Refining the Twitter Explosion
DOES Twitter have a T.M.I. problem? — And, no, I don't just mean the Twitter users who share too much information about their lives, social, medical or otherwise. — Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after meish.org flagged what was still missing from Twitter, the complaint has inverted: the service no longer lacks anything so much as it overflows. Through late 2009 the "Twitter Explosion" earned its name — users beat major outlets to both the US Airways Hudson River landing pictures and Michael Jackson's death in June, cementing Twitter as a real-time wire even as analysis that month argued its follower counts were inflated and unreliable, a skepticism reaching back to Tweeterboard's 2007 ribbing of follow-culture.
First-order effects
- Heavy users absorb the navigation cost directly: the author proposes new microsyntax conventions — "three pointers" and "the slasher" — extending the grassroots success of the hashtag, meaning the fix ships as user behavior, not product.
- Twitter's own "Report as spam" tool becomes the platform's first-line answer to the same noise, pushing moderation work onto individual users flagging questionable profiles.
Second-order effects
- Evan Williams' framing of journalists as curators of tweets puts newsrooms in the filtering business, making editorial judgment — not raw speed — the differentiator once everyone has the same firehose.
- Any client or search layer that solves navigation better than Twitter's default timeline gains leverage over where attention lands, turning filtering quality into a competitive feature rather than a utility.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, value migrates from posting to ranking: the durable asset in a real-time network is whichever layer — user-invented syntax, professional curators, or the platform itself — makes the stream navigable for everyone else.
- Protocol-by-convention growth like the hashtag cuts both ways for Twitter: it scales the network without engineering effort, but it also signals that the product's most important features are being designed by its users, leaving the company reacting to standards it did not set.
The trend: Real-time social networks shift their center of gravity from publishing to filtering, with user conventions, professional curators, and platform tools all competing to make the unfiltered feed usable.