Received an email from Vizify today! I have had a few in the past months. Vizify is a site which appears to aggregate data on Twitter users! I knew this because it has done it for me before! Amazing really – all I have to do is keep twittering and these summaries continue to appear.
This one was different though – not only does it do a summary – it creates a short Video story of my work on Twitter – simple but nevertheless a story – and almost without my knowledge – the story is posted on Twitter – absolutely fascinating! Another window on this extraordinary technology!
Obviously the data is not new to me – to have it packaged and represented with no effort on my part other than to keep doing what I am doing is more than useful:
The Data represented:
Top 3 Tweet topics
Top 3 Twitters I interact with
Top 10 Tweets
Check out the Video:
https://www.vizify.com/ben-kehoe/twitter-video
https://www.vizify.com/ben-kehoe/twitter-video
One of the really interesting features of twitter is the “instant feedback” – on a day to day basis I can check – a summary of number of tweets – number of people I am following and the number of followers I have!
Every time something occurs in relation to my tweeting – I am notified – It is fascinating really – having ongoing feedback serves as reinforcement and increases the engagement with the technology.
It is basic learning theory and I have no idea how it is going to effect – how learning is contructed – how work is designed – how children play with one another etc – but I am convinced it will shape our lives. When Arie de Geus wrote 20 years ago that the only competitive advantage any business may have is the rate at which they learn I find it hard to believe he had Twitter in mind!
This ACCESS to data and Information is occuring at an amazing rate!
Over the years – I have made a point of reading widely both inside an outside my areas of “debateable competence” – every day now the leaders of the fields I am interested in are Tweeting about – what they are reading – what they are writing – what they are thinking! Instead of waiting for the HBR – or searching the Web – or reading in a newspaper that a document has been published – this data is tweeted and I access it it daily.
I remember in the mid 1990’s when I discovered computers!!( refer blog 1) – that it was access to the Web which “hooked”me – I actually went to a “course” and learnt about “surfing the web”. I was excited by the opportunities for learning it created – back then you will remember you had to name the topic and ‘surf” till you discovered something – many will remember Web Crawler – the search engine of the day! Now you put your name and the topics of interest in Twitter and data is presented – and you can choose to access it at your discretion.It is seductive – as is most learning.
Two milestones in my learning journey with computer and technology were:
1. When I discovered Amazon – ordering books on line was just revolutionary and so convenient!
2. When a colleague at a conference told me he had to go back to his room and get his fix -and he talked about surfing the web – I thought he was nuts -is it possible to do business without it?
Twitter is more exciting and makes it all more accessibleBen Kehoe
