It’s important to note that Twitter  is a platform, not a news service, and also that regardless, no one outlet can control the internet anyway: That’s the beauty and curse of the beast. So when news breaks it’s about two things: accuracy and distribution.  Right now we’re stuck with a drunk leaf blower in a flour factory. I’ll be the first to champion these tools as platforms for change, opportunity and knowledge sharing, but it has become clear we – and especially the reeling news media – are in need of a system that helps Twitter et al sort through the haze of breaking news and get the facts straight, faster. The current model and tools are not clearing things up – they are adding to the mess.

A centralized, collaborative evidence table

Sifting through the mountains of analysis on the bombings alone, I couldn’t help but think of the customized Twitter Nascar hashtag page that was put together in 2011, and how it tied in nicely with the New Yorker digital “evidence table” it describes for Reddit users. So one first step I propose is a one-stop place or system in times of important news or mass emergency. Literally just a single agreed upon place to gather the facts, or a system of checks and balances free from speculation. Like a central hub for help to be channeled and extra information provided – a bit like an active Storify stream.

This feels like a simple fix to a complicated problem at the source. Clearly there are huge questions about who administers it, but one thing is clear: It must be solitary and held to a strict code that is pre-agreed upon, possibly among a cross-collaboration of the major newspapers. For instance, each might host the same page so traffic stays where the trust is with the user.  There is no speculation: Simple fact dissemination and information being released – only after  it is verified – so that the news-consuming public has a go-to source that is consistent.

The ability to deal with errors

Imagine if Twitter or Facebook could lower the relevancy of an incorrect tweet or post in real-time so that bad information was less likely to be seen. Reddit and pals is a more difficult kettle of fish because of their very nature.  We will need to help them help themselves by providing clear information in order for them to do what they do best – engage with it.

The Atlantic wrote recently about the need to undo things on Twitter because it is currently a one-way system that, while capable of self-correcting over time, is pretty flawed when it comes to doing so in the moment. And so we need a system that enables users to revoke or modify what has been said so that it is instantly identifiable. Internet fundamentalists find this idea uncomfortable but many I suspect would cherish the ability to be alerted to incorrect information so the continued dissemination of knowingly false info can be minimized.  A technical nightmare sure, but something to work towards.

A need for innovation and cooperation

Right now big data is not being used or harnessed by news organization beyond visualization or longer-form pieces but I imagine a time (and not too far in the future either) when we see news outlets using Twitter and company in a much smarter fashion than simply looking at volume spikes and “first-grabs.”  So for instance, outlets might soon use data to predict, locate and activate “sleeper-unit” journalists (and trained citizen journalists) who are armed with Facetime technology – or simply volunteer individuals streaming through a phone that a news outlet is able to instantly locate via GPS. It’s interesting to note that Twitter has just appointed its first Data Editor who is charged with “explain[ing] how this phenomenon works.”

We have two options when it comes to “fixing” truly crucial news and real-time mass events: 1) Assume that what we’re doing now works but will need a few tweaks, or;  2) Realize that our current system is no longer tenable and so needs a complete overhaul. Any honest appraisal will quickly come to the brutal truth that the current system is failing, and so needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. In the short term, we will need to move toward something like a system of “Flash tweets:” site-wide notifications, that simultaneously tweet, post, alert, offer a donation system, etc to news sites when major events transpire. I’d like to see a system like this fleshed out by the social juggernauts as they further flex their news muscles.

Paul Armstrong is founder of  Digital Orange Consulting. Contact him via paularmstrong.net, or on Twitter @paul__armstrong or @TheMediaIsDying.

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Photo courtesy Edward Meyer.

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Word that Lucky Sort is shutting down and that several of its team are joining Twitter’s revenue engineering department suggests this is exactly what the acquisition aims to accomplish.

As it stands, companies use Twitter as a way to track how people are talking about them and maybe, if they’re really advanced, do some sentiment analysis. If they’re willing to pay a third party, Datasift and Gnip are more than happy to broaden marketers’ views to encompass the entirety of Twitter’s data, both real-time and historical. What companies really can’t do, though, is run their own advanced analytics about topics straight from the Twitter platform.

One view of the Lucky Sort dashboard

The value proposition from such a product should be obvious at this point. Facebook, Google and Yahoo all collect a lot of data about how people are using their platforms and what topics are trending, and they all offer it up via a variety of products targeting marketing types and the public at large. If Twitter wants to be taken seriously as a venue for advertising budgets and a platform for measuring the pulse of the nation, people need to be able to ask questions of its data without relying on an intermediary or the occasional Twitter blog post.

As a journalist, I’d love to have access to this type of tool to track trending topics in real time and spot possible stories as they’re happening. The appeal to marketers should be obvious. As IBM’s Erick Brethenoux told me recently, “[Marketers] talk a good game about social data. Very few actually leverage it effectively today.”

At Twitter, though, data is a slightly different beast than at other web companies. Twitter’s value lies largely in real-time data — topics can be peak, crest and all but vanish within a 48-hour window. This situation has hampered some of Twitter’s efforts to surface optimal search results, and it has spurred the decision to buy companies such as Backtype (for its streaming-processing Storm technology) and parallel-processing startup Ubalo.

The latter move, which happened last week, should help Twitter’s development team create new features without worrying about the intricacies of making them run — and run fast — across a cluster of machines. (You can learn a lot more about how companies such as Google, Facebook and Box are rethinking infrastructure to handle their unique data needs at our Structure conference next month in San Francisco.)

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We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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The reported expansion comes on top of Twitter’s existing infrastructure footprint, which apparently includes space at the Sacramento facility and might also include space at the data center custom-built for Twitter, which the company moved into in 2011. At that time, former Twitter vice president of engineering Michael Abbott wrote that the social network had arrived at its “final nesting ground.” But it seems that nesting ground was not big enough.

Like Facebook, Twitter is not a site for flat traffic. The infrastructure needs to accommodate traffic spikes — think of how people clung to Twitter during Hurricane Sandy — and having more space can keep Twitter ahead in those types of situations.

Keeping latency low as monthly active user count increases — it was at more than 200 million in December, up from 100 million in September 2011 — is likely a high priority, too.

More data center space also makes for better backup capability. Remember when Sandy proved the importance of being ready for disasters with flooding and power outages on the East Coast? A bigger footprint for Twitter translates into lower likelihood of a fail whale.

Twitter’s infrastructure expansion comes following news of other webscale players bumping up their respective footprints. Facebook reportedly will build a new data center in Altoona, Iowa, with the first phase measuring 476,000 square feet and costing $300 million. Also in Iowa, Google said it would expand its data center in the city of Council Bluffs, and Data Center Knowledge reported last month that LinkedIn is expanding its data center space, too.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

The company is worthy of merit for talking about its features in public and open-sourcing many of them, although it has been cagey about disclosing information about its infrastructure and the causes of service disruptions. We know very little about Twitter’s infrastructure, in contrast to Facebook and Google’s installations. In the past it was unclear where the custom-built data center was, as the plan in 2010 was for the Salt Lake City area, but then it was reported that Twitter was actually moving servers to Sacramento. Twitter’s status in Atlanta is another unsolved mystery.

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How did you become interested in open source and community building?

I was contributing to an open source web publishing system for digital archives called Omeka. The primary goal of Omeka is to make publishing digital archives of historical photographs and stories as easy as publishing a blog. We patterned our community strategy around Mozilla and WordPress, trying to create a ladder of contributions where people of varying skill levels could get involved, and I was helping coordinate developer community growth. Shortly after launching our first public beta, we realized that the community of interested users was more diverse than we imagined, not only from museums and archives but also libraries.

For me, community building began mostly as a way of understanding and negotiating the differences and needs of these institutions. You need direct, personal connections with your users in order to understand their needs; in the process, you start to draw connections between the work of others and play a role of matchmaker.

My interest in community building led me to help co-found THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, an un-conference. THATCamp is a BarCamp-style event, bringing together technologists and humanists to create sessions related to digital humanities. Sessions vary from event to event, but my favorites have always been ones that focus on building. And since 2008, there have been over 100 THATCamp events around the world.

You’re involved in open web projects through the Mozilla Foundation, right?

I’ve been working as an Integration Engineer Contractor with the Open Badges team at Mozilla, mostly helping third-party developers integrate with APIs to create and display badges. Open Badges is a standard to recognize learning online through the open sharing of digital badges, It’s an exciting approach to informal learning and using badges as a way to capture achievements that are otherwise not visible on a resume.

One of my contributions to the project has been creating several WordPress plugins to make it easier to issue and display badges; it’s important that a variety of platforms adopt the standard to give the community a variety of ways to hook into our infrastructure.

You’re also interested in hacking hardware, such as drones. What has this taught you about coding?

This semester I helped organize a group of fellow graduate students at UC Berkeley to form what we’ve called “Drone Lab”, an informal group that has met weekly to hack, discuss, and investigate creative and problem-solving uses of consumer-grade quadcopters. These are hobbyist toys that you can buy at your local shopping mall, but the ability to control them using software that you script unleashes the potential to tap into their cameras and sensors from heights and hard-to-reach places that are new and exciting. What we ended up focusing our hacking on were new ways to control the quadcopters, including voice and tracking head movements.

What I found fascinating the last several months was introducing several of my classmates to Node.JS through programming these drones. Learning to program can often be a frustrating and unrewarding experience, but with just a proper development environment and a few lines of Javascript, you can fly a copter. Programming shouldn’t be limited to terminal windows, and the feedback of seeing the drone fly can be very rewarding. This also fosters creativity and unexpected things – sometimes you’ll see the drone do something in flight that seems odd, which prompts new questions about your code and experimentation that can be less common in programming.

So were you part of last year’s TacoCopter stunt?

TacoCopter is a project that I’m not involved with; I believe it’s meant to be more of a joke than a real thing. Still, there’s something intriguing and futuristic about a flying robot delivering Mexican food that gets people’s attention. We joke a lot about delivering tacos via drones.

What do you see on the horizon for programming and the open source movement?

In the age of GitHub where it’s easy for anyone to share code online and gain a following, the proliferation of projects both big and small can come at the expense of a clear way to integrate various codebases together. In my experience, it’s often the “glue code” and examples that are most valuable to users who want to use your software; the last 10 percent, so to speak. To be effective in open source community building, understanding those needs of integration is crucial and something I’ll be spending a lot of time working on.

In general, I’m excited to see more companies using and releasing open source software, not for the goal of selling it but in an effort to develop better services and give back to communities that they benefit from. The precise model for how this software will be supported, grown, managed, and sustained is still to be defined; these are often projects without a software foundation. I hope to see more coordination and partnerships among companies regarding open source contributions.

Finally, what’s next after you finish your Master’s?

I’ll be joining Twitter as an Open Source Advocate in June. I’ll be responsible for building relationships with communities to drive adoption of our open source projects and APIs. Twitter has over 100 open source projects, and as an organization has made a big investment in using and releasing open source software.

time to make it official with a tweet: in June I am joining @twitteross as an Open Source Advocate. I’m pumped!

— Dave Lester (@davelester) May 8, 2013

Images via OpenBadges.org, UC Berkeley School of Information

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There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

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The appointment was first reported by CNET, which stated that Wong would be “chief privacy officer;” later reports describe the post as “senior advisor” to United States CTO Todd Park.

and has yet to be confirmed, comes at a time of growing public concern over data collection tools that scour everything from smartphones to shopping records, and make it easy for companies and governments to collect information about individuals.

The Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Wong may therefore represent an attempt by the government to find new ways to balance the power of data with preserving liberty and privacy.

During her time at Google, Wong fought the governments of Turkey and Pakistan over YouTube censorship, and she has also worked with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a respected cyber-advocacy group.

Wong’s appointment also comes at a time when Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been calling attention to the growing threat of governments using Western technology to spy on and oppress their citizens.

Wong, who joined Twitter last November, is the second long-time Google lawyer to be hired by the White House in recent months. The Administration recently hired former Googler Michelle Lee to head the troubled Patent Office.

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Beyond Meat makes plant-based meats and is currently selling a chicken product at select stores like Whole Foods. The product hasn’t been widely available, but is supposed to be scaled up at stores in the coming months. Beyond Meat has a partnership with Whole Foods, and the startup is looking to sell its products out of the meat counter instead of in an alternative meat section, which Brown described as “a penalty box.”

In contrast to the current fake meat products on supermarket shelves, Beyond Meat is trying to use technology to create food that mimics the taste and feel of eating meat. We’ve got “OCD; obsessive chicken disorder,” joked Brown, explaining the company is looking to replicate “the fibrous structure of meat.”

The company is backed by Kleiner Perkins and Obvious Corp, the company behind Twitter. As I wrote in this article earlier this year, Silicon Valley investors have been looking to fund sustainable food innovation. Brown said that Beyond Meat grew 50 percent last quarter. “If we’re successful, we can be like Tyson or Perdue,” said Brown.

The animal meat market is a $177 billion market, said Brown. While Beyond Meat is focused on selling its chicken product, it’s also working on a beef product made from pea protein and sea salt.

The World Bank says that livestock contributed to 51 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions globally. “The efficiencies around taking protein from plants instead of animals is massive,” said Brown.

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Tunigo works on Spotify’s platform and also has iOS and Android apps. Tunigo lets users browse Spotify playlists, discover new music and read music reviews.

Tunigo’s app will remain on Spotify and its employees will work from Spotify’s New York and Stockholm offices.

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks,” a Spotify spokesman told me.

Twitter recently launched its own #Music app, which focuses on music discovery and was built by We Are Hunted, the company that Twitter acquired last year.

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