Twitter Intelligence 2.0

As Twitter has become one of the world's largest event-based databases/warehouses/clouds, it would be neglectful to not investigate it further in the realm of Business Intelligence and related Analytics. I've referred in an earlier article to this as Twitter Intelligence (not sure if I coined the term, but it sounds good to me :-)

My fascination with Twitter is that of an analyst of social phenomena, and not that of a Content Junkie.
Hence, my natural inclination is the dissect and examine Twitter into its elementary pieces and understand how they work together. Now what's really fascinating to find is that Twitter is inherently simple. In fact, so simple that I run into many cynics who don't "get it", what this hype is all about. On first glance it is easy to miss out on the results of the network effect, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence that has emerged from Twitter, and only becomes apparent after some exposure, if not involvement.

At a conceptual level, we have 4 basic concepts in Twitter:

• The Social realm (human short messages with socializing intent)
• The Content realm (referral to cool/interesting Web content, via URL links)
• The Contributor role (people who initiate/author/share stuff)
• The Consumer role (the listener/reader of that stuff)

These are 4 pretty straight forward concepts. Where it gets interesting, is that each of those realms can overlap and intersect with any of the others, in any combination. THis is how out of 4 simple elements, we derive 13 different scenarios, the network effect!

This principle was originally applied by Robert Metcalf in a technical context, which lead to the explosion of the data network now called the Internet.

There is yet another dynamic to all this, after all, 13 scenarios is not a whole lot of combinations to attribute complexity. Each of these 13 scenarios can affect any other combination, recursively, iteratively, incrementally, infinitely. What we have here is a complex system of self-motivated, but environmentally influenced "agents".

The intersections and ovelap areas have been labeled with letters and numbers, due to space constraints in the diagram. But here is the key:

 A  Initiator of a general social conversation/discussion (typically topic/interest related)
 B  Listener to general conversation initiated by others
 C  Reader/Watcher of Web content referred to by others
 D  Producer or Referrer of Web content, referring it to generic audience (by topic/interest/subject matter)

1. Social promotion of produced content
2. Conversation provides promotion to contributor, and feedback from consumer
3. Consumer finds content by monitoring social buzz
4. Contributor provides the content the consumer needs/likes
5. Contributed content, as well as Contributor get social exposure to Consumer (2 way: promotion & feedback/rating)

Below just another insight into the relationships between content and social exchanges:

The orange elements are the reason why Twitter is labeled as a "social network", even though it gains real momentum with its connection to other Web content.