The Tweet heard round the world
Is this the start of a revolution?
Amy Kearns sent a message through Twitter this afternoon asking her followers to look at this wiki page. Take a look; I’ll wait right here.
Imagine: librarians all over the world answering questions via Twitter. It’s a grassroots, always-open reference desk available to anyone with a computer or cell phone. The idea prompted me to respond: “The Librarian is Always On.” Amy has–as do many of us Twitterbrarians–Twitter friends in Europe and in Australia as well as all over North America. It would be my guess that between all of us, we could answer a question no matter the time of day. For me, tweets get a little sparse between midnight and 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time (GMT -500), but that’s nearly the workday for western Europe.
How would it work? We’re not sure it would. But to try, we have to take advantage of a few of Twitter’s features:
- We have to agree on a watchword, a series of characters that mark an incoming tweet as a question in need of an answer.
- Interested librarians would have to use Twitter’s tracking feature to scan for tweets containing the watchword.
- Replies would have to be sent as “@replies”–any tweet beginning with @<username> appears in a special tab in Twitter labelled “replies.” @replies seem to appear in this tab regardless of whether that person follows the author of the reply. (Admittedly, twitter only seems to work this way. Here is an opportunity for all of this to break down.)
- As additional insurance, questioners could use twitter to track their own Twitter user name–this would ensure that tweets containing the user name are received.
Points of failure:
- Questioner doesn’t use the proper watchword
- Answerer doesn’t construct the @reply properly
- User mysteriously doesn’t see @reply (sometimes they *only* appear in the replies tab)
- Tracking fails, meaning that not all trackers of the watchword see a question and/or not all users see their replies
- As David Fiander points out, both questioner and answerer would have to have public Twitter feeds
Brute force (i.e. sheer numbers of participating librarians) should address most of these points, assuming that the questioner uses the proper watchword.
So, what should the watchword be? #librarian, #libn?
What should we call this service? How about “HiveLibrarian: Resistance is We’re Always On”?
I am also sure there’s an opportunity for the Q&A tweets to be harvested using the Twitter API and dumped into a knowledge base of some kind.
Why stop with librarians? What other professions could solicit queries this way (who would be willing to answer them the same way)?
As Amy posted on her wiki page: Am I crazy, or could this work?
[...] Cindi Trainor – “Imagine: librarians all over the world answering questions via Twitter.” Posted in twitter | Trackback | del.icio.us | Top Of Page [...]
Interesting thoughts. It is late and I don’t have the brainpower to think it through right now, but I think you are on to something.
I have been doing “guerrilla librarianship” through Twitter, finding answers for people, pointing them to the right source. It has been quite rewarding. Interesting thought to expand on that…
Cheers,
Connie
Cindi,
Thanks for blogging this and putting forth my original concept in a much more elegant way!
I’m excited about this and think it could be really great! Maybe we could have a working wiki to go along with it and to work everything out?
Just in case – I started TheLibrarianIsAlwaysOn.pbwiki.com
I love the “hive” idea and the “The Librarian Is Always On” – this “guerrilla librarianship” as Connie called it is just what I mean –
I’m so sorry I myself wasn’t “on” twitter when this discussion went on (the irony)!
Let’s think/talk more about this!
Thanks for picking up the ball and running!
In what has to be the weirdest development of the night, this post has been linked to from a blog called “Too late, somebody’s already doing that.” Rather than giving them link love, I’ll copy the (CC) post here:
“Amy is a genius. It could work something like this.”
Dude, all I did was distill Amy’s wiki page and the several tweets that followed, trying to flesh out the idea and give us a starting place. If that takes anything at all away from the idea that Amy came up with, well I’ll take this down AND eat my hat. You’re sort of missing the point of the collaborative and synergistic nature of the librarian blog and twitter community. …and I would tell you this directly, but you won’t let me comment on your post.
Anyway, thanks to Amy for the original idea–which I should have done in the original post but was in a hurry to get it out there–and for thanking me for this post! Rest assured, we *will* keep talking and thinking.
[...] Trainor has thought about it some more and put forward some good ideas (and possible pitfalls). I definitely think it’s an idea [...]
[...] one of my Twitter buddies, has come up with an interesting idea that is starting to get some notice (and maybe some action) in the librarian community. The idea is that, with all of the librarians [...]
Is Twitter the Future of news?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080227/010921368.shtml
This idea takes on the issue of providing information on something accurately and quickly, breaking the story. First News.
Could this service provide quick accurate answers? Faster than the general hive mind of twitter or better yet, beating the supertwits.
[...] Twitterhive reference service [...]
[...] folk have been working on the idea via twitter, including playing with channels and XML feeds. Cindi, Joshua and Robin have all added to the [...]
I think that post on “Too Late” is meant to be complimentary to you and Amy both. The point being that anyone else who thinks of it is too late, ’cause Amy beat them to it.
[...] The Tweet heard round the world [...]
Greg, that’s a great way to look at it, but other stuff I read on the site was pretty snarky, so I can’t help think that the post about Amy’s idea was also intended that way.
[...] Trainor's post last week, "The Tweet heard round the world," is what caused me to start looking at how other librarians are using Twitter. I was a bit [...]
http://www.mosio.com/twitter/
Twitter Answers