The Human Feed: How Twitter & Networks Filter Signal From Noise

There's a lot of talk about Twitter these days from upcoming books such as Shel Israel's Twitterville to how-to's like Twitter For Dummies. But there's a much bigger movement at play here that you need to grasp before you go diving into networks such as Twitter and try friending your way toward influencer status. I believe that one of the functions that networks such as Twitter does is to serve as something of a human powered feed, a real time living stream of links, content and conversation often times generated by our friends, peers or the people we look to as "filters"—indivisuals who we trust to seperate the wheat from chaff.

But aside from the tools, it's important to take a step back and see what's going on here. In the earlier days of the internet, the Web became a place quickly saturated with information and we needed something to beat the information into submission. Search engines were born—and as a result the internet became more productive.  Today, the internet is still about information—but it's also about attention. There is a surplus of information, and a meta surplus of marketing in every form. For individuals, we are experiencing the opposite. We have a deficit in attention.

We've long exceeded the capacity of information that we can absorb and retain. We all suffer from technology induced attention deficit disorder, bright and shiny object syndrome and short term memory loss.

Bookmarks don't help—now we need tools like del.icio.us.  And of course we need Google more than ever. And there's once more thing we need. We need each other to make sense of it all. We need a Web with a human touch to help guide us through the fragmented, landscape of the internet. And that's where the human feed comes in. If you sign up to a service like Twitter, Friendfeed, or even subscribe to the del.ico.us links of real live people who you trust and look to for insights, you'll find that a wealth of information will be brought right to you vs. you having to go out and hunt for it.

In many ways, this is why Twitter is so talked about. I have nearly 7k followers through Twitter—most of who are working in related fields. Even with this substantially sized human engine in place, it's one of the first places I go to monitor conversations, scan for links and look for patterns. Of course I can also go the search route using search.twitter.com. But I've found power in the human feed. Another way I've tapped it's power is by using it as a research tool. I ask the collective on Twitter qeuestions and the human feed goes to work passing along high quality links and information that are very niche in nature. I consider my feed to be high quality and because I provide value to them, they don't hesitate to provide it right back.

Often times the quality of links and information I get on Twitter is better than what I would have gotten from Google because the knowledge of the human feed is deep, niche, and fickle.

I don't believe that you have to have thousands in your human feed, or network to provide value. If you put in the time to cultivate high quality connections that are in the tens or hundreds, you can get similar value. It's not always about size—it's also about quality.  The key here is understanding what's going on here and why, not just thinking about how we can use these tools to our own advantage. The human feed is a powerful evolution of the Web that is providing us key insights into where things are going.

As more noise, clutter, information, services, and networks are introuduced on the Web, the human feed—human beings will become even more essential in helping us all filter signal from noise so we can make the most of the medium. It will be messy, organic and serendipitous in some ways, combining conversation with content. But context will be key.

As we dive into streams, that's where our attention will be. If our trusted peers are swimming in those streams as well, we will look to them to help us stay afloat.

If you think there is something here that you'd like to explore more, I'd invite you to join myself and others on Twitter to see how just one of the manifestations of the human feed works.

Comments

[neilperkin]

Great post David, distilling something I've been thinking about for a while. The network delivers a more consistently good quality of links and over time is taking more and more attention from my RSS reader

[Shawn Petriw]

Twitter for Dummies link is incorrect.

[Dino]

if anyone is interested to read more about this (flow and filters and attention) you really should look into the work of stowe boyd.

he has written extensively on this, very insightful.

www.stoweboyd.com

[avin]

great stuff david, ive often used the argument about getting more useful links from twitter than i find through other searches when telling people about why i use it so much.

you've just said it much better :-)

[Alan Wolk]

Points well made and well taken

The danger of course is insularity and group-think, more commonly known as "living in a bubble"

If all the information we get is what's fed to us by our friends, our thoughts become more and more similar and new ideas, new information and new people are shut out. We become more and more insular and we stop engaging in critical thinking: everyone agrees with us, reads the same analyses we do and so we have no reason to question our beliefs.

Twitter is good for what it does, and is a useful tool in supplying basic links and articles to us. But its utility should stop and end there or else our intellectual curiosity will ossify.

(Of course it's possible to seek out Twitter feeds from unique and/or opposing viewpoints, it's just that in reality few people do: it's human nature to enjoy hearing out opinions and values echoed back to us from our peers.)

[Warren Sukernek]

David, as always great post and visual. You have the innate talent of taking huge ideas/ concepts and simplifying with great frameworks that resonate with the rest of us, whether "living in the bubble" or not.

[David Armano]

Shawn, thanks the link has been fixed.

Dino, I know of Stowe and heard him speak once, I'll have to go check out his stuff.

Alan,
Great point—but no different than life. We have cliques everywhere in life—it's a personal decision to take in different viewpoints. Sure the internet can fuel groupthink, it can also do the opposite. We have to make the call on an individual basis.

Warren,
Thanks, I strive to communicate in a way that's accessible. Hope things are going well with lining up a new gig.

[Ari Herzog]

It's agreed you don't need thousands in your feed, because the law of social proof indicates if one person provides value, that value will be shared and re-shared through her concentric circles until you and I can participate and share it on.

Oh, and http://del.icio.us has been reinvented into the more natural http://delicious.com.

[Sasha Kane]

David, Saw that you dropped the Follow.
I will still read your blog, because you write in an informative distinctive non embellished way.

Hope 2009 is a banner year for you.

[wanna develop]

Twitter is great.... Forget about delicious eh :)

Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com

[Alan Wolk]

David: Point was not that internet is different than real life, Just that it takes a very common real-life behavior- to surround ourselves with people with similar POVs- and exacerbates it if we wall ourselves off from contact with others.

Twitter can-- and for far too many, does-- create a small isolated village where news of the outside world comes in sporadically and where the Twitter feed becomes an echo chamber of tweets and re-tweets of the same 10 stories from the same 10 sources, day in and day out.

If I only get my news from my friends off Twitter, I lose the opportunity to serendipitously discover things the way I might if I were getting my news from the source site or even the actual paper and ink publication itself.

But here's an easy way to avoid that: set up a separate Twitter account where you only follow a bunch of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of news outlets that maintain broadcast-style Twitter feeds. (e.g. they don't converse- they just tweet breaking news stories along with links) - what you wind up with is sort of a scrolling RSS news feed that lets you find stories on your own and where you serve as your own filter and read those stories that are of interest to you. Far more intellectually satisfying than engaging in group-think, as I find I often discover things I would never have thought to look for on my own.

[David Armano]

Sasha,

Hm. I don't think I unfollowed you—it's probably a glitch, but am following you again.

Alan,
I get the point. But you can also subscribe to NYT, FOX, BBC etc. all one one can't you? As well as friends? Seems like there would be so many ways to avoid it group think as long as you want to. :-)

[Alan Wolk]

David: Of course. The key words are "as long as you want to"
Keeping a twitter news feed account is just an interesting use of the medium, and kind of cool to see in action as a pure news feed. Nothing more or less.

[Blog Expert]

I love the twitter for dummies idea.

[Michael Leis]

Dave, great post, and dead on. If you look at a place like Korea, where they have a culture of ubiquity, Google can't get over 5% penetration.

Search engines that deliver conversations and opinions about topics (naver, daum) are must more insightful and relevant than simply the closest matching page. Google just recently rolled out features to start gaining a foothold in these areas as western countries gain broadband saturation.

The other key socialization trend that supports this is group computing. Already a big part of the culture in Korea, here I notice it more from kids than adults, as the last vestiges of our singular usage society start to dissipate.

On Twitter, the explosive growth of late has grown from nationally televised events, like the election, with people sharing the personal angles of mediating opinions and identities. The neat side effect have been really cool variations of narrative possibilities like fictional characters and news feeds .

It's fun to watch.

Thanks again!

[dino]

very interesting comment above from michael leis about google and the new features they are introducing in anticipation of broadband penetration. bit like getting a peak into the future when we look at what is going on in korea, isn't it?

[Jennifer Sparks]

David,

I always love your perspective. We're all working to make sense of it all and I appreciate your statement below:

It's not always about size—it's also about quality. The key here is understanding what's going on here and why, not just thinking about how we can use these tools to our own advantage. The human feed is a powerful evolution of the Web that is providing us key insights into where things are going.

Definitely agree with you.

[bonnieL]

@Armano
@AlanWolk

This conversation would be deeper and more direct on Twitter. Perhaps the main theme of this Aramano post?

There's room for it all - snail - e-mail - twitter, blog, mobile; and different reasons for using each, together or alone.

bonnieL
triiibe on!

[Sopan Greene]

Great post to show the main value of Twitter and being in the stream. I'm often asked about how Twitter is Different than Facebook by people who have never looked at Twitter. I'm going to start refering those people to this article.

@sopan

[Michael J Pratt]

Dave - well said. I take exception to Alan's extreme position (IMHO) 1st, who really uses Twitter as their sole source? I would argue that none of us does and neither were you making the case that it is your sole source of info. On top of that, it actually doesn't relate to real life source insularity as we have a much more limited set of relationships in real life that we routinely interact with...so there's no comparison. It's hard for group think to set in when the group size is measured in 1,000's. Twitter is like a cocktail party where you retain the conversational edge if you have something of value to say, otherwise you're ignored.

[Luke O'Connor]

I posted some similar sentiments recently with the gist being the following.

The Twitter layer will consist of many personal recommendations (links) to data and content, sent to you personally by people that you trust, respect or share personal interests with. Can any site or search service provide you with comparable navigational assurance?

Twitter will be providing the long-lat coordinates into the datascape.

Navigation and search are just for people who don’t know anyone.

Full post

http://lukeoconnor.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/twitter-as-your-personal-content-proxy/

Luke

[olivier blanchard]

Yep. What better filter than a small army of people whose judgment and opinions I know and trust? I don't have to sort through anything anymore. My network does it for me. Great post, as always. :)