central index of my activities in blogosphere and social Internet, which I want to be linkable to me.

You probably visit tons of blogs or sites, either through your RSS reader or when researching a topic. You might leave a comment here and there. In the end, you will end up with dispersed comments on multiple sites and only search engines will know about the link between you and those posts. If you want this link to be easier to see and follow, a personal blog is a great tool to help you achieve that.