On Twitter

Twitter is arguably now the dominant information sharing platform, which is to say that for many of us, it is “the news.”

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t find out about a major current event via Twitter. The first time I noticed it was during the horrific January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Arizona. Instead of clicking refresh on CNN or NYTimes or the Drudge Report, I just sat all afternoon watching my Twitter feed. The same went for the death of Osama Bin Laden, and now the closest I seem to get to traditional “news” is the Daily Show.

Joe Paterno’s Twitter death, falsely reported the day before his actual death and then retweeted ad infinitum, shows the potentially spurious danger of this information sharing platform. Twitter has been praised as the most salient weapon in the democratization of information sharing, but as with all other user-based content, it is both produced and disseminated in large part by amateurs who have no real accountability to the subjects on which they report.

The other common knock on Twitter is the double-edged nature of its customization. Unfortunately, for those who hate MSNBC or Fox News for their degree of bias and believe those networks lead to more and more opinion insularity among their viewers, Twitter is even more customizable. Sorry monoculture and imperial news outlets, your glory days are gone. We have entered the era of the “aggregator” (no, not aggravator, although that claim can also be made), of which the best can be considered “curators.”

I share these thoughts because Owen has started crystalizing their own Twitter strategy. The main Twitter account, , will still push out general information to its nearly 1,500 followers. But in another hallmark of this era, splitting offerings into niches, they have started a new account specifically geared for prospective students, . This will allow the admissions team to share deadlines and other relevant news that prospectives care a great deal about, and everyone else cares little about. I applaud Owen’s more targeted Twitter strategy and hope we’ll see more offerings like it.

Finally, for the three of you who read this far, here are my personal Top 5 twitter accounts, in terms of how far they’ve burrowed into my everyday habits. This is an offering that will soon be joined by lists from our other bloggers.

aka , is a self-described “interestingness curator” who is obsessed with “combinatorial creativity.” She rates highly in both the quality and quantity of her tweets.

aka , is a former writer at Baseball Prospectus and the guy who developed PECOTA for all the baseball stat geeks out there. He has since taken his stat savant skills and applied them to politics by aggregating and weighting various polls to more accurately predict elections.

, is The Onion’s pop culture arm, and in my opinion, it’s the best pop culture arm there is.

, as in the traditional media publication of the same name. I find it to be a relatively non-biased resource for smart writing about current affairs, culture and politics.

is an “urbanist” and prolific author who shares his musings on cities and the creative class.

If the mood strikes you, I encourage you to share your own recommendations in the comments section below.