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February 17, 2009

Why Twitter is Actually Something New and Different

Why is Twitter Different From What's Come Before?

I pride myself on being on top of the latest technologies but I think I unfairly judged Twitter a while back. I decided it wasn't really useful or important; just another IM type tool. Chat-all-over-again. But I was wrong. Twitter is something new.

  • It is both real-time and asynchronous
  • You can reach more people, more quickly, and the ratio of influencers to the general population is still quite high on Twitter because it is early in adoption cycle
  • The threshold for interaction and sharing is lower: People accept messages, publish messages to, and forward things (by "Re-tweeting") along weaker social links (meaning, to, from and via people they barely know or don't know at all; this does not happen with email except in the case of chain-letters).
  • Twitter has a different social structure and sharing dynamic than email -- there is a strong sense of shared place, where everyone is able to see the public activity stream, and can easily follow sudden conversations and issues that flare up in the commons.
  • Twitter has its own somewhat unspoken rules of ettiquette around following, direct messaging, tweeting, etc. The best-practices for using Twitter, and for integrating with Twitter, are not easy to find, and I'm not sure there really are rules or standards. You sort of have to figure it all out on your own.
  • Twitter is also quite different from other IM systems because the way it is designed encourages public and group discourse, not just person-to-person messaging. It has more of a "commons" in it.

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 10:06 AM |

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Nova's Trip to Edge of Space

  • Stepsedgestratosphere
    In 1999 I flew to the edge of space with the Russian air force, with Space Adventures. I made it to an altitude of just under 100,000 feet and flew at Mach 3 in a Mig-25 piloted by one of Russia's best test-pilots. These pics were taken by Space Adventures from similar flights to mine. I didn't take digital stills -- I got the whole flight on digital video, which was featured on the Discovery Channel.

Nova & Friends, Training For Space...

  • Img021
    In 1999 I was invited to Russia as a guest of the Russian Space Agency to participate in zero-gravity training on an Ilyushin-76 parabolic flight training aircraft. It was really fun!!!! Among other people on that adventure were Peter Diamandis (founder of the X-Prize and Zero-G Corporation), Bijal Trivedi (a good friend of mine, science journalist), and "Lord British" (creator of the Ultima games). Here are some pictures from that trip...

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