ICTlogy

Notes from Simposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (e-STAS: Symposium on Technologies for Social Action) held in Málaga, Spain, on March 26-27th, 2009. More notes on this event: estas2009. More notes on this series of events: e-stas.

Interview to Jack Dorsey, Twitter, by Sebastián Muriel

Technologies like twitter are little demanding, the concept is simple, there is no need for abstraction. It’s use is pretty straightforward. We’re seeing that applications are becoming more transparent.

And not also technically, but personally: new tools are more transparent also in letting see who’s behind a certain tool (i.e. who’s the person behind a username).

Q: How do we extract knowledge from tools? A: Being aware of all technologies can be overwhelming, but you always have the possibility to turn some of your communication platforms off. Correct usage — or usage that benefits you — must be learned

We have to focus on the content, not on the tool.

Q: is it possible to override mass media through things like Twitter? A: The journalism industry is fed by professionals, providing factual reports, properly crafted. This is difficult to be overridden by casual citizen journalists. Sometimes you don’t want just news, but stories, full stories well built by professionals that gather more information and point you even to more information.

Q: Twitter and geolocalization? A: There’s a big difference between twittering “I’m having coffee”, which gives context to your live, and “I’m having coffee at this place in this city”, which is kind of an invitation to join. We should let the user the freedom to decide exactly what he is meaning to say. Besides, there are matters of privacy that you cannot take for granted… or simply forget about them.

You can’t empower people: you have to build tools so that people can empower themselves. But, the goal is that people stops talking about the tools they’re using, and begin talking about what’s going on life.

Twitter is not a social network, but a broadcast mechanism. In social networks you end up not interacting with a specific person, but with whole his network — which might be your initial goal, but also an inconvenient. In Twitter, we kept the conversation (not the network) as the goal, and this enables commercial uses and businesses entering the platform without having to bother about networking and many-to-many engagement. Twitter did not came up with Yammer in part because of this: Twitter’s aim is to be kept simple. If you have groups, you “think” your message, and this is not immediate and ends up not being simple to just write a message.

Twitter allows for real time enrichment of information.

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