In which the author summarizes the authority-based tweet debate and then finds something new to write about

Well, the issue of authority-based search­ing on Twitter is here to stay, even though Loic Le Meur, the guy who started all of this by ask­ing for some sort of author­ity search fea­ture on his blog, has amended his opin­ion. He points out now that “author­ity” was a poor word choice that resulted from the fact that he speaks French first and English second.

Given this amend­ment, I’d like to say that authority-based Twitter search­ing is noth­ing more than an aca­d­e­mic exer­cise, debated by blog­gers across the Web in their posts and in their com­ments on other people’s posts. But I can­not say that because at least two devel­op­ers have come out with sites to search Twitter based on the num­ber of fol­low­ers that users have.

These two new sites are Twitority and Twithority. Twitority’s tagline says “Authority based twit­ter search,” and Twithority’s says “Twitter Search by — Authority.” Both of those sites are still stick­ing by the word author­ity, though I won­der how long that will last when the dis­cus­sion hasn’t yet man­aged to come up with a solid def­i­n­i­tion of author­ity as it per­tains to Twitter. (The com­ments in TechCrunch’s lat­est on the sub­ject offers some good ideas, though.)

Of course, not every­body cares about Twitter and any author­ity its users might derive from their sta­tus as Twitter users. On TechCrunch’s , com­menter Scott C. writes:

Because “twit­ter­ing” makes NO SENSE. It’s some­where between a text mes­sage, an instant mes­sage and an email…and there’s just no rea­son to have it. It’s sortof like “micro blog­ging” via Tumblr. You either write noth­ing or some­thing. Anything inbe­tween is ulti­mately a waste of time and energy.

The com­menters on that TC post, some of them at least, see Twitter as just another fad, a “mutual admi­ra­tion soci­ety” within “the largest echo cham­ber in all of tech,” that is, TechCrunch itself.

Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” blog goes into a lit­tle more detail about the per­ceived impor­tance of Twitter.

I think, though, the real story is the end­less echo cham­ber of Silicon Valley that seems to per­sist in over­es­ti­mat­ing the mean­ing of Twitter, espe­cially com­pared to so much more that is going on in the tech industry.

With only about six mil­lion reg­is­tered users (with a much lower num­ber of active ones), Twitter gets writ­ten about as if it were a mover and shaker extra­or­di­naire, instead of just being what it is: An inter­est­ing status-alert start-up that makes zero rev­enues and turned down a very large buy­out offer from another once-too-overhyped start-up (Facebook).

Well, after yet another week in the real world, I am here to tell you, pre­cious few peo­ple still have any clue what Twitter is or how it works.

Is Twitter’s impor­tance over­rated? Maybe, but I think a larger and more cul­tur­ally impor­tant issue is high­lighted by one of the com­ments on Swisher’s post.

Commenter Andrew writes:

Sometimes tweets can be much more effec­tive than blog posts. I like read­ing your work, but this arti­cle required a lot of read­ing to say very lit­tle. First of all, it took way too long to even state the issue. Fun ban­ter is great to have in your style but it appears as though this post was all fun and ban­ter and no much else.

Also, if you would try to get into a Twitter a bit more, you might find that many peo­ple have become really good at say­ing much more in 140 char­ac­ters than you were able to say here in this very long blog post.

Not mean­ing to be crit­i­cal of you, just being crit­i­cal of your work in this case.

Andrew wants to reduce read­ing to the act of obtain­ing and absorb­ing bits of new infor­ma­tion; at least, that’s how I read his com­ment. (Of course, I’m blow­ing his com­ment out of pro­por­tion, but that’s what hap­pens when an inno­cent sen­tence incites thought.)

So in this commenter’s view, a view that seems, anec­do­tally at least, to be more and more com­mon these days, read­ing is about the gains in infor­ma­tion that can be made by the act of read­ing some­thing. Reading for enjoy­ment or explor­ing a sub­ject with an author through their skill­ful and intel­li­gent use of lan­guage is a thing of the past. No one in the tech world has time for things like style and play; it’s about get­ting the data now and get­ting as much of it as possible.

I’ve been wor­ried about this for a while. I think my worry inten­si­fied when CNN added the bullet-point sum­maries at the top of their arti­cles. Seriously, the inverted-pyramid style of jour­nal­is­tic writ­ing is sup­posed to be a sum­mary in and of itself. It doesn’t need more sum­ma­riz­ing. Are we, as a soci­ety, so rushed that we can’t bother to read a 400-word AP-style arti­cle, espe­cially when we were inter­ested enough in its head­line to click through to its text?

Swisher’s arti­cle, which was bliss­fully short com­pared to some blog posts (like this one), didn’t take too long to get to the point, and its ban­ter, the char­ac­ter­is­tic that read­ers like Andrew find to be a waste of time and atten­tion, is part of Swisher’s style (prob­a­bly part of the rea­son she was hired to write for the WSJ in the first place).

Yes, Swisher prob­a­bly could have boiled her article’s data con­tent down to a 140-character snip­pet, but that’s not what writer’s get paid for. Writers get paid for their intel­li­gence and their skill with lan­guage, their abil­ity to manip­u­late words and ideas into shapely and mean­ing­ful texts.

When we start to exor­cise style and beauty from our read­ing habits, we elim­i­nate that part of read­ing that con­nects us with other human beings. Readers like this become noth­ing more than infor­ma­tion proces­sors, often over­loaded proces­sors. It’s no won­der that we don’t feel like we have time to read an entire arti­cle and sort through its lan­guage to find meaning.

I use Twitter. I’m aware of that my love of long-writing con­flicts with my use of a microblog­ging ser­vice. But I also don’t feel like Twitter writ­ing is going to advance soci­ety much in the long run. Twitter is more of a sand­box, a source of dis­cus­sion and debate that leads the smart peo­ple out there in Internetland to go home, think about what they’ve done and come back to do some long-writing on the sub­ject. That long-writing then feeds the dis­cus­sion machine, and the process repeats.

The short-writing will inspire and incite us. The long-writing will make us bet­ter human beings.