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Why use Twitter?

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I played around a bit with Twitter a year or so ago, but between server hiccups and a lack of things to actually use it for, I didn’t really get into it. Now, though, I am starting to get my Twitter on. So the question is, why use twitter, especially since I gave up on it so easily a year ago?

1. Twitter fills a communication niche, one that we didn’t even know existed five years ago. It really does. There’s a whole spectrum of human communication, which can be organized from timely to timeless, from sparse to dense, from interpersonal to broadcast. Twitter falls into an interesting midpoint in that range, somewhere between instant messaging, leaving a note on the dry-erase board outside your dorm room, and heading down to the local hangout to see who’s around.

2. Twitter is a social app, so it displays classic network effects – the more people you know using it, the more valuable it is for you to use it. Working for Google and living in Silicon Valley I’ve met a lot of people over this past year who are devoted users. Twitter is good for everything from ad-hoc get-togethers to sharing in obsessive election night poll watching.

3. Twitter isn’t just an application, it’s a platform to build applications on top of. So there’s a number of apps which make Twittering more usable and effective.

  • The Twitterific iPhone App makes it easy for me to send out updates from my phone. Which I have on me at all times.
  • I’m using the Twitter Facebook app to update my status in two systems at the same time, meaning I’m more likely to make use of either.
  • Twitturly collects urls that people are talking about in almost real-time, creating a sort of incidental social news site.

Feel free to follow my twitter updates me here. Got any cool Twitter apps not listed above? Let me know in the comments below.

Sometimes I am asked: How is it that you became a famous minor internet personality?

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Baby name article in the Sydney Morning Herald Okay, I stole the title from John Hodgman, who spoke at Google recently. And to be really fair, I should add more modifiers to the title, “briefly famous” being much more accurate.

Hodgman, who writes in the great tradition of literary nonsense, has a very entertaining story of minor fame in his new book More Information Than You Require. He has inspired me to write a a less entertaining story about the minor internet fame that our baby naming project has bestowed upon me.

Earlier today I was interviewed on The Morning Show, broadcast all across the great nation-continent of Australia. Since my kayak is in the shop, I was to go to KNTV in San Jose where the interview would be done live via satellite.

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Okay, we should dump the Electoral College – but no need to spam my blog!

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One of the things I mentioned in my last post was how the Electoral College distorts the vote in favor of those in small-population states.

I got a comment from NationalPopularVote.com along these lines…

The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided “battleground” states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule under which all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.

They make a good argument, and I agree with them, but I find it pretty reprehensible that they are spamming blogs to make their point.  If the comment is on-topic, why do I call it spamming?  Grab a snippet of text and do an exact-phrase Google search by wrapping quotes around it, like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22of+the+states+and+people+were+merely+spectators+to+the+presidential%22

As of this writing there are 233 occurrences of the exact same comment slathered all over the web.  It looks like they’re using an automated program to watch Technorati or Google Blog Search for posts about the Electoral College and autopost the same comment.  I’m going to email them and ask that they stop.

The phrase search is a good technique for discovering compliment spam as well.

In any event, we already looked at the fact that some people’s votes count four times as much because they live in a state with a small population.  Do the NationalPopularVote.com folks have a point about swing states?

One way to look at the power of your vote is to figure out the likelihood that yours will decide the election.  By this definition, it helps a little to be in a small-population state but the most important factor is how close the election is in your state – your best bet is to live in a swing state.  Andrew Gelman has a great article explaining why, but it’s pretty intuitive.  If you live in a safe Democrat state, for example, it doesn’t matter if you live in California or Rhode Island – your vote is much less likely to be the one to flip the state to one side or the other.  The same is true for safe Republican states, from Texas to Wyoming.