What the hell is Twitter, anyway?

For a while, I thought it was like Pyroto Mountain, which it is in some ways. But more useful.

But I have a couple friends who just don't "get it". They really do not see the value of social networks like twitter and Facebook. So of course I'm trying to explain to them why they're interesting. And this is what I came up with. I'm curious what anyone else thinks about it (if anything):

If the internet can be considered a global mind (which I believe it can, though not in a conscious sense - yet), then twitter is its short-term memory and attention span. Through real-time content search and keyword aggregation, crowd-sourced memes which persist for temporal periods consisting of minutes to hours to days are discovered by influencers and distributed by followers. In addition, the facility persists for followers to discover or create memes which will be retweeted or distributed by influencers. In essence, it's a Heirarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) composed of chunks of human attention.

The constant tweets go by, banal, boring, interesting, or deeply meaningful, and humans dip their metaphorical toes of attention in the stream and if they like the temperature (i.e. the meme) they tell someone about it. Actually, maybe they don't tell any or maybe they tell a whole ton, depending upon who is paying attention to their output stream of tweets (signals / excitations). The network is created on the fly and adapts in real time as people follow and unfollow each other. There are streams of right-wing memes and left-wing memes and funny memes and D&D memes and cystic fibrosis memes and oprah memes and sci-fi memes and sports memes and happy and sad memes and everything else pretty much you can possibly think of and they are all excited chains of nodes in a massively dynamic network that is constantly self-organizing. I like this because - well, come on - it's just pretty damn Neuromancer
-level cool.

But twitter is also a reputation economy because the nodes in this network are conscious (i.e. us folks). Pretty much what builds your twitter rep is (1) credibility, (2) snark, (3) freshness, (4) reciprocity, and (5) reach. So it can be self-reinforcing because of (5), as - just like in any network - the value of a single node increases proportionally with the size of the network (paraphrasing Metcalfe's Law). I like twitter because I appreciate those values.

Also, it's a marketplace of ideas. By the time a meme is trending on twitter, that means that thousands of people (possible tens of thousands or more) have made the conscious decision that this particular piece of information is important enough to remember for at least a little while and to have a discussion about.

And this is something that I really do love about twitter - the connectedness. I have met real people through it. Communicated real ideas. Made friends. Found clients. And had fun. Being part of a network isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Follow me if you want: @jayturley