hello delight

Last night, the story broke about the Newark airport security incident.  As someone who flys quite a bit, airport incidents are always of interest to me.  CNN was reporting very little news on the topic so I decided to go to Twiter.

The problem was the signal to noise ratio was completely out of whack.  So much so, Twitter was rendered useless.  A search for "newark" brought up pages and pages and pages of the same @cnnbrk tweet being retweeted.  Occassionaly someone would add a pithy and insightful "what a bunch of morons" comment, but on the average, pure duplication of a single message.

It's beyond me why the Twitter search can't be more intelligent than this.  I assumed this was the purpose of the offical RT function on Twitter.  By not allowing an author to extend a tweet in any way, the search results should be able to easily filter out exact duplicates.

But that is apparently not the case.

It's interesting to think of this single small experience in light of the larger world of information discovery via Twitter.  Yes, it's true lots of people were telling other people there was an incident but no one was adding value vis a vis new information.  Should someone have been able to add value, say they were actually directly involved with the incident, they would never have been heard amongst the chorus of retweets.

Solutions to this sort of filtering problem come from a few places.  First, Twitter search should step up and add some Google-esque magic to their search results to make them more intelligent.  Next, this seems like a perfect opportunity for paid journalism on Twitter.  If you really could get unique scoop, and were willing to pay for placement, why not allow that?  It's a concept not unlike iReporters I suppose.  Finally, a third party could really do something interesting to solve this problem.  There are certain messages on Twitter that have a sensationally high density such as the Newark example.  Yet, there are probably little related messages that are ancillary but impossible to find even though they provide incremental value.  It's probably a combination of human and machine logic but a compass rose to navigate these stories and tidbits would be massively awesome.