Scientists warn of Twitter dangers

Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

Scientists say updates on networking tools such as Twitter are often too quick for the brain to fully digest.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development.

Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern California study.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

The report, published next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, studied how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain. iReport.com: Growing pains for Twitter, Facebook?

Brain scans showed humans can process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in others, but took longer to show admiration of compassion.

“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and refection,” said Immordio-Yang.

She said the study raises questions about the emotional cost, particularly for young people, of heavy reliance on a torrent of news snippets delivered via TV and online feeds such as Twitter.

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She said: “We need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass.”

USC sociologist Manuel Castells said the study raised more concerns over fast-moving TV than the online environment.

“In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.”

Research leader Antonio Damasio, director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, said the findings stressed the need for slower delivery of the news, and highlighted the importance of slow-burn emotions like admiration.

Damasio cited the example of U.S. President Barack Obama, who says he was inspired by his father, to show how admiration can be key to cultural success.

“We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It’s a deep physiological reaction that’s very important to define our humanity.”

Twitter, which allows users to swap messages and links of 140-characters or less, says on its Web site that it sees itself as a solution to information overload, rather than a cause of it.

This function, It says, “means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention.”

Filed under: Twitter , scientist, Scientists warn of Twitter dangers, Twitter

Google Acquisition Rumors Reflect Twitter’s Importance

While rumors of an imminent Google acquisition of Twitter were apparently offbase, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the companies strike up a formal collaboration or partnership.

Twitter, a microblogging service in which millions of people post brief text messages, has emerged as the custodian of a valuable online index of real-time facts, comments, musings and announcements, information that is clearly valuable for Google’s search engine index.

Google routinely collaborates with major Web sites to determine the best way to crawl and index their content for its search engine, so sitting down with Twitter for that purpose would be consistent with its modus operandi.

“Twitter is clearly hot. The phenomenon of real time search and the ability to capture this stream of ‘tweet’ discussions is an important development in social media and search because people are trying to mine data for information that might otherwise be sought in a search engine,” said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence in a phone interview. “This whole phenomenon Twitter represents is here to stay and needs to be addressed by search engines.”

However, it’s much less clear why Google would want to spend major-acquisition money on Twitter at this time. After all, Twitter doesn’t represent anything close to a clear and present danger to Google in the search market. “Twitter exemplifies the category of real-time search, but it’s not a Google killer,” Sterling said.

In addition, Google, like most companies, is in cost-cutting mode and Twitter, while wildly popular, hasn’t figured out a way to generate much revenue yet.

“There’s a very interesting parallel between Twitter and YouTube. When Google bought YouTube, they did it because it was extremely popular, got tons of traffic and represented this new trend of video hosting and sharing. Now, Google still hasn’t found a way to effectively monetize YouTube in a big way,” said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst, in a phone interview. “Does Google really want to spend another huge amount of money on another extremely popular service that hasn’t figured out a way to make money? I don’t see it happening.”

Others aren’t so sure.

In an e-mail interview with IDG News Service, IDC analyst Karsten Weide said Google would gain “tremendous stickiness and traffic” from Twitter. “Microblogging is becoming an accepted new channel of online communications in addition to email and instant messaging, and it is here to stay,” he said.

But he agreed that Google needs to know that it’s highly likely Twitter will never make significant amounts of revenue. “That would mean — just as Web mail — it would be a loss leader that one cross-finances in order to have the indirect benefits,” Weide said.

While Google doesn’t need to boost its audience, the acquisition might keep Twitter out of the hands of competitors, namely Yahoo and Microsoft, he said. “I think an acquisition would make sense, and if they can get it for less than $1 billion, the better it is,” Weide said.

Others believe Twitter should actively entertain the option of getting acquired by Google and strike while the iron is hot.

“Other tie-ins short of an acquisition could make sense, but would be harder to sustain since Twitter already uses such open interfaces. It will be hard to do something that others can’t replicate. Now is the time for Twitter to sell. It is at the top of its hype range now. Monetizing on its own would be a long, hard slog,” wrote Gartner research vice president Jeff Mann in a note e-mailed to reporters.

The rumors erupted late Thursday when tech blog TechCrunch reported the companies were engaged in “late stage negotiations” for an acquisition, citing two anonymous sources. TechCrunch later tempered that report, saying a third source characterized the discussions as “early stage” and possibly revolving around a search engine collaboration. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital tech blog, also quoting anonymous sources, said no acquisition discussions were on the table, but rather talks about collaboration on real-time search and better crawling of Twitter’s content.

It would be interesting to see what emerges from a collaboration between the companies to fine-tune Twitter’s usefulness for search engine users, Sterling said.

“Right now, it’s problematic using Twitter as an alternative search engine. There’s a lot of noisy results you get on Twitter’s search,” Sterling said. “If you can remove some of the noise, it could be quite powerful.”

For example, Twitter could turn into the next evolution of question-and-answer search engines, especially for users tapping into it from mobile devices, Sterling said. “It becomes a word-of-mouth network that is kind of instantaneous,” he said.

That would complement all the different ways in which Twitter is already very useful, like for marketing, Sterling said.

There would be technical challenges in making Twitter into a more useful search engine, and it would involve Google coming up with a way to weigh the reliability and authority of different Twitter users, Weiner said.

While Google declined to comment, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone posted a note on the company’s official blog saying the company’s plans are to remain independent.

“It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects,” he wrote. “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.”

Stone also encouraged people to apply for jobs at the company, an interesting document to peruse for clues to Twitter’s current plans and business and technology strategies.

Interestingly, Stone appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Nation” on Thursday evening, and during the interview he also said the Twitter’s intention is to be a strong and independent company.

“We’re recognizing a difference right now between profit and value. Right now, we’re building value,” Stone told Colbert.

That means extending Twitter globally, tapping not only into Web-based users but also into mobile phone networks, as well as adding features and refining the service, Stone said.

“When we get to a certain point where we feel we’ve gotten there, we’ll begin experimenting with a revenue model. This isn’t unlike the way Google approached their revenue model,” he said. The revenue-model testing and experimentation will begin this year, but Twitter will take its time getting it right, Stone said.

Stone’s comments may signal a potential tension with Twitter’s financial backers, who have poured $55 million into the company. “Investors may agitate for an acquisition because the idea of an IPO is unlikely if not impossible,” Sterling said.

Another issue that might derail a Google acquisition is that several Twitter staffers, including Stone and co-founder Evan Williams, already went through the experience of working for Google, after Google acquired Pyra Labs and its Blogger blog publishing service in 2003.

At the time, Blogger was the undisputed leader in the blog publishing space, but as part of Google its rate of innovation slowed down and competitors like WordPress and Six Apart delivered more sophisticated services.

“Blogger was ahead of the curve when Google bought it and then it became the AOL of blogging platforms: an early leader that then lost ground,” Sterling said.

If Google bought Twitter, the Twitter service would see some immediate improvements, Sterling said. Twitter posts would be incorporated into Google search results. Twitter’s own search would be improved. Google would monetize Twitter with ads. But in the end, it could face Blogger’s destiny.

“You might see Twitter maintain its current leader status for a while, but maybe not see if evolve as dynamically as it would under the stewardship of its founders,” Sterling said.

It can’t be encouraging that Google decided to stop actively developing Jaiku, a Twitter competitor Google acquired in 2007. Instead, Google has decided to port Jaiku to Google App Engine, and later to release the Jaiku engine as an open-source project under the Apache license.

The Jaiku service is maintained by volunteer Google engineers. Google also recently put mobile social-networking service Dodgeball out to pasture.

Other signs that would point against a Twitter acquisition are recent comments made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter “a poor man’s e-mail” and wondered whether it will remain a stand-alone service or become an e-mail feature. Schmidt has also said recently he doesn’t foresee Google making major acquisitions in the immediate future

Filed under: Google, Twitter , Google, Google Acquisition Rumors Reflect Twitter's Importance, Twitter

Is Twitter’s breakneck growth causing a backlash?

David Bill isn’t annoyed when Twitter gets so bogged down with traffic that he can’t post a message.

Twitter’s “fail whale,” which appears when the site is overrun, is so popular it’s on T-shirts and even tattoos.

1 of 2 That’s because in the moment when frustration would hit, he’s greeted on the popular Web site by a cartoonish image he loves: a giant whale being lifted out of an ocean by a small flock of tweeting birds.

The icon — which Twitter users call it the “fail whale” because the creature appears only when the site has failed to load — has gained a cult following as the social media site grows at breakneck pace.

The conversational Web site, which lets users post 140-character microblogs, saw a 1,374 percent jump in unique visitors between February 2008 and February this year, up to 7 million from only 475,000, according to Nielsen NetView.

By comparison, Facebook grew 228 percent, to 65.7 million users, during the same period.

With all of those new Twitterers, fail whale sightings and site crashes seem more frequent.

Bill (mr_bill on Twitter) and other fail-whale followers aren’t bothered, though.

The 36-year-old San Franciscan has organized parties in honor of the whale. The most recent, held in California in February, was attended by more than 300 people, including Yiying Lu, the artist in Australia who created the image.

Bill says the whale represents a contrarian philosophy.

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“It’s sort of an adorable whale but also this thing that represents the Herculean tasks that we sometimes go about from day to day,” he said.

“We’re all trying to do a lot of things that seem pretty impossible,” Bill said. “It’s nice to identify something positive with those failures.”

Not every Twitterer is sympathetic to the site’s troubles, though.

Some users say Twitter has outgrown its core audience and is irrelevant to the technophiles who made it popular in the first place. Others are annoyed by the flood of spammers and profiteers who now use the site’s popularity to make a buck.

Celebrities and members of Congress have been jumping onto the site in recent months, adding to the site’s mainstream popularity and, some users say, causing glitches in the system.

“I keep getting the fail whale. Twitter got too popular too quickly. I blame Shaq,” wrote Jessica Roy, a 21-year-old New York University student who goes by suchamessica on Twitter.

Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, or THE_REAL_SHAQ, has more than 470,000 followers on the site.

Nova Spivack, a blogger whose article “Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?” has been passed around the site, said a rift is developing between Twitter’s original “in crowd” and its newer, more mainstream users.

Early adopters find many of the new users annoying, he said.

“A lot of people come in, and they take that ‘What are you doing?’ question literally, and so they put very inane things on Twitter,” he said. iReport.com: How do you feel about tweets and status updates?

The site used to feel “insulated” from the mainstream, and now it doesn’t, he said.

But for all the complaints, there seem to be just as many people who are almost excited about Twitter’s growing pains.

It is inevitable that a Web site seeing Twitter-style growth would face some glitches and a backlash from early adopters, said Laura Fitton, a consultant and co-author of the book “Twitter for Dummies.”

“There’s going to be all kinds of people using it all kinds of different ways,” she said. “The purists can go pound rocks.”

Major news such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Hudson River plane landing has broken over Twitter, and that’s added to the site’s popularity, she said.

Amy Gahran, who writes on social media at contentious.com, said the backlash against Twitter stems from the fact that people are uncomfortable with change. Early users see new people coming to the site, and that creeps them out, but it shouldn’t, she said.

“Change is freaking good,” she said. “Roll with it.”

As the site gets filled with fresh users, people are creating pieces of software to help Twitterers sort through the noise, Gahran said.

She said Twitter is popular because it mimics real-life conversation and because it’s easy to use. She also expects Twitter to expand, especially as people in developing countries use cell-phone text messages to communicate through the site.

“People talk. That’s what we do,” she said. “We’re social creatures. We’re kind of wired for this.”

Twitter says it is addressing breakdowns in that wired communication.

“We have made amazing progress from a technical perspective as far as accommodating this rapid growth goes and will continue to improve system and subsystem performance moving forward,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a statement to CNN.

Critter Gewlas of Cary, North Carolina, believes so much in the site’s ability to overcome adversity that he recently got a tattoo of the fail whale on his leg.

“The site itself has suffered a few scrapes and bumps along the way, but for the most part, I definitely think it’s a good thing,” said the 36-year-old.

The fail whale’s account on Twitter has more than 2,265 followers. A Facebook group dedicated to the whale has more than 4,400 members. The whale has spawned art and merchandise, from coffee mugs to baby clothes. A Current.com parody of the whale has spun around the Internet, too.

Bill, whose fail whale parties have featured an aquamarine martini in honor of the icon’s color, said the whale’s popularity comes from the idea that failures are worth celebrating and learning from.

Twitter will use that philosophy to continue to grow, he said.

Filed under: Twitter , Is Twitter's breakneck growth causing a backlash?, Twitter