In The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell identifies two types of nodes in social networks:

mavens

collect information (build memes)

connectors

are connected to lots of people (spread memes)

A single person rarely is both a maven and a connector. Mavens have content but no distribution channel. Connectors have a distribution channel but no content. Mavens and connectors need each other.

Gladwell claims that “mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”. But a maven’s power comes not from trading information, but from how many people they influence.

The Internet can work as a robotic connector for a maven. Mavens can write reviews, edit Wikipedia pages or blog about obscure stuff.

All of us are mavens and connectors to some extent. But very few of us come across enough specialised information to write a significant number of reviews, become one of the Wikipedia Cabal or have a blog read by more than your friends. Instead, most of us come across random bits of information that we don’t know how to get to someone who cares.

Twitter is a good place to put random bits of information. If there’s an obscure topic someone cares about, they can find tweets about it using search (especially with hashtags). If one of your friends knows someone who cares, they can retweet it – making the most of your meagre network.

I’m particularly interested in sharing local facts and event information. I come across lots in my day-to-day life that my immediate social circle is not really interested in. Hopefully if I start broadcasting it out, some stuff I am interested in will come my way.

As my friend Michael points out, the Iranian troubles are about whether one theocratically-approved politician should be chief administrator instead of another theocratically-approved politician. I haven’t done much research, but my instinct is that the election may well be valid and it doesn’t make that big of a difference anyway. Wake me up if it switches into a revolution against the Islamic Republic.

Since professional journalists have been unable to report from Iran, Twitter has been the medium of choice for citizen-journalists. The problem is that Twitter is not good at filtering out noise. So much of the news is apparently distorted, either for entertainment purposes or outright psychological warfare.

Imagine you’re running an organization that runs a bunch of applications on a bunch of different computers. These applications need to coordinate or exchange data over a network. So how do you hook them up?

The traditional solution is to hook each application to every other application that it needs to talk to; this architecture is technically known as a Big Ball of Mud. A better solution is to use something like a postal service that accepts standard-sized letters. The post office can handle things like forwarding addresses, queuing letters when mailboxes are full, broadcasting to all mailboxes, etc. This architecture is known as Message-Oriented Middleware.

There are lots of MOMs you can buy and run on your own servers. But if your applications are communicating over the web, there is no good option. (Email is much more complicated than it looks, HTTP requires running web servers all over the place, and nothing else is well-supported.)

Twitter, originally developed for use by humans, is a great option for web-based MOM. It allows an application to push messages out to queues that other applications can poll. It works with a variety of interfaces and there are libraries or example code in most programming languages. Granted, messages are restricted to 140 bytes, but that ought to be enough for anyone.

Ironically, Twitter’s performance sucks because it’s simulating MOM on database-centric architecture. It’s generally accepted that it needs to be rebuilt on a lower-level MOM.

The user accounts are all in and the old posts and comments are in our database. The posts are just not showing up.

Feel free to author away. Here’re my todos:

1) Post the Christmas message.
2) Get the old posts working.
3) Put the loglines out on our twitter feed.
4) Fix this cluttered theme.
5) Get Google Analytics back up.
6) Add ShareThis.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like, or if you see anything broken.

Merry Christmas.