Twitter has always performed text analysis of the tweet content to detect elements and extract them as distinct entities to discrete data fields. Now the separation is fixed and formal: They’re auxiliary data points, not part of the message content, and as such they will need to be specifically interpreted by any program, site, or service that integrates with Twitter. This means that tweets are no longer just text; they are turning into something entirely new.
Tweet Strings
My new piece for Motherboard unpacks the recent changes to Twitter’s character limits. In short, the big news is not that the tweets are growing longer, it’s that they are now being treated as data structures, not text strings.
Audio Metadata
For VICE/Motherboard, here’s an obsessive deep dive into the minute details of music metadata, and how information about the songs we love is being co-opted for questionable ends by streaming services like Spotify and Google Play.
Hacker NewsFormat shifts have already altered the mechanics of music simultaneously several times over the past few decades, and the recent rush toward streaming services like Spotify and Google Play now positions a technology company between the listener and the material. Surely remote cloud storage is a new audio format at least as much as the Walkman?
This is a new kind of consumer relationship, and the play button has a different meaning for each side; to the business, it does more than just switch on entertainment. As a result, there’s now a sort of subtle power play occurring over control of the metadata which surrounds the music and connects it to search fields, filters, and playlists. This is unfortunate, because our ability to meaningfully engage with something depends first and foremost on whether we can find it at all.
Twitter timelines
My first story for Motherboard, the tech vertical at VICE, is about the darker side of Twitter’s recent experiments with polls and non-chronological timelines.
As polls spread highly structured tweet content, algorithmic presentation meanwhile creates a testable structure around the more chaotic tweets. Since the implicit contract with users would no longer be based on publicly verifiable values like timestamps, a fully algorithmic Twitter would actually just be an experimental Twitter, a service in which the content can be constantly tweaked and manipulated in order to see how users will react.