I’m sitting here in the Newark airport waiting for my flight to LAX. From there I will continue onward to Kona, Hawaii. This will be the first time that I’ll be in Hawaii so I’m pretty excited. Everyone says great things about it. I’ll also be visiting Kauai after Kona and I’m probably even more excited about that part of the trip. I’ll definitely take a lot of pics and videos as I’m sure the scenery will be spectacular.

On another quick note, lifting is still going great. I’ve had a great two months of training (although two cumulative weeks had zero training due to trips) and I’m pretty excited about it. I’m still not at the point that I feel like I can declare myself to be “strong” but I’m definitely well on my way. Obviously I’m strong compared to the average untrained person but, for me, I consider someone of my weight to be “strong” when they have about a 400lb full squat and a 500lb deadlift (or 182.5kg and 227.5kg). I can definitely get to those numbers in 2012 as long as I’m able to continue to train. Until then I’m an intermediate level lifter. The trip to Hawaii might set me back a little but I’m going to make sure to work on my mobility (ie, the ability to get into a full squat easily) everyday to make the return easier.

Okay, so, on to the main reason I wanted to write this post. Something has been bugging me about twitter for awhile. I haven’t written about it yet because I was waiting to see if twitter would add it as a feature with their new interface. They haven’t really. I also need to preface this by saying that while the new twitter interface is worlds ahead of the old one, it’s still a completely horrific interface from a consumption standpoint. To me it’s amazing that twitter has grown the way it has given the interface. I suppose it shows just how popular it is to have an easy and simple online publishing option.

With that out of the way, I think the main problem with twitter is the lack of ability to aggregate tweets around a topic. I think the cause of this problem is multi-fold. For one, any sort of reliance on hashtags is really retarded. Lots of people don’t use them, they spell them wrong, people use them when they shouldn’t, etc. Right now, looking at “top” tweets for a given hashtag is just about as nonsensical as it gets. And keyword searches often bring up a lot of tweets that aren’t relevant. Put another way, hashtags return too narrow of a result set and keyword searches return too wide of a result set. Second, the twitter interface still looks at tweets in a “tree branch” sort of way (and really it only makes it easy to go down one path as opposed to jumping from branch to branch). That’s just incorrect. In reality, tweets end up looking much more web-like if you actually map them out. A web-like browsing option (think something like the old Pandora interface, but with more connectivity — or like the Rdio circle interface but with lines between tweets and replies). A single tweet can result in tons of replies. And those replies can result in more and more replies — lots of them other repliers in addition to their reply to the original tweet. Twitter makes it so incredibly difficult to follow these conversations without a huge amount of clicking, new tabs, using the back button, scrolling, etc. It’s a slow and inefficient process at best. Third, twitter doesn’t have good quality ratings at all. “Dumb” numbers like number of followers, number of retweets (only up to 100) and so on really don’t tell the story of a twitterer or tweet. The system needs to be way more advanced in terms of it’s ability to filter out the spammers and bots. Twitter needs to be able to figure out and display actual influence. While I’m sure they do some work internally to try to figure out influence when determining top tweets, they could make huge progress on this front by calculating and showing sophisticated influence ratings.

So what prompted me to think about this? Mainly, I’ve read dozens of news articles over the past several months about things like protests in arab countries, the occupy movement, certain sports stories, etc. Most articles find a way to mention how twitter was used to organize, how a story blew up on twitter, how so and so celebrity (ie, Alec Baldwin and his airplane incident) incited some huge back and forth on twitter, etc. To date, I haven’t seen a single article that actually linked to any proof of this. Sure, I’ve seen articles that link to or quote an individual tweet or two. But that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I am not questioning at all the fact that twitter was heavily used and very important — it definitely was. Instead, I am questioning the total lack of ability to actually easily SHOW examples of the tweets around a certain topic. Granted you can link to a hashtag or you can link to a search but who really knows how that sort of thing will age over time? Sure the top tweets might be kind of relevant at a certain moment in time for someone who knows how to dig into twitter but I doubt those top tweets will be relevant to the news article even one day later. And since the news article doesn’t update over time, linking to top tweets that will update over time is pretty pointless. It would be so vastly superior if Twitter had a good Google News-like algorithm to identify topics based on tweets, replies and the quality of the discussion around a topic and then provided a way to link to that topic — with a datetime parameter. If I wanted to be able to demonstrate the importance of twitter to a certain day or so within the Egyptian protests, it would simply be a matter of finding that topic within twitter (obviously this requires a new search interface for topics) and then look at various dates. Like I said above, I think this works best in a spider web-like interface. I think it’s a matter of putting the most important tweets in larger circles with lines connecting to replies to that tweet and so on. Dumb retweets and non-influential tweets wouldn’t be shown. It would be drop-dead simple to browse the important tweets about that topic from that day. News articles, bloggers and others would easily be able to actually show evidence for the things they’re saying about the usefulness of twitter.

I think this is only one change of many that I would make if I had any control over the twitter interface. But I think it’s one of the most important things that twitter can do to make important content easily consumable. Hopefully one day it’ll happen.

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