'Is Twitter the Semantic Web?'

By Tom Dunlap

"Is Twitter the Semantic Web?" -- that's the provocative headline on a recent blog by Steve Wheeler of the University of Plymouth.

In the blog Wheeler makes some interesting points, and it caught my eye because it combines two of my interests. I'm a Twitter newbie, approaching the Twitter larval stage, learning as fast as I can (156 followers!). And I've been wrapping my head around the semantic web for two-and-half-years, to the point where a colleague at WebMediaBrands calls me the semantic web "reluctant expert." (Jupitermedia recently renamed itself WebMediaBrands.)

But the semantic web is still a tough nut to crack, because there are so many ways to define it. It's also referred to as Web 3.0 or the linked data movement. My company hosts conferences about this technology. The next one is the Web 3.0 Conference in New York,  May 19-20.

Wheeler makes this argument about the Twitter-semantic web connection.

We are still some way off from truly intelligent agents that predict accurately what you want, when you want it, delivered to your current location. But Twitter is much more than the glorified e-mail system many claim it to be. Twitter is certainly a huge step toward semantic predictive filtering -- it allows you to lock directly into and maintain your own personalized community of interest, where you can follow or un-follow who you wish, communicate across boundaries and push/pull information as you require it. It employs a number of simple and abbreviated filtering features such as #hashtagging, @names, RT (Retweeting) and DM (Direct messaging) which many social networking tools do not have. It is only a small step from here to automated versions.

Wheeler first got to thinking about the Twitter-semantic web connection by reading "Twitter Drives Traffic to Blogs and Social Networks," by Alan Cann at the University of Leicester. Cann writes:

Twitter *is* the semantic web, network as filter. If I send you crap, you drop me from your network. The semantic web is here, and its name is Twitter (and bits of Facebook which don't consist of advertising spam and zombie vampire superpokes).

With the unprecedented explosion in Twittering, it's certainly a thought-provoking point of view and bodes well for the still-evolving semantic web.