Twitter = Mob rule?
Twitter, twitter, twitter. Once the social networking playground of those on the cutting edge of new internet toys, now it’s become mainstream - everyone seems to be on it. (Let’s not talk about the fail whale!) A recent conversation with a friend brought a thought into my head: Twitter is the ultimate mob rule.
Here’s why:
1. Everyone following you can click on the link you send, almost all at once.
2. Get a shit load of people to do this and it crashes sites rather quickly.
3. What if you did this on purpose?
Forget the bot networks. Forget the viruses. All you need is a massive follower list (or enough people to cross pollinate their twitter streams with your message) and people clicking to take down or disrupt websites for a bit. Click. Click. Click.
So what? Easy to grab people’s attention - see the latest amazon fuck up with ‘adult’ searches. By de-ranking the searches, people noticed quickly and the result spread through twitter like wildfire. So simple and fast to retweet information and have it distributed almost exponentially. People will click on the links and see where it leads them, get enough people to bombard a site and people could send a potential message to the site’s owner.
You have your own army at your fingertips and you don’t even know it.
Large websites have been accidentally doing this for over ten years (getting “slashdotted” was a big deal many years back), and to be honest, the click through rate / follower on twitter is lower than you’d think.
Really, web-servers are getting better, and fewer and fewer sites are going down due to excess traffic. This is a problem that will be less and less of a problem as time goes.
Yeah.. in terms of sheer power, you can’t compare to digg or the slashdot of old for server crashing goodness. Twitter does keep the sort of “anger-microtrend” going quite well, and the amazon fiasco this weekend is a good example. People love to work up a righteous fury about something.
i think of twitter as more as a door way to the collective unconscious, or rather a digitized way of sharing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge…speeding up the process. Leading to our minds becoming one, in a way. I hope that makes sense.
You know when your grandma is on Twitter is it no longer cool.
@ Phil Nelson
the click through rate / follower on twitter is lower than you’d think.
I went looking for those kinds of stats - do you have a link?
@Matt
Good point on that, about /. and digg. I think twitter is a different animal entirely and I can’t really compare them to it though.
@bairdduvessa
i think of twitter as more as a door way to the collective unconscious, or rather a digitized way of sharing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge…
YES. Twitter is the shriekygirl platform. I can haz plug in now?
@BrikHed
My grandmother currently lives on the net more than I do. Is that cool to me? Hell yeah! You reminded me I should ask her if she twitters - she probably does. :)
And now Ashton Kutcher has an army?
http://mashable.com/2009/04/16/ashton-twitter-million/
That’s your unimaginable future right there.