The Cost of Twitter
I work in an office for a fairly large company, and unsurprisingly we have a mailing list for our department (interactive media). This is used for making announcements and also sharing information more informally such as news or humorous links gleaned from the information superhighway.
I’ve increasingly noticed how the latter is not very informative for me since most of the time I’ve already seen whatever it is being shared usually because someone (often more than one) I follow has twittered it. When somebody sent round a link to the Onion’s parody on a new Macbook launch I made the (tongue in cheek) comment that it was like soooo 8 hours ago.
But it reminded me of a blog post by one of my favourite bloggers, Seth Godin:
The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.
If you wanted to be the first person to see Nokia’s new phone, you could have flown to Berlin, as Robert Scoble did. Or you could have been the second person by obsessively hitting refresh on his posts. Or you could have been the tenth person by having it show up in your feed later in the day. Or you could wait a week and see it everywhere. Or in a year, get one on eBay for $5…
Sure, go ahead, stay hyper-current, but realize it’s not free.
I think I’ve gained a lot by being ahead of the information curve, possibly because there are lots of people in the company not trying to be, so that current knowledge is a resource to a certain extent. But if everyone is trying to be close to now does it simply become an informational arms race with spiraling costs?
Couldn’t agree more with you. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the amount of information I sift through every day. It’s good to accept that you can’t possibly take it all and so what?