Aaron Weyenberg

Twitter reflects our dreadful collective geopolitical IQ

Aug 9

“I hope not, but I wouldn’t put it past this stupid country.”

That’s what liberal commentator & comedian Bill Maher recently said in response to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when asked if he thought Sarah Palin had a chance of being elected President of the United States. This caused a negative response from viewers. Maher’s rebuttal to his hate mail is quite amusing in itself and in my opinion worth a read. He cites a few statistics to support his position:

• Almost half of Americans don’t know each state has two senators
• The average voter thinks foreign aid constitutes nearly a quarter of the federal budget (it’s less than 1%)
• Most Americans cannot name any of the branches of the federal government
• 24% could not name the country we fought for independence from in the Revolutionary War
• Two-thirds don’t know what Roe vs. Wade established

Maybe he was just exaggerating? I doubt it. Here are a few more alarming figures that he didn’t mention:

• Over 40% of Americans think Earth is less than 10,000 years old
• 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun
• 75% of 18-24 year-olds are unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East

I don’t know if, collectively, the United States is a “stupid country.” But I wouldn’t be shocked if the number of Americans that could name the last three American Idol winners outnumbered those that could name one justice on the Supreme Court by 5 to 1. We know lots of things, we just don’t necessarily know things that matter.

Twitter as a window to our civic literacy

Could we find any anecdotal evidence of Bill Maher’s findings in our day to day culture? If we use Twitter as an imperfect gauge of the nature of public discourse, then I’ll answer this question with a question: What do the Prime Minister of Isreal, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister of Canada, the US Senate Majority Leader, the United Nations Secretary General and the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq have in common? They have less Twitter followers, combined, than Haylie Duff. No, not Hilary Duff. We’re talking about her less successful older sister here.

Here’s the follow count breakdown (as of today) of those I mentioned above — people that have a direct hand in shaping the world we live in:

PM of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu): 2,026 *

Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, highest ranking officer in the US Military (@thejointstaff): 5,363

Steven Harper, PM of Canada (@pmharper): 17,189

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader (@SenatorReid): 1,591

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations (@secgen): 4,131

Barham Sali, Deputy PM of Iraq (@BarhamSalih): 2,498

* Netanyahu seems to be on a hiatus from tweeting

I admit this is a small unscientific sample to illustrate a point. NPR Politics is now over 1 million and Barack Obama will eclipse 2 million followers soon (but he’s still tied at the moment with the likes of Ryan Seacrest). How influential is Ashton Kutcher on Twitter? He has more followers than the entire US Congress combined.

As for Bill Maher (@billmaher), he weighs in at nearly 28,000 followers. Not bad for sending only seven total tweets over the last three months.

Sarah Palin’s new Twitter username

Jul 29

Clearly @AKGovSarahPalin is no longer valid. So what will it be?

I hereby offer some initial suggestions. I’m not feeling particularly creative or mavericky at the moment, so surely there must be better ideas out there. What’s yours?

Tweet®

Jul 1

We sort of knew this was coming. You can use Tweet in your app’s name, as long as your app doesn’t suck.

I suppose that somewhat puts to rest my earlier post about Twitter nouns and verbs.

How’s that Facebook redesign revolt going?

May 7

It’s been about 7 weeks since Facebook’s redesign (their second in six months). The first redesign was rolled out starting in July 2008, and about 40% (roughly 40M users at the time) were opting in to the new beta.  By mid September, all users were seeing the new design whether they wanted to or not. This caused all kinds of Facebook “change it back” groups to sprout up. The result? Facebook has doubled in size, swelling to 200M users (according to them).

Since Facebook launched their second redesign, the Petition Against the “New Facebook” group has grown significantly, but appears to be leveling off at around 1.7M members. Unquantifiable are other disgruntled users who didn’t join groups or vote in feedback polls. According to (rough) Quantcast estimates, it took 3 months for traffic to recover from redesign 1. Redesign 2 was rolled out during a period of steeper growth, in mid March 2009. So it remains to be seen if the recovery time will be quicker. I bet it will.

But it’s apparent that the redesign dent seems more acute this time, and also happening when Twitter’s traffic is fully tipping (not counting mobile and other desktop clients). One of the goals of redesign 2 was to better position themselves in response to a growing Twitter messaging platform. Facebook users who mainly used the status update feature could be warming up to Twitter — and that might be magnifying that dent slightly.

Twitter nouns and verbs

Mar 28

Something’s been nagging me lately: the various verbs and nouns used to describe the act of posting a twitter message and referring to a message itself.  Here’s what’s out there, with definitions from Merriam Webster:

Twitter

• noun 1: a trembling agitation 2: a small tremulous intermittent sound (as of birds)
• intransitive verb 1: to utter successive chirping noises 2 to talk in a chattering fashion

Twit

• noun 1 : an act of twitting 2 : a silly annoying person
• transitive verb 1 : to subject to light ridicule or reproach 2 : to make fun of as a fault

Tweet

• noun : a chirping note
• also lists intransitive verb
  

It seems that by definition twit/twitted is a clear nonstarter.  I just heard a correspondent on NPR say “twitted” which just doesn’t sound right.

Twitter seems to reference a series of chirping noises or an intermittent sound.  This suggests a plurality of tweets which by definition is “a chirping note.”  So it seems to me that if we define one twitter message as a single utterance, then one Twitter message is indeed one tweet.  And a cluster of successive tweets would qualify as a twitter.  So with these rules in mind (and I know they’re meticulous), here’s some hypothetical usage:

Right

“Jeez man, how many tweets does that make for you today?”

“Dude your last tweet was so hilarious, I nearly choked on my overpriced Panera sandwich!”

“I heard Jennifer Aniston dumped John Mayer because of his excessive twittering.  I bet they broke up over something else and Twitter paid her for the pub.”

“Stop tweeting or you’re going to kill my battery.”

Wrong

“Did you reply to my last twitter?”

“Are you following my twitters?”

“I just twitted about that Wash Post story.”

How do you say it? Like Stephen Colbert?

Update 4/21

Just saw StockTwits. So technically, the name implies silly, annoying stock gossipers.