the reflexions insider

Something extraordinary happened on November 16, 2008.

At 12:02:32 PM (EST) a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Indonesia. Within seconds, users of the microblogging platform Twitter who were located in the affected area had broadcast text messages describing the event. Minutes later, tens of thousands of users had learned about the earthquake as news fanned out across Twitter’s global web of social networks in the form of web updates, RSS feeds, mobile application alerts, and SMS text messages.

About two hours later the New York Times, CNN, and other news outlets “broke” the story. Granted, it was a weekend. But any observer of how Twitter has changed the dynamics of information sharing can see that the days of large news outlets serving as the de facto source of breaking news are effectively over.

As the currency of the web as a communications tool has shifted from documents and pages to blogs and tweets, the following trends have emerged:

1. The discrete units of web-based communication have gotten smaller.

2. The propagation time of information among social networks has gotten faster.

It’s worth noting that these two trends are related. Smaller chunks of content are easier to consume and lead to faster rates of propagation. Information flow becomes more efficient as the time required to “flip” the information — to filter it, modify it, repackage it, and send it on its way — approaches seconds rather than minutes, hours, or days. Indeed, microblogging is the closest thing to efficient large-scale real time information propagation on the web.

Michael Mukasey leaving the hospital

By the same token, platforms like Twitter can also serve as rumor mills on steroids, propagating half-truths and conjecture alongside up-to-the-second first hand accounts. When Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed at a speaking engagement last week rumors of his death circulated within minutes on Twitter. Twitter could never be said to be accountable for such things. It’s just a platform after all. But it’s led to discussions about what role reputation and trust should play in the design of such platforms.

I predict that mechanisms which represent reputation and trust will be one of the next innovations in the evolution of platforms like Twitter. Something like the “web of trust” model seen in public key cryptography could provide a solution.

Think of the “follow” relationship on Twitter as the connection layer of a network stack. Its simplicity is what has driven the adoption of the network but more meaningful layers representing the subtleties of person-to-person relationships are a natural next step. Ultimately I’ve always felt that the most successful social web platforms are not those that attempt to fundamentally change how people interact, but those that model how people already interact in real-world scenarios.

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