Call it the lazy web, wisdom of crowds, organic computers, or a hive mind, but I’ve seen in the last few weeks alone that asking a question on Twitter yields great results. Here is tonight’s example:
I use Twitter as my hyper-intelligent personal search engine #quote @zaibatsu
There is a problem, of course, in relying on Twitter or Facebook or whatever social network du jour is out there and it has nothing do to with getting the wrong answer, it’s whether you get an answer at all. I know that a lot of us will help and answer friends, friends of friends, sometimes even total strangers when we can, but we’re just not around all the time.
Okay, enough of the downer stuff, let’s think about how we can do this better, how we can capture the questions and answers so they aren’t just passing whispers in the wind or drops in a deluge. Not long ago I need suggestions for a good Nintendo DS game. Not only did I get nearly instant responses (probably not that much slower than searching Google and reading the info I found), but I got consistent results that let me make a good decision (as it turned out, it was an awesome decision Mario Kart for DS is really, really cool). However both the question and all the answers are as good as gone. I would take me a tedious amount of searching to find my original question and even more to find all the answers. That doesn’t even pull the information together.
I know Google indexes all of Twitter’s public timeline, but with the scale of information that flows through Twitter at any moment, even a search engine like Google needs some context to help pull things together. If we have @replies for discussion and hash tags for search, I think we need another designator just for this kind of query-response connection. Maybe ?q and ?a to connect the dots? Yes, I know its two characters instead of one. I suppose you could preface or end with ^ instead? The point is, that in order for this information not to be lost, we have to find a way to curate it.
The question with the answer(s) doesn’t become a blog post. The person asking the question thanks everyone for their help and that’s it (most of the time, I know there are exceptions). I also realize that just ending a question with ^ and answers with ^ (or ^^) doesn’t connect specific questions to specific answers, but at least it’s a start.
It’s like when I was a lab geek counting fossil pollen, seeds, and other organic bits in samples. I asked my professors if I needed to count this or that. They always answered that if you don’t gather the data, you can’t analyze later. If we don’t de-mark some tweets as special, then we can’t build engines to analyze them. We can’t match a question to answers from that person’s followers if we don’t have an easy way to pull them out in the first place.
Okay, I’ve had my time on the soapbox. So…
- How should we denote a question
- How should we denote an answer
- Who’s going to find a way to connect them together?
And can we start now…
