Twitter is faster than Google!
I want to say a few words about how I've discovered that asking Twitter can be faster than searching Google, if you want a question answered.
As my Twitter network has grown (currently 378 followers), I've come to rely on Twitter more and more. Nowadays, if I have a question about just about anything, and especially anything tech, I'll ask Twitter first. Then I might turn to Google to search, while Twitter is pondering the answer.
Usually I don't get far past bringing up the search window before I have several great answers from Twitter, and then a few minutes later there will be many more. Sometimes it even sparks a discussion on the topic. You just can't beat that. As I keep saying, Twitter is faster than Google.
Trust the twitter, the twitter knows all. The wisdom of crowds.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Got any good examples of this?
5 comments:
A critical mass of smart people is more sociology than it is new tech. When I was working for Feedster, I used to hang out in geeky IRC rooms, where part of the fun was trying out each other's software. E.g. I signed up for del.icio.us just to try to get back on the good side of Joshua Schachter, after having done something annoyingly clueless a few days before. (I'd pasted a multi-line ASCII art birthday cake into my chat.)
But now all those guys are off playing WOW...
I've found twitter and facebook faster for specific queries that are too hard to google.
An example (it was actually Facebook rather than twitter) was when I was trying to remember a case study where a car company gave 50 bloggers cars to testdrive for the weekend, and then blog about it.
I tried every possible combination of words in google but didn't even get close, I kept just getting matches on test driving cars, car blogs, etc. Facebook turned up the answer from some marketing friends who remembered the campaign. Once they mentioned it was Toyota in Greece I could google the results straight away - but without the key word of "toyota" it could not be found via Google.
Hi John!
I came to the same conclusion: Crowdsourcing is definitely better than algorithm-sourcing.
Twitter works really well. In Jaiku the sub-discussions or sub-chats generated on each post are impressive.
Who knows...maybe with semantic web and AI things will evolve but so far what makes the difference is the human component.
Andrea
Have to agree, twitter can be a great source of information. As it has been said Twitter has the human element which no algorithm can yet bet.
Thanks for your responses. Yes, I find it's the human factor that makes it well worthwhile. People are so willing to help too. There's a really good community vibe on Twitter right now.
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