Twitter & Interweb Cycles & Human Nature

Since I don't play much poker these days and have been busy with all sorts of other things (life, work, getting ready for KajaKid #2, etc.) I figured this would be the best place for me to write down some of my thoughts. If you don't like it then move along. But if you do stay and let me know what you think.

So one of the things that I have been thinking about recently is the cyclical nature of the interwebs in general and Twitter specifically. I've had a few twitter accounts for some time now and originally the @Kajagugu account was so annoying that I pretty much ditched it. I turned off notifications and stopped updating. I've recently started playing around with Twitter again under my other accounts (business and personal).

So why do I say Twitter is cyclical? Because in my opinion it is based on the same concepts of one of the first technologies to appear on the internet called IRC. For those who don't know what IRC was - it was the first version of real time online chat rooms. You chose a nickname and channel and you would chat with the people on that channel. There were topics about pretty much everything, you could send direct messages or reply to everyone. You could ignore people who annoy you.

Twitter is a single channel chat room. You can add topics by using #hashtags and everyone can see your responses unless you send a direct message. You can also block other users if you want. It's very similar to IRC and might even be a simplified version of it.

Obviously since all the tweets are stored on the Twitter servers there is some additional functionality, like search, but really there is nothing special about it. The genius behind it is that it play on peoples natural emotional needs:

Recognition: This whole business of 'followers' and 'following' allows people to feel important. "Wow, look who's following me" they might say to themselves. "Look how many people are interested in my boring little life." If you think about it a second you will realize how preposterous it is. Half of your followers are dormant accounts or some sort of spam at this point. Which brings us to the next point:

Popularity: Twitter is a place for the "cool kids" to compare how many followers they have. And the more you have the more perceived influence you have. It's especially hilarious when you follow the people who created this site. They spend less than 5% of their time interacting with their followers and would rather micro-blog their wonderful lives for all to see. And then there are the "social media experts" too. Oh, they know everything. Just ask them.

Addiction: There's no arguing that Twitter is extremely addictive. I've fallen into this pattern too and my initial thought was that I don't want to miss anything the people I am following say. But really, who cares? How is this any different than Digg or StumbleUpon which are just ways for people to share other website? Hey look, Guy Kawasaki linked to another demo of how to use Alltop! I must retweet that so that everyone who follows me will know how smart I am!

Let's face the facts. Twitter is a fad that has managed to raise $55M so far with no real way of making money. There's been talk of monetizing it somehow for targeted marketing, but that's just a derivitive of permission-based spam. There's been talk about what a powerful real-time search engine it is, but with a greasemonkey script in FireFox I can run a single search and get the last 5 Twitter search results as well. So what's the big deal?

The big deal is that our attention span as human is getting shorter every day. We don't want to read complete articles, we want excerpts. We don't want excerpts, we want 140 character-max messages. We don't want everyone's messages, so let's just use tweetDeck and filter out the noise. How many of you made it this far in the post? Probably less than half of those who started at the top.

If you want to follow some interesting people, I give you two who are a must: @cwalken (last tweet: She said I should talk more about my cat; that people like that sort of thing here. I didn't know I still had a cat. Explains a few things.) and @BobbyBracelet (last tweet: "If my head was made of veal, how much would it be worth?" is possibly the most random quote to pop into my head in quite some time.)

That is all.

Top 5 BBT4 Predictions

The BBT4 starts today and I have a few predictions to share:

1) Kajagugu will NOT win a single event. That's an easy prediction, because with 4 cents in my FTP account I can't do much. Also there's the fact that I switched laptops and haven't installed a single poker client on it. I think that might be my downfall right there. Kaja's take: You're now all playing for first again.

2) The regular hot-shots will dominate. The same people who took it seriously the first few times, have the bankroll, the experience and the time. You know who they are. I won't name names. Kaja's take: You're all playing for second place.

3) The regular hate-mongers will ruin it for everyone. By taking a beautiful thing and inciting stupid flame wars and other child-like behavior. You know who they are. I won't name names. Kaja's take: If you're serious about getting the top prizes, insulate and isolate yourself from the haters.

4) There will be lots of debate. Should you say Booooooom? Should you chop? Should you chip dump? Should we let everyone play? Should you take the prize? Kaja's take: We've heard it all before.

5) It's going to be a lot of fun for those who have perspective. If you don't fall into the flame-wars and get caught up in the insanity, you might be able to keep your eye on the prize and have a lot of fun. Kaja's take: It will be fun reading about it (you wouldn't know it, but I actually still read pointless poker blogs).

We may end up in the Hudson

I know it's been a while since all this went down with flight 1549, but this video is pretty cool:



But then they go and make fun of it by adding Christian Bale in the tower, which is pretty awesome: