Why Twitter Is Important

“I don’t understand Twitter,” my smart friend Red Maxwell CEO of OnRampBranding told me one day at lunch. “Twitter is a PageRank machine,” I informed him missing Twitter’s real importance by a mile or two. Twitter’s SEO abilities are impressive but not Twitter’s real value. Twitter is a “curation” tool and curation is the next web revolution.

Twitter makes headline editors of us all. We "micro blog" complex ideas and concepts to 140 characters and send them off into a sea of similar headlines. We curate our life’s information telling a story or two in 140 character headlines and links. In Everything Bad Is Good For You Steven Johnson argues video games are archetypes for our modern information age. We learn critical parsing skills while zapping zombies. Johnson asks us to attempt to sit still through nostalgic television such as My Three Sons. I’ve tried and am here to tell you it can’t be done. Johnson’s point is our minds are different shaped by our age’s information demands and tools. We can’t go home again. There is no putting this Genie back in the bottle.

Twitter is modern magic. Using Twitter means loosely supported “friends” or "followers" and those followed extend our parsing abilities. At first I couldn’t understand how or why anyone would have more than a hundred “follows”. Some Twitter accounts have tens of thousands of follows. Then it hit me. Following extends curation range enlisting new brains in a massive wisdom of crowds grope forward. Follow thousands to increase your ability to process information from outliers meaning you will miss less. Who can afford to miss important stuff these days?

Use of tools such as Tweetdeck organize and extend Twitter’s power (or they drive you crazy). Any curation tool capable of extending our learning or sharing reach is important. Learning reach is about increasing the diversity and quality of what we learn. Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You video game lessons hold for Twitter. We learn more than we know or fully recognize. Twitter teaches how to pull gold from black sand. Our digital footprint increases. We get better. We become smarter.

Sharing reach is followers parsing our tweets, learning from us. As we teach we learn to shape headlines. We watch bit.ly’s analytics to see messages picked up, retweeted (RT). TweetDeck tells us who Re-Tweets our messages. We become headline editors by putting in the time. Riding the Twitter bicycle up the mountain daily all information mountains become easier.

Twitter’s “nowness” is powerful. We looked to television for what is happening now. Problem is television is, at present, still a gatekeeper medium. Television is sound bites approved by some company. Like all gatekeeper strongholds television is morphing into something else pushed in no small amount by curation tools such as Twitter. Twitter is faster, more crowd wisdom, more bazaar than cathedral.

We've heard people call Twitter a waste of time. My friend Red is too smart to utter or think such a thought. Red knows he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He keeps his mind open. Twitter’s importance is becoming undeniable. Twitter's power is not Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but in how Twitter and tweeting transforms us. Twitter prepares our minds for the next big thing. How will we find out about that next big thing? On Twitter of course.

Links

Curation The Next Web Revolution

TweetDeck

OnRampBranding

Cathedral and Bazaar

Crowd Wisdom by James Surowiecki

Author Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You)

Curation Nation Book Is Here!

Curation Nation: Why the future of content is context
Curation Nation arrived today and I can't wait to read Steven Rosenbaum's book. Read my post about why curation will be the next web content revolution by clicking on the link below:

Curation: The Next Web Revolution

Visit Author Steven Rosenbaum's site for Curation Nation Book

Will post a book review soon, but Curation Nation is center beam on THE future topic for content web marketers...and that should be every web site on the planet :).

Martin

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