Twitter: Your All Access Pass
Two nights ago I was jotting down some thoughts about how Twitter’s democratic nature is vital to its utility. Then, ironically, along comes this controversial suggestion from Loic Le Meur that Twitter should rank search results by authority. Dangerous. There’s room for more granular search, sure (see Scoble’s quick suggestions), but the slippery slope to avoid is introducing a vernacular that describes hierarchy in the Twitter user base. That’s contrary to Twitter’s appeal and threatening to its growth.
Appeal, you say? What’s so appealing about Twitter? You can talk to anyone on Twitter. They’ll choose whether or not they want to listen, but in theory, every user is a potential conversant. You just have to test them with a ping.
You can talk to Lance fucking Armstrong on Twitter because he has made himself available and the transmission path for your data to his eyeballs is very easy. He may not respond, but the chance is good that he’ll review your message. And if he likes what you say, he may offer a reply, thereby bringing the connection full circle. We have enough walled gardens to support known relationships (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). The value of Twitter is its encouragement of new connections between unrelated users.
Think of Twitter as a very simple and scalable network comprised of people. In an efficient network, data is routed through the quickest paths between communicating nodes regardless of the relationship between or perceived awesomeness of the nodes. This equal opportunity routing is also Twitter’s core value proposition. It puts every node onto the network topology and does not censor, amplify, or otherwise throttle the data streaming from any of them. Twitter is open, unilateral, making new connections much easier. There’s no good reason why Twitter should look to demote the majority of its user base by promoting the tweets of a select few of its users. Routing would falter. Messages would garble. Communication would be stratified, incomplete, ineffective.
So screw criticisms of mundane status updates about eating bagels, the real value of Twitter is that is an all-access pass to anyone you ever wanted to listen to or speak to. In time, valuable conversations may move off the network, but the introductory connection can happen on Twitter where it would never happen in the real world, the professional world, the Warcraft world, or the other landscapeless worlds you inhabit that Lance Armstrong doesn’t deign to visit. Upsetting the egalitarian nature of the Twitter landscape by introducing an authority measure outside of basic statistical metadata would begin a slow decline in its connecting value. It would put Lance back up on his golden bicycle, unreachable, untouchable, unfuckwithable. It would be the beginning of the end rather than the start of what’s likely to be something really great.
