I tried to watch the trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum on IMDB. The Flash player started up and informed me that before I could watch the trailer, I’d have to watch an advertisement first:

Sorry, isn’t the trailer already an advertisement for the movie? So, in order to watch an ad I want to see, I have to first watch one I don’t want to see. In this case, VH1 is paying IMDB for me to be able to see an ad for The Bourne Ultimatum. WTF?!?

To top off the screwiness, after the Flash-based pre-advertisement advertisement which played flawlessly and without delay, the player tried to load a Windows Media version of the advertisement that I actually wanted to see. However, all I was able to see was a black screen and the phrase, “Connecting to media…” Alas, it never did connect to media, and so I all I got for my trouble was a blog topic.

The other day, a friend of mine (someone who should know better) asked me, “What’s the name of that really dumb site where everyone just posts what they’re doing?” My friend was referring to Twitter, which as I am coming to learn, is a simple yet very powerful communications tool.

When you log in to Twitter, you’re presented with a single prompt asking What are you doing? You get 140 characters worth of space to tell the world what you’re up to. Hit “Update” and your message gets posted to your profile and added to the positively massive public timeline, which includes all posts from all users.

For example, just before I typed this sentence, I posted this entry to Twitter:

Writing a blog entry about Twitter.

which you can see here at http://twitter.com/dkawalec

Pretty dumb, huh? At first glance, Twitter might seem somewhat self-indulgent or maybe even completely pointless. So, I can post what I’m doing to some website? So what?

Adding Friends
Twitter begins to show its value when you begin to follow other people’s streams. Not only can you view the posts of anyone else on Twitter, you can also add them to your Friends list and have their post feed intermingled with yours on your Twitter home page. As you add friends, acquaintances, or just people you think have interesting things to say, your home page turns into a vibrant real time stream of multiple consciousnesses.

Attracting Followers
Just as you can add friends and read all of their posts in your stream, others can add your posts to their streams. The people that add you to their friends list show up on your profile as followers. Followers are your audience. They are the ones who will be reading when you post something new.

Public IM
You can see that if someone is both a friend (you read their posts) and a follower (they read your posts), the two of you can communicate in what amounts to a kind of public IM session. Why not just use IM then? Because other people are reading the conversations too, and getting involved in them. These other people may have answers you need, points of view you never considered, or facts you’re not aware of.

For example, I first learned of the death of Jerry Falwell, not from the 11 o’clock news, not from CNN or even from CNN.com, not from blogs. I read about it on Twitter, when financialaidpodcast posted

Is it bad luck to say that I’m glad Jerry Falwell is dead?

With Friends
This is hands-down my favorite feature of Twitter. You can visit anyone’s profile (www.twitter.com/profile name) and click the With Friends link to see Twitter as they see it.

This experience is not quite voyeuristic — all Twitter posts are public, after all. However, you still get a sense of tapping into a view of the Twitter timeline that is specifically meant for someone else. This feature offers interesting insight into how other people are using Twitter, lets you see who might be worth adding to your friends list, or simply gives you the chance to virtually walk in another person’s shoes if only for a few minutes.

Microblogging
The ability to quickly publish tiny messages, and the fact that these posts are availble through RSS feeds, has led many to begin thinking about posting on Twitter (and on similar services such as Jaiku) as microblogging. I’m still getting comfortable with this term. First, because the working definition of microblogging seems to be, “what you do on Twitter.” Second, because I’m not sure that it captures what makes Twitter unique.

Microblogging implies something less than blogging. However, with its endless stream of posts, the stream-of-consciousness thought, and the near-frictionless interaction among users (made even more frictionless by the ability to add and receive new posts via phone text messaging and IM), Twitter seems to be, in some respects, a great deal more. It strips away the (yes, I’m actually about to type this) formality of blogs (with their “post/comment” and/or “post/counter-post” conversational dynamics), and leaves behind something more fluid and immediate.

On the other hand, I never feel like I have to catch up on what I’ve missed on Twitter. Posts on Twitter have an implied urgency (i.e., “This is what I think is interesting RIGHT NOW.”) to keep looking forward to the next post, the next discussion, the next idea. And the idea need not be earth-shattering. On May 18, it was a miserable and rainy in New York and I posted:

Today is a good day for soup.

I’d like to think that somewhere someone read that and thought, “yeah, soup sounds pretty good.”

This past weekend, I finished up reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The main premise of the book is that there is no one best way that you can organize any group of information. He then goes on to explain how Web 2.0 technologies allow us to dynamically organize the massive collection of disorganized, miscellaneous information on the internet in ways that suit our needs at the moment.

I want to delve a bit more deeply into the concept of orders of organization that Weinberger talks about. The First Order is the physical. Knowledge is condensed into a readable form in books. Books are physical objects comprised of atoms and are thus bound to the laws of physics. They have to exist at some point in space and at some point in time. They can’t occupy the same space as any other object. A group of books can only be arranged on a shelf in one way at any one time. So, you may line the books on your shelf up by alphabetical order by author, or you may organize them by subject, title, height, thickness, whatever you want — you can pick any method of organization you want, but you can only pick one. This is the First Order of organization. The Dewey Decimal System (which Weinberger spends a great many pages discussing) describes one way to physically organize books in a library.

The Second Order introduces metadata (data about data) — we’re talking about the card catalog. Certainly, the card catalog doesn’t tell us as much as the books themselves do. However, multiple cards referencing the same book can be put in multiple places. As a result, the book can appear in the system in two (or more) places at once. We can organize the same information in multiple ways. But this Second Order still has its physical limits. For example, you can only have so many cards before the system becomes unusable.

In the Third Order, hyperlinks, tagging, playlists and folksonomies allow us to organize whatever information we want however we want. We can find connections we never knew existed, completely on the fly by bringing our information in the digital realm, making it miscellaneous, and then applying technologies that allow us to easily turn knowledge upside down and inside out.

When looked at in this way, the First Order becomes almost irrelevant. Weinberger asks us to consider Wikipedia, where pages don’t even “exist” until a collection of servers assemble them on the fly. Which sector of which hard drive are those bytes stored on? Does it matter? Contrast that with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You’d better know where Volume 1 is or you’ll never be able to read about the fascinating lives of aardvarks.

As I read this, I thought of Second Life.

Is Second Life more like the Britannica than Wikipedia? Is Second Life less miscellaneous than the web? Sure, it often is seemingly random, but does it allow us to organize information in the Third Order?

One take on Second Life that I’ve read a few times is something along the lines of, “What if you were looking for a book, and you could browse through a virtual book store in Second Life, and with a single mouse click, buy the book and have it delivered to you in the real world?”

Would this make for a better store-browsing experience than shopping in real life, or a better online experience than Amazon.com? I don’t think I’d want to browse through infinitely long virtual rows of every book ever written. It would be like sifting through the entire Library of Congress every time I went to buy a book. Since Second Life simulates a kind of world with physical rules, we’re bound by its physical limits, and stuck with its First Order organization.

Sure you can fly and teleport in Second Life, but you’re still limited to a four-dimensional spacetime experience. You can only be in one place at a time. Events happen only once, at a certain time. You can craft an amazing island, with buildings featuring architecture unrivaled by any construction in real life. However, if you throw a party in Second Life, and someone shows up a half-hour after it’s over, rather than experiencing the communal bliss of interacting with people from the farthest reaches of the globe, they’ll instead be standing alone in a big empty building. In fact, the number one complaint I hear about Second Life is that when people log on, it always seems empty. It’s clear that you need to know not only WHERE to go, but WHEN to go. This is a limitation the web mitigated, that Second Life is reintroducing.

What might a Third-Order Second Life look like? Imagine being able to form space around you at any time. Why should Second Life necessarily mimic a physical reality everyone can agree on? What if “here” is not where I am on a grid, but rather some subjective “space” where I can pull together people and objects in order to create my unique experience? Maybe on my screen, we’re standing on a mountain, and on yours we’re on a beach. Or maybe we could both be in two places at once. What if any “thing” could be two things or three, or could be one thing for me and one thing for you, but it was exactly what we both wanted? What if we could trade, not just playlists, but whole realities?