RT @mathowie Anybody seen sites that scan cats?

October 22, 2009 10:13 PM

Are there good examples of Twitter (or status updates on Facebook) being used to answer questions AskMe-style? Or even better, to collaboratively solve a problem, like when the Scooby Gang here sussed out Kaycee Nicole?

Right now, all of the questions & answers I see happening via Twitter replies are mostly opinion/survey questions. While it's interesting to see if people prefer Ginger or Maryann, I'm much more curious about concrete problems being solved using these new, more immediate media. Enlighten me!

posted by anildash to computers & internet (18 comments total)

The Curated Lazyweb on Super Auto Espresso Machines
posted by b1tr0t at 10:19 PM on October 22

The FriendFeed room for the Library Society of the World is kinda like a library-skewed AskMe. Twitter served a similar function before the great ALA diaspora of 2008 (not kidding).
posted by unknowncommand at 10:20 PM on October 22 [3 favorites]

I'm much more curious about concrete problems being solved using these new, more immediate media. Enlighten me!

It is really difficult to ask, much less answer, a complex question in 140 characters.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:30 PM on October 22

Oh, and the Clinical Reader brouhaha happened over Twitter (not Kaycee Nicole exactly, more like Givewell).
posted by unknowncommand at 10:36 PM on October 22

I like where you're going with this! But I think the constraints of Twitter are such that the medium itself serves to solve a problem due to time, access or avoidance of bigger channels (news media, etc.). So, for example, the Tehran election...Twitter solved a problem of information blockages, but this wasn't explicitly indexed or even 'asked for', because that's not how it works on the surface representation. But, I think it can be argued that essentially the structure is the same, just interpreted through each service's respective interface and socio-pragmatic underpinnings.

So I think with Twitter, you're not going to get a whole lot of explicit 'tell me how to solve problem x', but that's not to say it isn't happening. And and I think there are indeed many examples of the more organic, off-record types of collaborative problem solving. Off the top of my head, besides Tehran election, there's #boycottwholefoods and #motrinmoms.

Are you looking for more of the explicit type of examples, or will those like the ones I referenced above suffice? If the latter, I can think of plenty of ways that Twitter helps gather people, decide things like restaurants or meeting places, or seek answers to questions (usually borderline chatfilter, or outright chatfilter).
posted by iamkimiam at 10:42 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

TSA Dingo Lady got a lot of coverage at Twitter; that's primarily where she spawned and was de-bunked. In terms of collaboration, there was the whole #peas thing for breast cancer. There have been a couple of instances of being locked in (or out) of a house ala the recent one on Ask that have been sorted via Twitter but I can't find them because the Twitter search is so god-awful (and I am not using Bing, thank you.)
posted by DarlingBri at 10:45 PM on October 22

It's not really Kaycee Nicole but the whole Trafigura incident seems to fit the "collaboratively solve a problem" description.
posted by mattliddy at 11:41 PM on October 22

There's LazyTweet based on the old LazyWeb site.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:48 PM on October 22

Dan Cohen's Spider Mystery was an experiment in crowd-sourcing carried out over Twitter.
posted by greycap at 12:27 AM on October 23

This isn't exactly a problem being solved, but there was a vengeful blogger who wrote mean Tweets about Maytag and scared the company into being nice to her.
posted by ForHurricanesHave at 12:43 AM on October 23

The New York Department of Labor has been answering unemployment benefit questions via their Facebook wall, and other folks have posted temp agency contact info, along with their own experiences with unemployment, food stamps, etc. It's turning into quite the resource, considering how easy it must be for the DoL to maintain and monitor.
posted by greenland at 5:51 AM on October 23

I give presentations sometimes on collaborative information systems and mention places like AskMe, Yahoo Answers and places where people work together to arrive at some sort of consensual truth. There are not many Twitter experiments that I've seen that have really taken off. Part of this seems to be because the 140 char. limit makes asking any questions that need collaboration a little tough -- there's only so many retweets you can fit in -- and part seems to be that it's often not the best model. So a little look into this

- companies that use twitter for customer support also often have a facebook wall. The peopel who are staffing these contact points check both places. The facebook wall posts seem more "permanent" and people seem to, in my personal opinion only, use these more. So if I want to complain to my local bus service, I go to fb not twitter.
- libraries that use SMS or whatever for reference. Usually a question that can't be answered with a shortened link will end with a "come to the library for more" or what have you. twitter/SMS are used for "ready reference" types of questions but not as much for real back and forth. Also it goes without saying that institutions are not always the best for collaboartive problem solving [+1 to the Library Society of the World stuff, those people are a marvel]. Also if you want SMS reference you might go to chacha instead. Works better, no institutional affiliation necessary.
- as far as grappling with problems, it's a little tough to see this happening unless you're inside of it. I enjoyed watching the Oprah/KFC thing play out over twitter both because there were recognizeable short hashtags for the whole deal [#oprah #kfc] and because people's reports of what was happening ["went to KFC, no chicken" "library couldn't print my coupon"] needed to be assembled *by the reader* into a recognizeable whole which I found fun [as someone who both got a coupon and got my chicken] and a little depressing watching people get failed by their libraries (to be fair, there was some onerous software also partically at fault.

I really think the best way I see this sort of thing happening online is the talk pages of Wikipedia [sorry, not 140 chars, etc]. If there's a disputed topic on Wikipedia, as there often is, I find that I can gt a good sense of what the conflicts are and what the sources are where I could go for more information by watching the back and forth there. Of course you have to be careful since if you try to ascertain general support by sort of seeing which side has more supporters, you also have to do the math as to what the wikipedia population looks like generally and the same is VERY true for the Twitter world. I don't care what the Pew Internet people say about it, this sort of communication is limited, strongly, to people who are socially online which is maybe 10-20% of everyone, max.

So I think everyone is sort of right. Twitter/microblogging is best when it's referring to longer bits [like a discussion on FriendFeed or a facebook page or a wikipedia page] and it's not the space where the problem solving is generally happening. I haven't done an assessment of "how people are doing reference on Twitter" in a few months but last time I checked the answer was that, except for ready reference type stuff where people need one answer and they need it sort of quickly, they are not using twitter for this.
posted by jessamyn at 6:58 AM on October 23 [2 favorites]

Great idea, anil: somebody should do it.
The 140 characters limit is overcome all the time by giving a link.
Answering in a blog and linking to it would be cumbersome, but I am guessing that a lot of questions have already been answered somewhere.
What would be really interesting would be for such a service to store all questions and answers somewhere with tags.
It would be cool if it could be built on top of AskMe.
posted by bru at 7:17 AM on October 23

It's also worth noting that it can be two steps from God awful to follow a real conversation in Twitter, so not only is there a 140 character limit, but an extreme difficulty to have a real thread.
posted by advicepig at 8:10 AM on October 23

AskOnTwitter is similar to this, but it isn't as community-oriented, in that you can answer pretty much anyone, and the answers aren't aggregated.
posted by unknowncommand at 8:14 AM on October 23

Thanks for the feedback - most of the examples I've seen so far have either been survey-type questions ("what's the best [whatever]?") or general customer service issues like Dooce's washing machine or whatever. I'll keep looking, though.
posted by anildash at 10:15 AM on October 23

ToAnswer was an early example of this. Doesn't work anymore, but here are writeups about it in TechCrunch and Mashable. The mashable link also mentions iknowtweet.com, twttrstrm, and twitQA.
posted by mattbucher at 1:03 PM on October 23

The people searching for Evan Ratliff used Twitter to some extent, primarily with the #vanish tag. (At the moment Twitter is telling me "older tweets are temporarily unavailable" so I can't see what went on, but hopefully they'll be back at some point.) Some of it was actual discussion within Twitter itself, some was just pointers to more extensive blog posts. Although I think the people most involved eventually went to a private group (on Facebook, possibly? not sure of the medium) in order not to tip off Evan, or at the very least better be able to identify any sockpuppet accounts of Evan.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:02 AM on October 26