Twitter is Shared Perception, Not Science
Today’s post by Robert Scoble on the earthquake that rocked China brings out an important distinction about the nature of a distributed messenging service like Twitter. Scoble eulogizes over the speed of information delivery in his post, thrilled that he knew about the earthquake 50 miles from Chengdu three minutes before anyone else did:
I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. […] Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!
While this is a great leap in keeping the world informed about what is going on in any part of it literally at the speed of light, what Twitter does is let you share perception and opinion with the rest of the world. This is different than sharing facts about what is going on. For example, the USGS report which came out three minutes after Chinese citizens began twittering that there was seismic activity, is full of precise details:
Magnitude: 7.9
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 06:28:00 UTCLocation: 31.099°N, 103.279°E
Depth: 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region: EASTERN SICHUAN, CHINA
Distances 90 km (55 miles) WNW of Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Location Uncertainty: horizontal +/- 5.8 km (3.6 miles); depth fixed by location program
Event ID: us2008ryan
If you look at Robert Scoble’s twitter stream, what you get instead is a succession of misinformation, subsequent corrections, noise, predictions of doom, and frenzy:
- 06:37:49 - @dtan just reported an earthquake in Beijing. Wonder how large it is?
- 06:40:50 - @keso reported earthquake too. @dtan said it lasted 10 seconds. I’d guess it’s a 4.5 then.
- 06:41:21 - @michaelrice says it was a 7.8.
- 06:44:14 - @gaberivera says it’s 57 miles from Chengdu, which has 11 million residents.
- 06:57:46 - @jwalkerjr says to hold off on predictions. Well, I need to pass along my experience with earthquakes. This is a HUGE one.
- 07:15:20 - @casperodj just said it felt like the earth was going to split. Literally everything was shaking.
- For more just wade through the mud…
To his credit, you can get an impression of the event, as seen through his and others’ eyes. You can get an idea of the scope, and the impact it has had on people around the world. But, you can’t get trustworthy facts from listen to what the general public is saying in the face of a disaster. A calm rationality is needed that Twitter cannot provide.
Still, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC is holding out hope that Twitter can mature into a real-time news service:
Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Twitter is fast, and it will let you share your experiences, but it will never replace solid journalism and hard facts. What do you think?
Mark Cuban’s P2P Ideas Suck
In a three-part rant about peer-to-peer technologies (1, 2, 3), Mark Cuban demands that peer-to-peer technologies “die a quick death” in order to”speed up [his own] internet connection.” He suggests that “Google Video is a far better solution for audio and video distribution than any P2P solution” and that cable companies “charge for upstream bandwidth usage.”
Guess what–I already get charged for all the bandwidth I use, either up or down. When Verizon strings a fiberoptic cable to my home, I’m getting a certain amount of fixed capacity into the greater internet at large. If I want to trade a little upstream capacity for greater downstream capacity, that’s my call! Have you ever noticed that downloading over http is typically slow because there are 100s of clients and 1 host? If I download the same information over bittorrent, I can sustain 12Mbs because everyone is a server–including me. Distributed protocols, such as the ones powering Amazon Dynamo or bittorrent, are more efficient, cost effective, and fault tolerant than single-server models.
Reactions around the blogosphere indicate that Mark Cuban’s thoughts on P2P are nonsensical rubbish. Mashable calls him “a guy who does not understand how P2P works, and yet he wants it shut down.” Ars Technica notes that “if users who are currently saturating their connections with BitTorrent start saturating their connections with Google Video content, the end result is more or less the same.” And a slashdotter comments, “Just imagine how fast the internet would be if there were no content to view. After P2Ps gone, get rid of all these freeloading websites, emails, etc. and it will be blisteringly fast.”
My guess is that billionaire Mark Cuban has a slow, shared cable internet connection at home, the modern equivalent of a party line. This might lead him to confuse his own slow internet connection with a greater systemic problem. What he should be complaining about is why Verizon hasn’t strung fiber in his area yet.
Leveraging the Sharing Culture
It is inevitable that piracy occur. My age group, the college student or young professional, almost exclusively acquires media through illegitimate channels. It doesn’t make sense to pay for what we can get for free, especially when downloading requires less effort and gives more immediate gratification. A trip to the record store: 30 minutes of your time gone. A download of a new album: 5 minutes of computer time gone. So, the clear choice is casual music piracy, a fact of modern American youth culture that the RIAA has yet to properly address.
- The problem: not selling records.
- The solution: not selling records.
As piracy leads to the commodization of popular music, revenue cannot be generated from sale of albums. Rather, popular music will be created for relicensing and branding. Commercial deals, inclusion in movie soundtracks, elevator music, radio royalties will be the primary source of income for records. Eventually there will be a “song” or “band” of Coca Cola company, ties between musicians, labels, and other corporations that deliver content to the public. It is these ties, not the content itself, which can be negotiated for money.
Conversely, selective cooperation with music piracy could lead to labels and artists reaping greater profits. As the revenue a song or album brings in becomes tied to its popularity, leaking a hot single before an album release becomes smart. Take, for example, the widely-released new single from Justin Timberlake, Sexy Back. It was released on MySpace, leaked to the torrent sites, and played all over the radio. While releasing singles before albums is not a new strategy, letting the internet believe they’ve stolen something hot, secret, and new will improve its appearance with the masses.
A song sampled in stolen solitude seems a lot better than something the industry is force feeding its market.
Azureus Torrent Download Speed Tips
If your torrents are downloading too slowly and you want to improve your download speed in Azureus, you’ve come to the right place. Azureus is a bittorrent client, namely, a program you can use to download files at high rates across the internet from a variety of peers. It’s a p2p (peer to peer) filesharing program, and may get you in trouble with legal authorities (RIAA, MPAA) if you use it illegally. However, it has plenty of non-infringing uses, as well.
Today I downloaded a torrent at 1.12 MB/s:
On a regular 10 Mb/s LAN that’s the best you’re going to be able to do, but only if your bit torrent program is configured properly. There are a few things you can do to improve performance in Azureus, and here they are:
1) Uncap the Windows XP SP2 Connections Limit
Service pack 2 limited the TCP/IP stack to 10 half-open connections–there rest are queued–to reduce virus spread rate. Unfortunately, this cripples a p2p program. Open those connections with this patch: EvID4226Patch223d-en.zip. Install at your own risk, but it works great for me with the limit increased from 10 to 100 or 200. You could go as high as 500 if you wanted, but that might be overkill.
2) Setup Port Forwarding
You need a path from your p2p program to the peers, and if you’re using a home firewall, make sure you forward the port that Azureus uses to your computer. This tutorial will help you–you can find the find the Azureus port in the first Options screen:
3) Setup Advanced Network Settings
Go to Options->Connection->Advanced Network Settings. You’ll see a screen like this:
You want a lot of simultaneous connections, so set the “max simultaneous outbound connection attempts” field to something just under what you set the Windows XP connection limit to in the hack in #1. I had 100 XP connections, so I set 64 in Azureus.
4) Upload Transfer
Go to Options->Transfer. You’ll see this screen:
You should set the “global max upload speed” 100-300KB/s, so that you can spend most of your connection bandwidth on downloading, and not uploading. However, the bit torrent protocol requires you to upload, so you should not set this less than 100 KB/s unless you’re on a very slow connection.
Additional Resources
VOIP Dr. Seuss Gripes
Jeff Pulver, in classic style, writes of Baby Bell and voice-over-ip woes:
Oh, no.
I cannot hear your call.
I cannot hear your call at all.
This is not good
and I know why.
A Bell has blocked the line.
Good-bye!
Who needs Chinese censors when we have American stifling of innovation?