Overheard Signal Beats Direct Message

“The value of Twitter comes when you are overheard. To understand what I mean by this, consider how the telephone network worked in the small Welsh town where my father lived in the 1950s. A typical call ran as follows: “Oh, hello Mrs X, could you put me through to Newport station, please?” Mrs X (the operator) would then connect you to the station and you would ask for and be given the times of the following day’s trains to Bristol. So far, normal enough. But 30 seconds after you had hung up, the telephone would ring: “It’s Mrs X here from the exchange. If you want to get to Bristol, I remember hearing Mr Shaw saying he was driving down tomorrow morning, so maybe you could ring and ask him for a lift?” Now I suppose being connected to this telephone exchange was pretty hopeless if you wanted to have an extramarital affair or run an international drugs cartel. But sometimes, as in this example, it was very useful. The same goes for Twitter. Collective knowledge is valuable. Mention that you are thinking of having a curry in Oxford and in minutes someone will come up with a recommendation (Spice Valley or Saffron, apparently). For this reason, some very clever people believe that the threat to Google, when it comes, will come from a collective social brain like this.”

“That, in short, is the value of the semi-addressable medium. They are the natural home for peripheral or tangential information. The birdsong of social intercourse. Analogous in many ways to the noticeboards we used to have in agencies before email seemed to kill them. Except these boards are visible worldwide.”