As if I needed one more thing to distract me…I am going to investigate the leading theories that attempt to explain why Twitter has problems keeping up with demand. Maybe it doesn’t even have trouble. Maybe it’s a coincidence that lots of the 30 or so folks I follow seem to complain that Twitter is down and I usually have a “Twitter experiencing problems” message on my Twitterific ap when using my Mac.
Mostly though, Twitter does all I want it to, which is allow me to blurt out 140 characters worth of whatever I am doing and “listen” to same most of the time for the folks I follow. It keeps records, so that if I wonder what others have been up to while I was away, I can visit their logs. And I can track anyone on the whole network who uses a word like emergence or complexity for instance. Pretty amazing that such a large network does work – it all seems like magic most of the time anyway.
But I am curious if Twitter actually has a scaling problem and where exactly to pin the trouble. Help me out here with your comments if you have researched the problem. Look for my report soon.
I’m reading The End of Theory, a thesis article written by Chris Anderson editor of my favorite magazine, Wired. Loving it. Identifying with the principles; like finally, something written to my sense-making style of living and being. Citing Google’s search engine technology, Anderson asserts that the applied mathematics of data analysis provides a more complete construction of the way things are than tedious empirical experimentation.
I am not done reading yet, but suspect we live our lives empirically testing out what the data of a trillion attention points seems to show. “All models are wrong”, and “Out with every model of human behavior from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.” These challenges to sacred ologies draw me further into Hansel and Gretel’s woods.
“Data without a model is just noise”. Righto! We go through life with models our empirical little selves have tried, tested, and concluded into belief systems. We have models of the way the world is. Then along comes data, which must be disequilibrious to even attract our attention. Aha, I propose, before I finish reading the article, that the DATA is getting our attention somehow because of its aberational qualities – and we are compelled to integrate the information – make sense of it. Maybe this is just the way I work. But what if it is the way most of us work and construct realities. What then are the implications?
I hold dear somehow nevertheless draw me in.
