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I’ve got to admit it took me a little while to warm up to Twitter. I actually deleted my account not long after I created it because I wasn’t ‘tweeting’ and saw it as just one more thing to keep track of along with Facebook and the rest of my bloggerly reading. But at the insistence of a few good friends I reinstated my account. (Twitter actually restarted my account as if I had never left. Same followers. Same tweets. Same everything. So when you go to delete your account and Twitter tells you that you ‘can’t undo’ it, don’t believe them. It’s a little spooky.)

As I started to grasp the nature of Twitter a few things became clear to me. One: Twitter succeeds because humans are pattern-seeking creatures. Two: the signal to noise ratio is very high. This is why ‘Trending Topics’ and hashtags work the way they do. People like to organize their thoughts and make them presentable to the people who want to see them. It makes your tweets (I hate that word by the way, but I can’t think of one that works better in this context) more valuable by making them easier to find. In Twitter’s very structured, very open platform, it’s very easy for voices to be lost in the crowd. This was one of my initial reasons for deleting my account. The signal to noise ratio was just too high. In this respect hashtags are absolutely necessary. And I’ve come to embrace them (to a certain extent)

#WildlifeWednesday

Some friends and I have started our own hashtag hoping to see it one day in the Trending Topics column. In hopes of capitalizing on the human need for pattern and rhythm we’ve decided on a theme: anything animal related (videos, news articles, songs, funny pictures) along with a specific time for these tweets: Wednesdays. This is the same principle as #FollowFriday and #MusicMonday.

#WildlifeWednesday started slowly with just myself and my friend SheenaLara, but has grown to a good number of individuals, although Sheena and myself are still the top contributors. If the history of internet trends is any indication, I predict that as it continues to grow it will eventually reach a phase transition (Malcom Gladwell would say it would ‘tip’ ala “The Tipping Point”) This phase transition will be marked by a rapid rise in the number of people using the #WildlifeWednesday hastag making it appear in the Trending Topics column on every users homepage. Both Sheena and myself have been watching for it, and with the ability to browse old tweets we should be able to tell with some degree of precision how long and how many people and/or tweets are necessary for its phase transition.

In a purely scientific study my writing about #WildlifeWednesday here would skew the results, but the internet is anything but purely scientific, and one could assume that any number of individuals could (or already are) blogging about it. It’s out of our control completely so my addition here is really of no consequence.

BlipTube

My second experiment into the use of the Twitter platform is a combination of the online DJ site Blip.fm and the video sharing site YouTube. This mash up of independent audio and video sources I call BlipTube. Blip.fm allows users to search and choose music tracks and share them via Twitter by creating text links that link back to the Blip.fm site and automatically play the selected track. BlipTube simply pairs this method of sharing music with links to YouTube videos in the same tweet. The user clicks both links (the Blip link first, YouTube second) and both the musical track from Blip.fm and the video from YouTube load and play simultaneously. This allows me to essentially make my own music videos, although that descriptor is very limiting. The shear number of Blip tracks and YouTube videos allows endless curatorial possibilities. My favorite BlipTube combines Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ with a slow motion video of two pomeranians play-fighting. Unfortunately I didn’t tag or even use the term BlipTube in this instance so the only way to find it is by raking through my old tweets (hint: it was tagged with #WildlifeWednesday, so it might be easier to find it that way.) Newer BlipTubes can be found by searching for the term ‘BlipTube’ in Twitter.

The great thing about BlipTube is that it doesn’t live anywhere. It’s not a website or application, it’s just two links in one tweet. Two independent sites providing two pieces of content that have no relationship to one another. If BlipTube ‘lives’ anywhere it’s in the heads of the creator and the end user. Both must draw the line that connects them. That line is an emotion or thought that comes from the viewing of both pieces of content at the same time.

So much of our use of the internet is dependent on the interrelatedness of content. Google searches content based on its relationship to a search entry. Hashtags were created to group related content within the Twitter platform. All of these things make our lives easier, but the curatorial aspect of BlipTube cannot exist without human beings to connect the dots in their heads. Surely an application could be created that would pair music and videos based on user reccommendations, length, or any predetermined set of criteria, but the surprise factor would be lost or greatly diminished. The magic would be gone. Take Pandora for instance. Pandora is an online application that plays music based on user set criteria. The hope is that Pandora will also play music that wasn’t specified, but is related enough to the criteria that the user will enjoy it. The user can then tell to Pandora to ‘play more music like this’ or ‘play less music like this’ and Pandora will act accordingly. Unfortunately the more information you give Pandora the less options fit the criteria, so you get more of the same type of music. Your musical selections are narrowed as opposed to broadened. I remember having to jack all my settings every once in a while on Pandora to things like ‘Gangsta Rap’ or ‘World’ just to get things mixed up. I eventually quit using Pandora all together because of this reason. Apples new Genius Mixes in iTunes 9 are similar but they only group the music on your computer and do not generate or play suggestions. I’m not even sure how Genius Mixes are grouped and created, although I suspect that it pulls information from the iTunes store and uses the same functionality as the ‘Users also bought’ feature.

These functionality issues are systemic of a larger idea; that being that humans are smarter than computers! Computers have difficulty making cross-canonical connections that are not specified within a set of criteria. In fact they cannot do so WITHOUT a set of criteria. Granted, the criteria has gotten really good. Application generated recommendations for music, movies, and clothing are very useful, but they serve only to narrow options, not broaden them. It is the surprise and creativity in making broad cross-canonical connections that gives us things such as humor and art. The burning question should not be whether a thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years would reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare, but rather, would those monkeys have created it if there had been no William Shakespeare in the first place.