I have been playing with Twiiter for several weeks now (I am known as @franksummers in twitter-speak). If you haven't played with it, twitter is a way to broadcast short (140 character) messages. Other people follow your twitter feeds and can see what you have to say with enforced brevity.

On the face of it, twitter seems like yet another internet distraction. Another way for an already over-stimulated generation to waste time.

However, today I saw a truly useful side of twitter. Twitter became a source for breaking news.

Tweets

Most twitter posts, called tweets, are just chatter about what folks are doing. Brief bursts of gossip, news, and ideas along with a torrent of the mundane events of everyday life. It is an immediate and immense way to see what others are doing and thinking - text message voyeurism, if you will.

But, now think of all those tweets as a database. And a database that is constantly updated with the zeitgeist of a huge community of users. Data mining can extract useful information from that much information. Ignore the "having my morning coffee posts" and find the ones that have real content. There's gold in them there tweets.

Breaking News

On your twitter page, there is a list of "Trending Topics". It looks like a search through recent posts that finds the most used phrases. Today, a Friday, the biggest topic when I logged on was "TGIF". Duh, nothing exciting here. There was also the usual #followfriday, which is a twitter meme where folks post good people to follow every friday.

The strange listing among the hot topics was "National Cleavage". What? Well, following that topic leads to learning that April 3, 2009 was declared National Cleavage Day in South Africa by the folks at WonderBra. You just can't make this stuff up. OK, I learned something, but not something particularly useful.

Then, a new topic jumped straight to the top. Iowa Supreme Court. I've never known the internet generation to have much interest in judicial proceedings, so this was truly quixotic. Turns out that the IA court unanimously struck down a ban on gay marriage in Polk County (which include Des Moines).

Tweep Potential

This news was useful. Not Earth-shattering, but informative. I could immediately see that twitter has the potential to be mined for the breaking news of the day. Public tweets are a massive, instant gossip column. When something important happens, it will show up very quickly, as tweet begets re-tweet begets re-tweet across the net.

Further, the data mining can get a sociological profile of the twitter users (they call themselves tweeps). What matters to the internet generation is contained in hundreds of thousands of 140 character or less pieces. Advertisers will want access to that database to learn how to speak to those folks, and to sell them more coffee and WonderBras.

While I'm still not sure it will prove useful for me, I can at least recognize one intriguing angle on twitter. I'm sure there are many others to discover. In the meantime, it's about lunch time for me. Should I tweet that I'm going across campus for tofu in brown sauce over rice?