I recall at least one vacation from my youth that involved CB radios. It was a caravan of family vehicles on a lengthy driving trip to North Carolina. This being the mid-80s, the CB radio still seemed a worthy piece of equipment. It let you coordinate lunch and bathroom breaks, verify directions, learn of traffic jams, and speak cool slang terms like "10-4" and "breaker breaker."
It had problems, of course. The Appalachian mountains tended to block the analog signal and you had to coordinate what channel to use. It was also prone to noise and static. I've often wondered what "digital CB" radio would look like, but it would be totally unnecessary. Now everyone has a CB radio in their pocket: we call them cell phones.
Between push-to-talk, IM and text-messaging, the devices we carry today are obviously more sophisticated. But there's always been something missing in the way we use them. Something that CB and Ham radio had: spontaneousness and the ability to self-organize (as with truckers re-routing around traffic accidents). Cell-phones are (mostly) one-to-one devices, but the CB could be one-to-one or one-to-many and it was inherently open.
The Internet has lots of technologies for communicating one-to-many. Blogs, chat rooms, message boards, and IRC all count. Each has varying amounts of spontaneousness and what I'd call "reach" or the number of users on the network that are accessible at one time. Consider this table:
| Type | Spontaneity | Reach | Simplicity |
|---|---|---|---|
| IRC | High | Low | Low |
| IM | High | One (Low) | High |
| Blogs | Low | High | Medium |
| Social net | Low | Medium | Medium |
| High | High | Low |
Twitter fills a significant gap between the blog and the instant message. It satisfies a need for spontaneous, wide-reaching communication. It has greater reach than IRC or social networks (arguably) and is much simpler. Perhaps this has been described before, but after reading many Twitter discussions it still took me a year to glean this much understanding.
What's exciting is that Twitter is still developing and recent new features have made it more versatile. In fact, I'd argue the addition of Twitter tracking has pushed it over the edge. This is the feature that allows me to put "High" in the Reach column above.
Tracking lets you to monitor the entire Twitter network for keywords. If you track "Obama", whenever someone on Twitter uses that keyword, you see the message. Using the tracking feature, Twitter users have started to tag messages in a unique way: using the hash character. For example, if I tweet about the Consumer Electronics Show, I might tag my message by including the text #ces at the beginning or end. This is called a hashtag.
Now a really exciting, recent development: hashtags.org, which started in late November. Hashtags.org is a Django powered website, integrated with the Twitter user by the same name. When you follow this user, they automatically follow you back.
After following their bot, your tweets will be indexed on the site. They track your hashtag usage and collective usage over the twitter network. You can see peaks and valleys throughout the 24-hour tracking period, indicating more or less activity on a certain hashtag (or topic, if you prefer). This is really spectacular.
What's amazing about this technique is that it's highly decentralized. People invent hashtags spontaneously and they can appear and disappear with no central authority. It's very CB-like. On Thursday night I started tracking 'iowa'. My IM window was instantly flooded with reports, links, updates and other information about the Iowa caucuses. This is Twitter coming in to it's own.
Being a non-subscriber to cable television, my ability to follow live news events (like a primary) that the major networks don't care about is difficult. I used to refresh web sites or stream video. Now I'm on Twitter. There are a few caveats: clicking on tinyurl links from unfamiliar users is questionable at best. But all in all, it's an amazing experience. Expect me to be tuned into my Instant Messaging connection for tomorrow's New Hampshire primary. Hope to see you there.