News, Updates, and Commentary for Happn.in.

We recently rolled out a new feature at Happn.in called the City Feed (or, as we also call it: Talk to Your City). On each city page, in addition to the top current Twitter trends, you now have the ability to send a tweet directly to your city. You also have the ability to recommend tweets that other people have sent to the City Feed. Those tweets and users that are recommended more often will be displayed more prominently, which gives each city the collective ability to decide on the content that is shown in their feed.

This new feature is just one part of a larger roll-out that includes our upcoming iPhone application and Twitter’s recent geo-location announcement. The importance of this feature can best be explained by the difference between broadcasting and reception.

Broadcasting and Reception

Broadcasting is “to tell (something) to many people”. It’s mostly used in reference to Radio and Television – two communication devices that allow one signal to be sent to many people at once. In his book Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky calls this type of communication, “one-to-many”: “I talk, and talk, and talk, and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out” (pg. 87).

Tools like Twitter and Blogger, however, change broadcasting from a one-to-many relationship into a many-to-many relationship. If you have a connection to the internet, you can not only receive signals from lots of sources, you can send them as well. You are a broadcaster.

All of that is good and smart and interesting. Using Twitter, we all have the ability to send and receive information. The problem we’ve experienced recently, however, is that while Twitter has become a good way for people to receive relevant information (trends, hashtags, searches), it’s not nearly as effective a way to send information. Twitter is still a pretty poor broadcast machine. Currently, when you send out a tweet, you are sending it out to no one in particular. You may have a couple hundred followers, but the chances are that those followers have no real cohesion among themselves. A tweet sent to your followers is a little like shouting out to everyone who is on the bus with you – there is some similarity to all of you (you are all on a bus); but the similarity is random and tenuous. The connection between you and your followers is indirect.

When you receive your tweets, however, they all seem to come directly from each individual person you follow. When you look at your Twitter stream, you see all the little messages with user names and profile pictures; it looks like these people are talking to you. The connection between you and the people you follow is more direct.

Combined, you can see why Twitter overwhelmingly feels like a good place to receive information, but a bad way to send it. Each of your tweets is sent to no one in particular, while you are inundated by messages from specific individuals.

The only cases where this isn’t true, of course, is when you have a way of sending a tweet to a cohesive group. In those cases, you send information to a group you know is looking for it. Famous people are able to do this out-of-the-box with Twitter. Their followers are a cohesive group already. When they tweet, they know to whom they are tweeting; and the people who follow them do so actively. But that’s just using Twitter like it was a radio station – just another example of one-to-many communication.

Some groups form through the use of hashtags. A bunch of Twitterers all at the same event, for instance, might all use the same hashtag to send their tweet specifically to the group at that event. And those same people can then search for that hashtag to see all the tweets being broadcast to that event. In that case, the group is cohesive and is also many-to-many. But it’s also ephemeral. After the event is done, the use of the hashtag ceases as does the group.

The Importance of Broadcasting to a Group

The problem with a communication tool more suited to reception than broadcasting is that it’s not sustainable; eventually, you’ve got a lot of people listening and no one talking. In order to become sustainable, Twitter needs tools that make it a better broadcast machine for many-to-many communication. One way to do that is to give people more opportunities to broadcast their tweets to a cohesive group. You become a more effective broadcaster when you know to whom you are tweeting. Location provides an obvious way to do this. With Happn.in’s new City Feed, you can not only receive information from a particular city; you can send information to that city as well. Communication works better when you are talking to a particular group rather than to a group of no one in particular.

Location: The New Feature

The folks at Twitter recently announced an upcoming feature that will make Twitter truly location-aware. (Read: Location, Location, Location) While the details are still coming, the basic idea is that folks will have the ability to geo-code their tweets. Geo-coding will make each individual tweet a mark on a map. If you have geo-coding enabled and you tweet, “I’m at such and such a restaurant”, Twitter will code that tweet with the actual latitude and longitude of that restaurant.

This is cool because, as they write:

[W]ith accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city—whether you follow them or not. It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.

The Happn.in Philosophy

We applaud this move by Twitter. Happn.in started with the idea that Twitter had reached an unmanageable size; and without the ability to filter Twitter by something other than numbers, Twitter was becoming mostly useless

We are not claiming to have moved the Twitter mountain towards location; but we are excited that the Mt. Twitter is moving in the direction we think is useful and interesting.

As we said in our previous post, “to become truly, sustainably useful, Twitter needs tools that organize and filter its information based on criteria other than size.” By adding geo-coded tweets, Twitter has created some strong material from which to build those tools.

The Impact on Happn.in

When it goes live, geo-coding will give us at Happn.in better, more accurate local trends. Currently, if you have your location set to Austin, but are tweeting from a concert in Houston, we have to ascribe your tweet to Austin. In the future, if you’ve enabled geo-coding, that tweet would be counted as a Houston conversation, making Happn.in a more accurate representation of Local Twitter Trends.

But possibly more importantly: we have ideas. Oh, do we have ideas. We have been thinking about how location plays into Twitter for a while now, and this allows us to go big. While I will not lie to you and say we have several geo-coded features ready to release, I can say that we are very interested in using Twitter as a local broadcast and conversation tool; a way to make your city or town better and more connected (check out the conversation bar we’ve set up in Austin). Obviously we don’t think getting everyone on Twitter makes a town better (that would be a weird thing to think); but we do think making local conversation easier can’t hurt.

(Via Waxy.Org.)

Or, how size gets in the way

Twitter began life as a tool—you could only use it through their website—but has become more recently something akin to the phone lines: a communication infrastructure on which other tools are built. On its own, the first telephone was a tool, but it is the world-wide phone infrastructure that is the useful part. While it’s too early to say whether Twitter will become as important as the phone system, it is clear that it has grown so quickly and fast not because their website (their tool) is so great; it has grown because it has enhanced communication. Just like the telephone system greatly enhanced one-to-one communication, Twitter has greatly enhanced, in Clay Shirky’s words, the “many-to-many” communication: many people in conversation with many others. (For more on this sea-change in communication technology and practice, we heartily recommend Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody)

But while Twitter has enhanced this type of communication, in its current state, Twitter is also mostly useless (and I say mostly in the same way Miracle Max calls Wesley “mostly dead” in the The Princes Bride). To be useful, communication infrastructures need to have a good balance of tools (i.e. the actual telephones, the yellow pages, 411, etc.) and number of participants. You could have all the great tools in the world, for instance, but if no one else actually used the telephone system, it would be useless. And conversely, as in Twitter’s case, you could have a lot of people using the system, but without tools like the Yellow Pages or Directory Assistance or answering machines, the system becomes impossible to navigate. Think about a phone system where you couldn’t find anyone’s numbers. The dial tone would get pretty annoying pretty fast. This is where Twitter finds itself as its service grows. As more and more information is being pumped across Twitter, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get relevant or useful information. The larger it gets, the less useful it is. (Twitter has of course made some attempts to make itself more useful upon signup, and we’ll discuss those attempts below.)

The value of Twitter, as we are told over and over, is that it allows people to easily share and receive real-time information with lots of other people simultaneously. When a large earthquake hit the Chinese Sichuan province in 2008, for instance, people affected by the quake were able to get information and updates out as the quake was happening (see Shirky’s recent TED@State talk for a further exploration of this). This meant that the BBC received reports of the quake first from Twitter; and similarly, so did you or I if we were on Twitter. But what happens as more and more of that real-time information enters the infrastructure is that our ability to access it starts to depend on sheer numbers. Which is to say: Twitter is useful, but only for things that are large in number. In other words, for things already done pretty well by mass media. For everything else, it’s only potentially useful.

Twitter is really useful for famous stuff

As we see it Twitter is currently useful for three things:

1. Famous people broadcasting their fame (i.e. Ashton Kutcher and his 2 million or whatever followers)
2. Propagating topics that are already popular (i.e. Trending Topics)
3. Outputting information from events that have mass participation from folks with an interest in broadcasting that event (i.e. the current revolution in Iran)

The common denominator for all the above is that they depend on numbers to work. Twitter is probably very useful for a celebrity—they have large numbers willing to listen. Similarly, Trending Topics are like famous phrases and as such can be easily pulled out of the Twitter stream. And for social movements like the one in Iran, you have a lot of people all very interested in getting and sharing information and so Twitter has proven central to that movement.

These are all, of course, totally legitimate and good uses of Twitter; and we don’t mean to diminish the importance that Twitter’s infrastructure has played in Iran or during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. But to become truly, sustainably useful, Twitter needs tools that organize and filter its information based on criteria other than size. Ultimately, we are not all celebrities or participants in large social movements, at least not all the time. Just like the Yellow Pages took the potential usefulness within the phone system and made it real, we need tools that build on all the potential usefulness within Twitter. And with so many people using it, that potential is vast.

Importantly, it is not up to Twitter to build these tools—they have a large enough job just maintaining their infrastructure. If Twitter continues, it will do so because they strengthen their API and developers start building more tools equivalent to what Directory Assistance or the Yellow Pages are to the telephone system. The Yellow Pages were created in 1886 Chicago by Reuben H. Donnelly (see the Wikipedia R.H Donnely entry). Donnelly didn’t work for the phone company, but still made the phone system infinitely more useful by categorizing what was then just a list of names of people and businesses with telephones into a list categorized by services offered. We need similar tools for Twitter.

It’s not about size, it’s how you use it (AND: sorry for that joke)

There have been early attempts at making these kinds of tools for Twitter (of which Happn.in is a part). Each filters and ask questions of Twitter’s data. But importantly, there are two groups of tools. There are those that evaluate Twitter through numbers (and so remain useful mostly for stuff with large numbers):

1. We Follow – A service that categorizes popular users by tag
2. What the Trend – User-generated services that explains why certain topics are trending on Twitter

And then those use Twitter differently – that ask for information based on things other than numbers. We will give brief descriptions of these services, but we encourage you to check them out for yourself to really get a sense (feel free to add additional services in the comments):

1. Twitter Job Search – allows users to search for job listings posted on Twitter
2. Boston Tweet – Gives users in Boston a way to focus their updates to Boston residents
3. Almost At – A way to focus in on Tweets from a specific event
4. Topsy – A search engine powered by Tweets.

None of these latter services are perfect, and neither is our service Happn.in (which lets people know what people are twittering about in their area); but they are giving us a glimpse of how useful Twitter can be when we stop focusing our attention on numbers (How many followers do you have!) and start seeing Twitter as an infrastructure for useful communication and information.