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Some weeks ago there was a lively discussion on the reporting and / or journalism quality Twitter allows, influences or stands for. My position was: without referencing, twitter is nothing. Today, a plane went down at the Hudson River in NYC.

Within seconds it was reported by several Twitter users, for example @manolantern, by @trappedinabay, by @jdackerman and by @jkrums.

Janis Krums said to be on a ferry which was getting as close as possible to the watered plane and trying to rescue it’s passengers. He took a picture which will make it around the world during the next hours, sent it via TwitPic into the world. Even though TwitPics servers did not survive the massive amount of requests, the picture was republished by several others [I include it here, too, will change that to a reference link later on when TwitPic is back].

Some of the most interesting pictures I saw yet are to be found at the Flickr stream of user GregoryLam, who started taking pictures obviously within seconds after the plane watered (notice the wave trails behind the plane). They are also interesting to all kind of media, since they are published under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY license, which means: you just have to name the photographer and might use the pictures for whatever purpose you like to.

But what happened on Twitter after the crash? Loads of people reported that others reported that a plane fell into Hudson River. Most of them did not even reference sources or started chatting about it, so their content was mainly meaning- and worthless - twitter search was flooded with plane/hudson posts within 30 minutes, it was hard to find the original posting. There was no journalism on twitter, after the reporting had ended/was replaced by those who do traditional media.

CNN just called me!?!? How did they get my number

To me, this was the most interesting tweet of the day. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to have a good positioning system.

The New York Times sent a News Alert about an hour after the plane went down. It’s content: flight route, no. of passengers and cabin crew, expected reason for the watering. Twitter was not mentioned.

Over there at TechCrunch, people discuss whether Twitter is a news source. I think it’s easier than you might think it is.

1. Twitter is a close-to-real time reporting medium.
2. You usually do not follow the guy at the place where “it” happens.
3. You probably do follow a guy that follows a guy that follows a guy… at the place “it” happens.
4. The last guy in the chain will cover “it”. Others will read and spread the word.
5. When Twitterers are not referring to the original source, Twitter is not a news source. It’s just a news channel.
6. If you are interested in making Twitter a crowd source medium, refer to your sources by linking the exact status or at least the original users.

It won’t hurt. I’m sure.

The microblogging service Twitter is felt to be 2/3 of the day “over capacity”, means: not working. Some of it’s features have fully or partly been disabled due to it’s server overload. But: that’s no surprise at all.

Don’t mind about Twitter. It is a perfect proof of concept whether microblogging works or not. Mind about something else: Twitter is a centralized platform. This is cruel in times of decentralization.

Twitter does not have to be fixed. Twitter has to be replaced. Microblogging needs it’s natural implementation as a decentralized communication network.

What does Twitter in fact do? It takes your posting, delivers it to your friends and your public timeline. It offers you direct messaging and RSS. And it also offers you friend networking functions.

A good open source networking-twitter clone would be very helpful these days. Think of it as a web of trust. All it needs is some protocol, maybe based on XMLRPC-Ping and/or XMPP-techniques. I’m not a serious program designer. You are going to add your friends by pinging em (something like XMPP publishing), inform them with a pingback that you reacted to their postings/talk to them.

Sounds like a good project for a plugin for Wordpress, Textpattern, Drupal and all the others. Or am I mistaken? I think it would be a very good point to start from, promoting several nice techniques such as OpenID by making use of it.

I’m one of those who usually run several chat clients at the same time. Jabber, Skype, IRC are the main protocols I’m using. Now that Facebook added a chat application, I tried to find out how it works for my purposes.

Not to make this entry much longer than needed: It does not. Facebooks chat application does not work for me. Browser based communication doesn’t force me to participate, it’s the same effect with Twitter as soon as the API is on strike again. Facebook could become the ICQ of 1999, when adding a XMPP-API to it’s chat. Right now it’s perfect for asynchronously missing the others messages and just a waste.

It turned out to be easier than I expected: I did not twitter for one week.

Here’s my protocol of not twittering in max 140chars per day.

Monday: Switched off IM notifications. 2 new followers. Not removing the mail notification.
Tuesday: Missing twitter when using public transport. Passive consumption, 2x.
Wednesday: Following a scene I would have twittered. But I did not do it.
Thursday: Taking a look at other ppl tweets due to may 1st clashes in Hamburg.
Friday: Being contacted by new people on skype. Didn’t happen for weeks.
Saturday: Switching off the laptop. Switched off my mobile, too.
Sunday: Switched on my mobile, again. Returning to twitter in the evening.

Twitter is a nice-to-have and very addictive platform. Since it’s available wherever you are (except some places without mobile connection), you are automatically trying to migrate as much of your communication as possible to this platform. Twitter is some relaxed chatterbox-tool, it’s something inbetween TV (you still remember? yer not young anymore…) with all it’s real life soap operas, and corridor talks with colleagues. Nice to have, but nonethelesse, it’s still dispensable.

Facing a very stressful week, I decided not to use Twitter beginning with monday morning.

I integrated Twitter in my daily life during the last months. It became a powerful and easy-to-use-wherever-you-are communication interface to me, i. e. when using pub trans I usually read and wrote tweets on my mobile phone. So I stopped abruptly with this  behaviour on monday having two major goals: saving some time that I need other non-communicative tasks and the other one was of course to find out, how much influence on my life Twitter already gained.

The first thing worked quite well. Twitter is still a dispensable communication tool. It’s easy to use other devices / interfaces to talk to the people you need to talk to.

The second goal I already miserably failed. Twitter is an attention drawing service. First, I switched off the IM functions. Since then, my Jabber client seems to be dead - compared to the weeks before. Then, I tried not to go on m.twitter.com when waiting for a bus or the subway. In lieu thereof, I read newspapers online sites. And I was pretty bored, since not much happened there when I pressed »reload«.

On tuesday, I saw a scene at the tram I thought to be very funny. I could have told the other passengers of the tram that I think it’s funny. I could have screamed it out. I could have made some real noise. I did not do it.

But I would have done on twitter. I would have told people about it. But this time, I didn’t. Sometimes, I miss Twitter. But not twittering seems to save a lot of time.

I did not switch off email notifications. And during this week, some real new followers appeared. In a short period of mental derangement, I once even clicked on “follow this user”. I was so used to this procedure..

I think I will return to Twitter on Monday. Even though it’s a mess and waste of time. And I will write a follow-up, too.

..the reply is not going to be a no if you twitter things like this. (And here is the answer.)

I really don’t care whether it’s fake or not, but at least it points me once more to a paper I’d like to write about the concept of the evolving public privacy and the different types of using communication infrastructure in our days.

Yesterday I attended the web monday in Berlin. For more than two years now, it’s a place where new startups, ideas and projects can be presented to a web crowd, from programmers to journalists to users to investors to…. Well, everyone.

Yesterday, two new software projects and a short introduction to an upcoming conference, the Re:Publica’08 were shown.

The first of the two projects was keiala. It’s a twitter-interacting social calendar tool, making you tell people what your are going to do next based on your entries at you keaiala-calendar. Smart stuff, the presenting guy Alex Lang did a good job. He even provided some “user” interaction: the audience should vote on a new designs main color. Of course there was no way of finding an absolute majority for one out of seven choices given, but pink seems to be out of the race at least.

The second project was vizeo.net. Company representative Jascha Vogel faced some tough questions on a Revver.com based platform which aims to provide new and more functions and especially a focus on the german market. It turned out to be a little bit unfair when the speaker does not have real time access to Twitter while the audience is live deconstructing his business approach.

Well, 40-something people attended and I had a nice evening there. Web monday Berlin obviously is alive.