As there are only three of us including myself that have posts up on the Twitter Fight Club assignment, @Zach you had a 50% chance of getting signalled out in a debate. You make a claim that having an abundance of sources of information available on twitter is a good thing, and for the sake of debate I am going to say that it is not. In the case of reading through twitter fight club contestants posts (which range from 18 000-56-000) a lot of it is useless information and I am wondering to myself how do I make an argument for those people to complete part 2 of this assignment. These contestants are all academics and largely intelligent people, but in trying to find posts that match their education is hihgly time-consuming. In the case of @texasinafrica, all I wanted to find was posts regarding her love/passion for pirates in Africa and instead I stumbled across posts about puppies and doughnuts. Usually this would interest me but not today…
What Twitter needs is a more efficient way of perusing through followers/followees tweets to find ones with hastags or comments that appeal to what we are trying to learn or find out. In the case of strong academics with 56, 000 tweets I don’t have time to sift through them to find the intellectual comments they do tweet about. If Twitter is going to have an overload of information available they should discriminate between personal tweets, work tweets, or academic tweets. This would allow followers to choose what kind of information they want from their followers.
In regards to TwitterFightClub, lots of information is timely and not so good. However, lots of information that is easily accessible and ordered is good.
Sammy, I definitely agree with your thoughts here. You mention hashtags in your post, which I believe are supposed to provide a way for Twitter users to sort through the twitoverse (and maybe individual ppl’s tweets?) to find tweets about what they are interested in. However, whether this is an effective tool is another question, and one that I cannot give an answer to, as I don’t use Twitter. I will guess that it probably isn’t capable of picking up things like the ‘tone’ of tweets, or the ‘direction’ of arguments made in tweets (i.e. for or against), so it’s limited in that it doesn’t pick up the finer details, like most other keyword searches.