“My nephew has HDADD: Hi-Definition Attention Deficit Disorder. He can barely pay attention, but when he does it’s unbelievably clear.” – Steven Wright

Since Twitter came out it was pretty obvious it was something else. Its minimal, quasi-zen approach (short haiku-style posts, ultra-light interface, a very “carpe diem” real-time nature) won many users over. But why would such a restrictive, limited social network become so popular? There are so many more things you can do via MySpace or Facebook, where you can easily embed everything possibly embeddable.
Nonetheless, although Mark Zuckerberg‘s well-tested money-making machine is still bigger than Twitter (I’d go as far as to say it’s almost necessary for internet users), the social colossus has been learning a lot from its younger, smarter brother.
The “twitterification” of Facebook has raised some perplexities and the opening of that once closed and well-guarded environment wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for their business. I like the definition of Facebook as a “gated community” (read here): you can easily do everything you need on the internet inside of it and forget about the outside web. This has been part of the network’s strenght in the past, one more reason why it is both scary and addictive.
While Twitter’s openness (making information public and searchable in real-time) has definitely played a major role in the social network’s rise to pop culture phenomenon, replacing Facebook as the next internet thing, I think there is another factor worth analyzing (and no, it’s not journalist A.D.D.).
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Image from http://uqbarorbistertius.blogspot.com/

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.

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