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"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that

"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe." But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to 'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up with the latest hot people on twitter isn't too much work? Makes no sense. Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.

RockyMcNuts 13y ago
that seems like such a solvable problem, from a machine learning perspective. every time you read/engage with a tweet or HN post or other content, you are providing training data on what type of tweets/posts you want to read. now if only we had some benevolent central cloud provider that wanted to provide such a service and had a central repository of news and feeds. maybe Google could do something like that and call it 'Reader.'
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Why do you want to centralize it? Just pull the twitter feeds, and filter them localy.
  - RockyMcNuts 13y ago
    sure, you could do it locally. Google has a better data set because they know what you read in a lot of different apps and on a lot of different devices.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cholmon 13y ago
He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA... "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  But I don't think the power has shifted to individuals; it's just an illusion that it has. Look at some 'celebrities' on Twitter and G+, for example. I don't just mean pop celebs, but celebs in any industry. Has the 'power' shifted to them really? The power is still in the platform and the extent to which those people are exposed to others in that platform. When the rules of the platform change ('real names' only, etc), the people who had 'power' may lose that power overnight.
tehwalrus 13y ago
he goes on to say "But if you follow 50 people, that is an epic time commitment." - which it is, if you try and use it like a filtered hacker news. I follow like 2,000 people on twitter. I don't read even a small fraction of what's posted; I use it as a news weather-vane - what do the [politicos|hackers|normals] think is annoying/cool enough to tweet about this morning?
- duaneb 13y ago
  I don't even think I know 2,000 people enough to recognize their face let alone name.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    a lot of people tweet quite infrequently - I don't see anything of theirs, sadly. the ones who do tweet often enough I get to recognise (at least, their avatar.) If not, and I see an interesting tweet, I just go and re-read their description. I only "know" about 30 or 40 people who are on twitter at all.
kafkaesque 13y ago
This is interesting. Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  You could theoretically use the Streaming API to analyze tweets en masse from different sources/individuals. Coding in a bit of text analysis (length, blacklisting/whitelisting keywords, sentiment, etc.) would discriminate between superfluous tweets and the ones you care about. That'd would be a great way to automate the process of scrolling through crap every morning, but you'd need to build a web app to house the results and scroll through that instead. Of course, that's how I would do it as a third-party developer. Will Twitter ever support this? Doubt it. I don't think it's relevant to enough users to implement that kind of feature. Most people who use Twitter evidently enjoy reading what Justin Anniston and Jennifer Bieber eat for breakfast.
  - jelled 13y ago
    This is essentially what we do with sports news at fancloud.com. By the time the tweets make it through our filters the end result is much more newsworthy then a raw twitter stream.
    - kafkaesque 13y ago
      It seems like there'd be a higher demand for these type of specialised content filters. I'm a big NHL fan, so I'll check out fancloud.com.
  - danudey 13y ago
    Not sure if it's what you're suggesting specifically, but if you analyzed common links within a span of time and analyzed them for keywords, you could associate other tweets from certain individuals. Tim Bray or Zed Shaw, as random examples, could tweet about an issue without providing a link to it (to infer context), but you could infer context by looking for relevant links from similar people. If the system analyzed the links you clicked on (via the t.co URL shortener Twitter operates), the links you posted, and the topics you tweeted about, they could build a profile of interest for you and highlight those tweets. Their current 'you should check this out' system on twitter.com and in the twitter client seems to be 'hey, here's some stuff everyone else likes', which (the last time I looked at it) was complete tripe about idiotic topics that 'the masses' care about, with nothing about the sort of tech news or political/economic interest that I tend to prefer, but I feel like a personalized feed is something that would be far more useful to me, and probably many other people.
dylangs1030 13y ago
Did you read what Malda said after that? He then explained why that isn't a suitable alternative for the exact reasons you just stated. He basically explained you have to eat all the insignificant minutia of individual peoples' daily lives, no matter their public stature, if you want their opinions and views on the world at the same time.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  I did, and wasn't sure why he even bothered saying the first part (unless it was edited out of sequence or something). Regardless of the problems, he seemed pretty down on aggregators, and seemed more about following specific people for news.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Eventually people will do that for you, as a service, and then give you just a digest of the interesting things those people had to say without all the inane minutiae. These people will be called "editors," and the circle will be complete.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    The cool thing that happens on Twitter is that interesting thoughts and news are re-tweeted, so if somebody important says something meaningful, there's a big chance that you'll see it without paying too much attention.
    - alxndr 13y ago
      Also mimicing Slashdot: after-the-fact dupes!
    - Jd 13y ago
      Yes, but you will also see useless minutia about the lives of the people who re-tweeted the originals.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
D9u 13y ago
I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  You're in good company: The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#attr-input-maxlength http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
- _delirium 13y ago
  That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an 80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's extremely simple information. A headline plus a short blurb, like on Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting, and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch people's eye in 80 characters. On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.
  - codva 13y ago
    This is exactly what I do here. I start with the first few comments and then click through to read the story after the comments add some context to the headline.
    - DanBC 13y ago
JPKab 13y ago
Scoble sucks. The dude has some interesting thoughts, but his signal to noise ratio is abysmal. But I guess the point of this article is that as communities like Slashdot, Reddit, or HN grow, the signal to noise ratio for any individual user becomes lower and lower.
Gormo 13y ago
Moreover, who's interested in following soundbites from "successful people" in isolation? The point of sites like Slashdot and Hacker News is the opportunity for discussion in depth. You can't get that from Twitter.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
gojomo 13y ago
A bunch of startups are working on the problem of creating a customized, ranked, deduplicated newsfeed for you from multiple personal sources. A few that immediately come to mind are: Nuzzel, Prismatic, Flipboard. Eventually Twitter will have to copy or acquire such filtering, but this also might be an important differentiator for App.net: apps whose filtering and UI innovations shouldn't be held back by platform proprietor restrictions.
- leephillips 13y ago
  I went to Prismatic and was annoyed that there seemed to be nothing on the landing page explaining what it was and how to use it. In search of enlightenment, I clicked the "blog" link, and was suddenly immersed in a series of amazing technical articles about Clojure. If you're interested in Clojure it looks like it's worth following their blog even if you don't care about their product.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    And I was so impressed by their work that I tried to sign up. But they demand too many permissions: not only to read from your accounts, which I was ready to grant, but to write to them! No way.
    - disgruntledphd2 13y ago
      I think that really only applies to Twitter and Facebook, as I signed up with Google and they've never shared anything on my behalf. There is a share button on each article though, which is presumably the use case. Well worth checking out (even if you do accidentally end up posting about the death of a computer science pioneer a year late :().
      - leephillips 13y ago
        "I signed up with Google" Then you granted them permission to "Manage your data in Google Reader" (yes, it still says that) and "Manage your contacts". For me that means "managing" the contact list on my phone. The risk/benefit ratio is probably way too high.
tlrobinson 13y ago
I think tools like Nuzzle can help solve this. Basically it watches my friends' Twitter and Facebook feeds and bubbles up popular links for today.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  Twitter already has that. Check the Discover tab.
malandrew 13y ago
No you don't: http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-your-favorite-client-with-node-js/ http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-yo... Proxlet did this as a service back in the day. I've been toying with the idea of creating a project based on Guillermo R's post with a social component for sharing regexes and rules. The truth is that this type of local proxy should be a generalizable service for every service you consume.
batemanesque 13y ago
yeah, if you want a clear, wide-ranging picture of what's happening in the world, this guy is definitely the source to turn to: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhMzK_qxFGtI5JjUscLo3TSYjY-wHiFXPX7-W-9qktoTXwX https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhM...

RockyMcNuts 13y ago

that seems like such a solvable problem, from a machine learning perspective. every time you read/engage with a tweet or HN post or other content, you are providing training data on what type of tweets/posts you want to read. now if only we had some benevolent central cloud provider that wanted to provide such a service and had a central repository of news and feeds. maybe Google could do something like that and call it 'Reader.'

marcosdumay 13y ago
Why do you want to centralize it? Just pull the twitter feeds, and filter them localy.
- RockyMcNuts 13y ago
  sure, you could do it locally. Google has a better data set because they know what you read in a lot of different apps and on a lot of different devices.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cholmon 13y ago

He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA... "But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."

mgkimsal 13y ago
But I don't think the power has shifted to individuals; it's just an illusion that it has. Look at some 'celebrities' on Twitter and G+, for example. I don't just mean pop celebs, but celebs in any industry. Has the 'power' shifted to them really? The power is still in the platform and the extent to which those people are exposed to others in that platform. When the rules of the platform change ('real names' only, etc), the people who had 'power' may lose that power overnight.

tehwalrus 13y ago

he goes on to say "But if you follow 50 people, that is an epic time commitment." - which it is, if you try and use it like a filtered hacker news. I follow like 2,000 people on twitter. I don't read even a small fraction of what's posted; I use it as a news weather-vane - what do the [politicos|hackers|normals] think is annoying/cool enough to tweet about this morning?

duaneb 13y ago
I don't even think I know 2,000 people enough to recognize their face let alone name.
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  a lot of people tweet quite infrequently - I don't see anything of theirs, sadly. the ones who do tweet often enough I get to recognise (at least, their avatar.) If not, and I see an interesting tweet, I just go and re-read their description. I only "know" about 30 or 40 people who are on twitter at all.

kafkaesque 13y ago

This is interesting. Do you think a service like Twitter would ever have the option for a user to differentiate between news-worthy tweets/posts from "minor tweets" about a person's everyday life? Or would there not be a clear enough distinction?

dylangs1030 13y ago
You could theoretically use the Streaming API to analyze tweets en masse from different sources/individuals. Coding in a bit of text analysis (length, blacklisting/whitelisting keywords, sentiment, etc.) would discriminate between superfluous tweets and the ones you care about. That'd would be a great way to automate the process of scrolling through crap every morning, but you'd need to build a web app to house the results and scroll through that instead. Of course, that's how I would do it as a third-party developer. Will Twitter ever support this? Doubt it. I don't think it's relevant to enough users to implement that kind of feature. Most people who use Twitter evidently enjoy reading what Justin Anniston and Jennifer Bieber eat for breakfast.
- jelled 13y ago
  This is essentially what we do with sports news at fancloud.com. By the time the tweets make it through our filters the end result is much more newsworthy then a raw twitter stream.
  - kafkaesque 13y ago
    It seems like there'd be a higher demand for these type of specialised content filters. I'm a big NHL fan, so I'll check out fancloud.com.
- danudey 13y ago
  Not sure if it's what you're suggesting specifically, but if you analyzed common links within a span of time and analyzed them for keywords, you could associate other tweets from certain individuals. Tim Bray or Zed Shaw, as random examples, could tweet about an issue without providing a link to it (to infer context), but you could infer context by looking for relevant links from similar people. If the system analyzed the links you clicked on (via the t.co URL shortener Twitter operates), the links you posted, and the topics you tweeted about, they could build a profile of interest for you and highlight those tweets. Their current 'you should check this out' system on twitter.com and in the twitter client seems to be 'hey, here's some stuff everyone else likes', which (the last time I looked at it) was complete tripe about idiotic topics that 'the masses' care about, with nothing about the sort of tech news or political/economic interest that I tend to prefer, but I feel like a personalized feed is something that would be far more useful to me, and probably many other people.

dylangs1030 13y ago

Did you read what Malda said after that? He then explained why that isn't a suitable alternative for the exact reasons you just stated. He basically explained you have to eat all the insignificant minutia of individual peoples' daily lives, no matter their public stature, if you want their opinions and views on the world at the same time.

mgkimsal 13y ago
I did, and wasn't sure why he even bothered saying the first part (unless it was edited out of sequence or something). Regardless of the problems, he seemed pretty down on aggregators, and seemed more about following specific people for news.
smacktoward 13y ago
Eventually people will do that for you, as a service, and then give you just a digest of the interesting things those people had to say without all the inane minutiae. These people will be called "editors," and the circle will be complete.
- bad_user 13y ago
  The cool thing that happens on Twitter is that interesting thoughts and news are re-tweeted, so if somebody important says something meaningful, there's a big chance that you'll see it without paying too much attention.
  - alxndr 13y ago
    Also mimicing Slashdot: after-the-fact dupes!
  - Jd 13y ago
    Yes, but you will also see useless minutia about the lives of the people who re-tweeted the originals.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

D9u 13y ago

I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)

PavlovsCat 13y ago
You're in good company: The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#attr-input-maxlength http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
_delirium 13y ago
That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an 80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's extremely simple information. A headline plus a short blurb, like on Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting, and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch people's eye in 80 characters. On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.
- codva 13y ago
  This is exactly what I do here. I start with the first few comments and then click through to read the story after the comments add some context to the headline.
  - DanBC 13y ago

JPKab 13y ago

Scoble sucks. The dude has some interesting thoughts, but his signal to noise ratio is abysmal. But I guess the point of this article is that as communities like Slashdot, Reddit, or HN grow, the signal to noise ratio for any individual user becomes lower and lower.

Gormo 13y ago

Moreover, who's interested in following soundbites from "successful people" in isolation? The point of sites like Slashdot and Hacker News is the opportunity for discussion in depth. You can't get that from Twitter.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

gojomo 13y ago

A bunch of startups are working on the problem of creating a customized, ranked, deduplicated newsfeed for you from multiple personal sources. A few that immediately come to mind are: Nuzzel, Prismatic, Flipboard. Eventually Twitter will have to copy or acquire such filtering, but this also might be an important differentiator for App.net: apps whose filtering and UI innovations shouldn't be held back by platform proprietor restrictions.

leephillips 13y ago
I went to Prismatic and was annoyed that there seemed to be nothing on the landing page explaining what it was and how to use it. In search of enlightenment, I clicked the "blog" link, and was suddenly immersed in a series of amazing technical articles about Clojure. If you're interested in Clojure it looks like it's worth following their blog even if you don't care about their product.
- leephillips 13y ago
  And I was so impressed by their work that I tried to sign up. But they demand too many permissions: not only to read from your accounts, which I was ready to grant, but to write to them! No way.
  - disgruntledphd2 13y ago
    I think that really only applies to Twitter and Facebook, as I signed up with Google and they've never shared anything on my behalf. There is a share button on each article though, which is presumably the use case. Well worth checking out (even if you do accidentally end up posting about the death of a computer science pioneer a year late :().
    - leephillips 13y ago
      "I signed up with Google" Then you granted them permission to "Manage your data in Google Reader" (yes, it still says that) and "Manage your contacts". For me that means "managing" the contact list on my phone. The risk/benefit ratio is probably way too high.

tlrobinson 13y ago

I think tools like Nuzzle can help solve this. Basically it watches my friends' Twitter and Facebook feeds and bubbles up popular links for today.

mkr-hn 13y ago
Twitter already has that. Check the Discover tab.

malandrew 13y ago

No you don't: http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-your-favorite-client-with-node-js/ http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-yo... Proxlet did this as a service back in the day. I've been toying with the idea of creating a project based on Guillermo R's post with a social component for sharing regexes and rules. The truth is that this type of local proxy should be a generalizable service for every service you consume.

batemanesque 13y ago

yeah, if you want a clear, wide-ranging picture of what's happening in the world, this guy is definitely the source to turn to: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhMzK_qxFGtI5JjUscLo3TSYjY-wHiFXPX7-W-9qktoTXwX https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ-_BhM...