Twitter is Good for You

And it might be good for me too.

I just read an article in Time magazine about Twitter and how it is becoming the next big thing, the next big platform for information on the web, on par with Facebook or even Google. Naturally, I had to give it a try and see what the hype is all about.

And here I am. I also added a little feed on the side here with my latest tweets. Nifty.

So what's the big deal? Well, according to Steven Johnson, the new way of sharing and filtering information made possible by Twitter, with its networks of followers and tiny status updates, is transforming a number of important information channels:

News and Opinion

• The links passed by people on Twitter function as a sort of customized newspaper. News we read may be more diverse, but also more insulated.
  

Searching

• Finding info through your network on Twitter will be an alternative to Google. Instead of a generic PageRank guiding our search, we have direct recommendations from friends.
  

Advertising

• Businesses will be highly motivated to attract Twitter followers. This necessitates a new form of customer interaction, to keep people following the feed.
  

I've found a few other articles along similar lines. This one had some interesting points to make. Even more intriguing is this article on bit.ly, one of the link shorteners often seen on Twitter. Just like Twitter could be the next Google, bit.ly or one of its competitors could be the next Digg. It all seems to point to "the complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web."

It's enough for me to get an account and try it out for myself. So far it's been pretty fun. :) I'm eager to really get into this and hone my tweeting skills.

What makes me really excited about Twitter is that I think it could really fit into my process, better than blogging, even. See, I have several layers through which I filter and organize my thoughts. At the most immediate level is my notebook, which I started a couple months ago at the prompting of this blog post. There I write thoughts, lists, notes, ideas, and basically anything that I want to remember later or get down on paper, and it has been very helpful. It's like freewriting, except for life instead of, well, writing.

The next level is my idea notebook, which I write in every day, choosing one or two worthwhile ideas or observations to explain more fully. And my retroactive planner, in which I summarize the events of the day in order to reflect and realize how much time I wasted doing unimportant things.

And after that is my blog, this thing you're reading. I use this blog to finalize my thoughts, to make them public and therefore solid and defined. The problem is that it usually takes me multiple hours to craft a decent post, and I can go for weeks without finding the time to do so. Even now I've had one post sitting around, unfinished, for almost three weeks and I'm still not sure when I'll be done with it.

So to me, Twitter looks like a good intermediary step between my rough notebook and my idea notebook. I can write more or less the same sort of thoughts I would record in my notebook, but with a bit more attention paid to clarity of expression and relevance to other people. And it's so much easier for me to write these short little tweets than it is to write these excruciatingly long blog posts.

Hope you like tweets. You'll probably be seeing a lot more of them!

And look, I've already found some cool stuff through Twitter. Here's a fascinating interview with Jenova Chen, where he really goes into detail on what he wants to do with games. We're getting there! :) Social play, emotion, thoughtful fun - these are all new areas to explore. I can hardly wait to get going.

Google Is the Future of Games

It seems to me that the future of game development, in terms of minimizing the barrier to entry so anyone can easily make a game, would look a lot more like Google than like Photoshop. And it wouldn't look at all like Visual Studio. ;)

I can imagine a knowledge network of algorithms and components and behaviors, built up by people searching a space, as in Electric Sheep, and then organized and filtered by people participating in some kind of social network metagame.

If I am putting together an environment sketch and I'm looking for some procedural water ripples for a fountain, I'd be able to search for these procedural components as easily as I would for a web page. I'd be able to navigate through the space of algorithms at a finer level, too, like Biomorphs, to tweak an existing component without ever touching any code. And if I wanted to, I could modify the code directly.

Whatever social rewards I'd gather through my creation would automatically trickle down to those who created the components I used to make it. In this way, there would be an ecosystem of people creating, evolving, filtering, and combining this procedural material from which games are made and recycled back into.

I'm not saying it will happen, but something like that will have to happen before creating games becomes a mainstream activity. It's a tough problem, but I'd love to see it solved. How do you turn software engineering into an art form?

*image from one of my favorite flash animations, Pencilmation*

Distributed Knowledge Networks

What is a "distributed knowledge network?" It is a network, of knowledge, that is distributed. A network is a collection of nodes that are linked together. Knowledge consists of the mechanisms that allow a system to interact with its environment. It is the embodiment of the knowledge of relationships between various patterns, which is extracted from the information coming into the system. A knowledge network is not the same as a learning machine, it is what is constructed by a learning machine. However, the knowledge network can be used by the learning machine to construct more knowledge, of course, since knowledge usually builds on previous knowledge. I think of a knowledge network as an artifact rather than a process, the product of knowledge production. Distributed knowledge networks are those built up by the actions of many separate agents, as well as stored in a diffuse set of agents.

Kevin Kelly Quote on Networks

What came first, stability or diversity?
"Biology suggests that in addition to regulating the numbers of connections per "node" in a network, a system tends to also regulate the "connectance" (the strength of coupledness) between each pair of nodes in a network. Nature seems to conserve connectance. We should thus expect to find a similar law of the conservation of connectance in cultural, economic, and mechanical systems, although I am not aware of any studies that have attempted to show this. If there is such a law in all vivisystems, we should also expect to find this connectance being constantly adjusted, perpetually in flux."

Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Ecosystems are like neural networks.