3 ms·
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will be t
by ivankirigin 18y ago
The bigger digg gets, the less likely it is that news will immediately hit the front page. The bigger twitter gets, the more likely it is that twitter will be the first to report on breaking news. Plus the speed of that spread will increase.
Think of it like 6-degrees of kevin bacon. With more people, the degrees to hear about the news decreases. As news sites get built on top of twitter to find these breaking stories, we might all be one or two degrees from the original source. That is astoundingly fast and connected.
Of course the USGS is going to be the fastest - they have a computer hooked up to a seismometer.
- ojbyrne 18y agoExcept that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain. Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed plane in the midst of an earthquake. An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail, but how do we know it's actually true?
- ojbyrne 18y agoCase in point: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/01/how-janet-fooled-the-twittersphere-shes-the-voice-of-exxon-mobil/ http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/08/01/how-janet-fool... (Random twitterer pretends to be official spokesperson for Exxon)