Here at Supernova, Twitter and Facebook are mentioned in every single talk, without exception. This is becoming increasingly common at tech events, and I sometimes wonder whether it is overhyping or the sign of a genuine revolution.

From the right angle, it's as if the world at large is waking up to the amazing world of Internet Relay Chat, the original real-time Internet communication device.

But that makes Twitter and Facebook no less revolutionary. First, though, let's refine this description to simply that of Twitter, because Facebook, in this context, is largely aping the Twitter functionality. And what is the Twitter functionality? It has nothing to do with communication, and everything to do with the fact that 100% of the text on Twitter is searchable. That's the power: being able to see, in real time, what people are thinking, doing, seeing, having trouble with.

As a hardcore IRC addict for going on 14 years now, I can say that this is exactly why I've always been addicted. IRC is not searchable, however, and provides a modicum of anonymity, as you can change networks, nicknames, hostmasks, etc. At Supernova, I was discussing this with David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain manifesto. He said that he noticed that the IRC back channel, #supernova on Freenode, was empty.

In previous years, we had used the channel to comment on speakers, occasionally calling people on their BS, or badmouthing somnolent speakers behind their backs. The fun of it was that IRC wasn't logged and put online, so we could be fairly uncensored with our assessment of who was pitching a product instead of giving a real talk.

Unfortunately for one speaker, that back channel chit chat had moved to Twitter, and it was projected onto the screen behind her while she spoke. This is a bad idea, for the record, as some men in the audience were saying rather rude things about her on Twitter, and these thoughts were then immediately projected above her head. 

One nice thing about IRC is that no one will ever be projecting an IRC channel's contents onto a public wall. The medium is well-known to be uncensored and often the harbor of inappropriate talk.

Yesterday, 95% of the attendees had laptops open during the talks, and I can say that 100% of them were looking at Twitter at some point. Speakers would check, immediately after talking, to see what people had tweeted about them. Questions were posited for speakers from audience members, a welcome change from the typical mumbling, rambling self-agrandizement that comes from open mic question sessions at these shows. It's hard to name-drop your company and go off topic in the limited space of a Twitter posting. 

And Twitter is powerful stuff to mine for data. This is the heart of that big data problem I've been so on about recently. Twitter provides an unfiltered glimpse into the ego of humanity (IRC being the id). But with that view comes the sensory overload William Gibson hints at in some of his more recent works. The heroes of Gibson's newer books aren't hackers and programmers, they're data analysts.

Why? Because if you know how to plumb Twitter, you can reap immensely useful information. But you have to know what to look for. Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research suggested searching Twitter for, simply, "The." I'd advocate selecting some key words, maybe 100 or so, and scraping Twitter's API, then pouring that info into some pretty charts and graphs. 

Either way, it's not easy to just reach into Twitter and pull out meaning. You can do so for the past hour of chatter, but to really get your mind around the constant influx of information it can provide, you're going to have to write some code to track data over timespans as long as a year or more. Of course, this all assumes that you can scrape Twitter enough before the fail whale surfaces.

So, basically, Twitter is the way of the future. That's the gist of Supernova. Make your applications capable of dealing with Twitter-like data feeds from users. Status updates, evidently, are one of the most powerful business tools to come around in the past 10 years. I guess that means your company needs internal status updates for all of its employees. And if you're going to do that, you might as well add a social network in there as well.

And, incidentally, #supernova on Freenode, though empty yesterday, came to life today. I guess anonymously taking about speakers and events still has a place.