Crowdsourcing on Twitter

I've seen a lot of interest in Crowdsourcing on Twitter lately. We seem to crowdsource all the time.

As Laura Fitton said in Clive Thompson's great Ambient Awareness article, “I outsource my entire life,” she said. “I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” Many other people are relying on the twitterverse for its opinions and referrals. As an example, just the other day Ken Burbary asked,

Ken promptly received several answers to his request.  Chris Brogan asked Twitter forinnovative ideas on a social media project for Oreo. This happens all the time. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing vehicle.  Several months ago, Zena Weist, discussed the concept in her blog and described the activity on Twitter as Community Sourcing, Community sourcing is taking crowd sourcing to the next level:
Outsourcing a task to a connected group/community for the benefit of that community.

There are a few great books on Crowdsourcing that I highly recommend and of course, each author is active on Twitter.


Mzinga Chairman Barry Libert, wrote We are Smarter than Me.
NYU Professor Clay Shirky, wrote Here Comes Everybody
and most recently, Jeff Howe of Wired wrote Crowdsourcing.


Have you read these books?  What did you think?  How do you use crowdsourcing?

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Ambient Awareness

If you haven't seen it yet, sit down and read Clive Thompson's provocative article in today's NY Times magazine, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy on the social realities of Twitter and Facebook. Thompson focuses on the relationships of loose ties that are now possible with the communities.  He describes how we deal with incessant online contact, using a term that you will hear for awhile, ambient awareness. 


As you'd expect, the world of Twitter has been abuzz.  For the last two days, the conversation about the article has been robust as it seemed that everyone had something to say about ambient awareness. And of course, there were some great pieces written about the article.  Alan Wolk wrote an amazing piece, Social Media's Defining Moment, identifying the importance of the article "because it's outside the usual geekosphere bubble and has the imprimatur of social science. The placement in the Times means that it should be getting a lot of traction since it's the first place many non-tech journos will go for insight into "that whole Twitter thing."

Laura Fitton also had a great analysis on her beautiful, newly redesigned blog, What's the Value? My comment on Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. As we've come to expect from Pistachio, she provides a personal response, demonstrating how Twitter has changed her life,
"In March 2007 I was a mom of two kids under two rebuilding my consultancy in a new city with no business network to speak of.
Today I wrapped up a business trip to NYC where I met with six c-level media and agency executives, two well-known journalists, my book agent and dozens of respected friends, contacts and colleagues. All of these contacts were made and cultivated via Twitter. Most logistical coordination for the trip was handled via Twitter. And yes, many of us combine the time-saving and reach-extending leverage of networking online with the substance of connecting in person."

The conversation also occurred on other communities like LinkedIn.  On LinkedIn, Melanie Notkin gave an inspiring account of how the ambient awareness of Twitter helped her start her business and become "active awareness". Jackie Huba expressed the reaction that many of us had and felt:

 

What is your reaction to this important article and description of your Twitter community?

News feeds on Twitter

Several news providers have discovered Twitter as a channel to distribute news alerts. As messages in Twitter are restricted to 140 characters, news alerts in Twitter can only consist of a headline (sometimes truncated) and a URL of the article where the full text can be read. Twitter is an additional channel where news alerts that are already available on other platforms (e.g. website, news ticker, RSS feed, SMS alert, ...) can also be distributed without cost for the subscriber. Several gateways between the existing news alert feeds and Twitter were initially build by persons who were not affiliated with the publishers of the news alerts. Even now it is not always clear if the news alerts on Twitter are officially endorsed by the original publishers.

The BBC was one of the first broadcast companies to publish news feeds around different subjects in Twitter. Currently there are at least 26 different Twitter feeds. Several of these Twitter feeds from the BBC appear in the top 100 lists of Twitterholic (based on the number of friends, based on the number of followers and the number of updates). The BBC Twitter feeds were initially implemented by Mario Menti. From time to time new BBC news feeds are announced at Mario Menti's blog.


CNN also publishes news alerts on Twitter on three Twitter accounts.


The New York Times has a wide offer of Twitter feeds for different topics.


Digg, a site where users can suggest, share and discuss stories, has also several feeds on Twitter.


Finally I have collected a few other feeds from various news sources, from the UK and the USA.


Twitter is currently an open system, revealing exactly how many persons are subscribed to Twitter feeds. This allows to get a clear view on the usage of the various news feeds on Twitter. The average number of followers of all news feeds mentioned above is 124. Although this number may seem impressive, I think it is rather low compared to the number of subscribers to the various RSS feeds of the news sites.

If someone would subscribe to all news feeds listed in this blog post, this person would receive on average 1885 messages a day or 79 messages each hour. If this person would receive these messages on his mobile phone, his phone would be beeping all the time. If someone would like to try this, please share your experiences.