Twitter, is by all accounts, the best source of information on ongoing crisis. It needs to stop there.
In November of last year, when I was pulling a gargoyle (Snow Crash) and providing real time analysis of events unfolding in Mumbai, user levels were such that it was still manageable for readers to rely on the flow + hash tags.
However, the tripling of traffic (partly due to that coverage) has made the presentation layer obtuse and burdensome (essentially useless). The signal to noise ratio is extremely low. The right play is for Twitter to save the dollars its wasting on the presentation layer and just shut it down. Instead, it should just provide its firehose data flow (driven by distributed tweet inputs) for processers and front end developers.
-Shlok
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