 Hi, I'm Ross Dawson futurist based in Australia together with good Leonard another futurist based in Switzerland Yeah, and Having a series of conversations and today's looking at Twitter and so good. You've used the phrase TNN for Twitter news network So what does that mean? Is that the future? It's actually not for me. I think it's from Jeff Jarvis television critic a television author and and writer I Think the idea of Twitter news networks to say what we're seeing on Twitter right now is that it will take about 40 seconds For any news to be broadcasted and send out via Twitter for example the Osama death Was Twitter within 26 seconds and it took about 40 minutes for the first television coverage I so what we're seeing now is that Twitter the speed of news is like increased tremendously and this is why I say Twitter news network is a pretty good Description of the future which to me I think TNN will be bigger than CNN In fact, we're going to have video and audio on Twitter and so we can watch TV through Twitter Produced by the masses and with a completely unclear relationship of who owns what and why and who's controlled the quality and the verification Which of course and in television was a That was all sort of a fig leaf anyway because we didn't know was true Just because Fox News was broadcasting it didn't mean it was true And so we have the same problem in television that we have on Twitter. It's interesting I mean just just to the point about integrating the video and audio In China Twitter is blocked but they have seen our way bow Which is basically as big-ass Twitter and one of the things the very interesting distinction with senior way bow Is that it it does include video and audio? Put in the stream so it is becoming more of that News channel than Twitter is currently so it'll be very interesting to see if Twitter takes that on Clearly one of the biggest differences between TNN and CNN is that filtering when you have something appears on CNN, you know that some person who presumably has had some training and Responsibility has made a choice to put that up for everybody whereas on Twitter There are people who are not only untrained but also may even have some being trying to mislead So it's interesting. I think there's we will lapse in this I believe this is the decade of the reputation economy We're more and more will have the reputation mechanisms to assess whether a particular Tweets or news or reports or videos whatever worthy of paying attention to though. It's Whilst we've always had to do that. I think you know absolutely as individuals We have to you have a far far more finely tuned senses as to what is worth paying attention to and If we want earlier news then we go to Twitter with that Understanding that we have to filter and make sense of that and be possibly misled along the way Yeah, I think this is a difficult question because clearly the fact that mass mediums were mass mass financed and Channeled through cable which was expensive to have didn't mean it was any more accurate I mean look at weapons of mass destruction now didn't exist, right? We all thought it did but you know started a war over it, but never mind it wasn't real And so are we then going to say just because Twitter is free and cheap? You know is it less any less accurate? I don't think so I think the biggest problem and the biggest distinction really is that Twitter is like a river like an ocean of stuff, right? And CNN is like a droplet and and so that's for it's manageable, right? And we tend to believe that it's better for that So I think if Twitter can solve this problem how to take this river and cut it down to the Kernels of truth and wisdom, you know, then I am for Twitter and that's not Twitter's role I mean so far it has it I mean while Twitter is taking more and more of the ecosystem that is in fact The role of the that you know those around Twitter to be able to take it is make sense of that so This is why we have flip or the other things Yeah, exactly to take to take the filtering process This is the big opportunity for Twitter is to generate this really and I in fact I've got a venture We outcome these have got a venture in the space as well basically Twitter filtering to be able to pull out the most Reliable around a particular themes and there's other ones around that paper Lee Twitter times Genie and so on which are all trying to take that and make sense of it But to be frank, I think we're pretty early on in terms of that As you say taking that ocean into distilling that into meaningful droplets But I mean we have similar situations for example trip advisor or Wikipedia What we're saying is the wisdom of the masses is that true? It's just bullshit of the masses, you know I think of course it's both but but I mean if you look at for example on trip advisor Like 95% of these comments are actually quite on the money when you get there Yeah, and that's because there is a filtering process. There is authenticity. There is review. Yeah, there is verification And that has to be part of Twitter as well and verification of Twitter is now how many times you've been retweeted And those kind of things that there is a long way to go to verify this though in a way It's the Twitter should be provided in the ocean and yeah Twitter as well or others as well can provide some of those filtering mechanisms But we all want to get our own slice out of that or our own droplet Yeah, so our own drop that out. It's not the same droplet for everyone So they still need to give us access to that unfitted Ocean interestingly whilst one of Twitter's big revenue mechanism now is charging for its the fire The fire hose of all Twitter streams. You actually still can get 2% of all Twitter streams for free Let's call the spritzer I think yeah I think that we know the future basically means that we're going to have a combination of the sort of broadcast medium Which is centralized and top-down and the broadband medium we have actually both In the combination of broadcast and broadband is where the interesting stuff will happen in the future It's not either or as we discussed in the previous show, right? It's not like a white would need broadcast We need broadband But just the broadcast medium in my view has not been sufficient really To actually express what could be happening, right? So the combination of the two and this is why of course CNN is a heavy Twitter user Yes, and actually promoting Twitter Skype YouTube and all that on on the air So the combination of the two is where it's going. I recently wrote a post saying you know seven reasons why Twitter is central to my life and There's a lot of reasons why one in fact people often surprise me as a futurist. They always get asked You know, how do you keep on top of all the information out there? How do you find what's really useful and when I say Twitter is my primary information source? A lot of people are surprised because they don't understand how Twitter works So Twitter is about an information source and it really is central to my life So I certainly see that as a you know, a big chart of my life My information source is my way of finding information and I'm sure you're in this case for you as well Yeah, maybe a quick message for people out there watching this I think the most important part is you can't talk about Swimming if you don't want to get wet, you know So you it's very hard to talk about stuff like Twitter or if you're not actually inside So the way to find out what it does is to try it and the same goes for Facebook and all the other tools there And that's how you find out what you can do for you And this is a good part of it because you have to actually get inside So this is being a quick conversation on Twitter and its role in the news in future So on Twitter, I'm Ross Dawson And I'm G Leonhardt g leo in HRD. Otherwise, just Google GERD GERD and futurist and you'll find I know 50 million not just kidding 250,000 links or whatever you can spend your weekend poking around in my tweets