> Thanks... I had no idea Twitter could geowank the tweets. The > following also works > > http://search.twitter.com/search?near=mumbai&within=15&units=mi > >> even if what's being covered is really sad. > > This... is so... bad. Why can't they just leave us alone?
It's concerning. Especially targeting specific nationalities. I have friends there so of course - even though it is a huge city - and likely as not nobody I know is involved - it has successfully scared me. My feelings are a bit mixed however because I don't like seeing us all freak out in ways that are basically totally futile - catering to a bunch of assholes with guns. I'm not a big fan of the running around with heads cut off thing that people seem to love to do. Almost all of us are thousands of miles away. I see it as a kind of negative of twitter - sensationalism and morbid voyeurism - and fueling the radicalism by providing it a stage. At the same time it's amazing of course; having a nervous system that extends there. It's starting to show the real promise of twitter; which IMHO hasn't been realized yet... Twitter was kind of dysfunctional as only a directed network of explicit relationships - often you would only catch half the conversation - there was no "room" - and even today group concepts are being provided by third parties rather than by Twitter itself. [ Maybe that helps its energy because you have to constantly friend the other half of the conversation... but you know it is extra work ]. However Twitter does represent an atom of speech; and as such they've managed to capture a kind of ground floor in the conceptual space of what it means to signal somebody - they've effectively managed to define a "neuron". Granted Jabber, IRC and other mediums also did this - heck even email did it for a while - but somehow the integration of twitter with mobility and the web and the general constraints and ease of use make it the prototypical exemplar of the concept of signaling. With search in twitter [ and maybe soon with a concept of rooms? ] [ If they can ever get their act together and get the stupid thing to stop falling over all the time ] there's really a chance that this could sink into the substrate of day to day engagement for ordinary citizens and become a community signaling device that we all use for all kinds of issues both great and small. On a related note - here in PDX our friend former O'Reilly CTO and Where 2.0 alumni Rael Dornfest ended up going to work for them; he's an engineer in the classic heavy metal industrial sense: ideas, clarity of mind, energy, motivation and a business eye - not just a geek. His iwantsandy project was a spin on humanizing web services; having them be more conscious and listen and respond with a human voice - rather than form fill out boxes... It'll be very interesting to see what he brings to the mix. - me! _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
