It seems I’m the mayor of manmeat.
I owe this moniker to Twitter and a 29-year-old Dutch Web developer who’s helped millions realize what a mental mashup we’re making of ourselves, 140 characters at a time.
Launched just last Saturday, thatcan.be/my/next/tweet takes the entire corpus of your Twitter output, mixes up a random selection of words from your tweets, and recombines them into a snippet of Dadaist nonsense — which it then invites you to repost on Twitter, saving you the headache of coming up with something new.
Thatcan.be/my/next/tweet became an instant phenomenon this week. According to TweetReach, a Twitter tracking service, only a few dozen people used it on Sunday. On Monday, it began picking up steam. By Wednesday, people were using it once a second — that’s as fast as tweets about the Consumer Electronics Show gadgetfest that took place in Las Vegas in January, or Twitter’s own celebration of its fifth anniversary, marked with the hashtag #5yrs.
So far, 1.7 million people have produced 4.5 million rehashed, reposted tweets algorithmically drawn from our text-messaging ids.
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So I tracked down Wimar Hazenberg, the creator of thatcan.be/my/next/tweet — or TCBMNT, as he prefers to call it. He’s the managing partner and creative director of Booreiland, an Amsterdam-based design agency. He’s also got a master’s in artificial intelligence, which explains a lot.
Hazenberg has been online since 1998, he estimates — back in the days when you’d search with AltaVista and chat with friends on IRC.
“TCBMNT is part of an ongoing personal project to explore how to autonomously generate natural language,” Hazenberg told me. “Programming is something that I like to do to explore ideas.”
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Speaking of exploring ideas, congratulations to Vadim Lavrusik, who’s leaving Mashable, the social media blog, to join Facebook as the manager of its journalist-outreach program. Much as operating-system makers like Microsoft and Apple have evangelists who encourage developers to code on their software, Lavrusik, as I understand it, is going to try to get reporters to think of Facebook as a tool to do their work.
That’s a big turnaround from the social network’s indifferent verging on hostile view of journalists just a few years ago. I remember when one of my reporters at Valleywag got dinged when he tried to use Facebook to send a message to the subject of a story. That’s now exactly the kind of behavior Lavrusik’s going to encourage.
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Back to TCBMNT. The most frightening thing about its output is how closely it resembles “word salad,” the psychiatric term for the verbal babble exhibited by patents with dementia, schizophrenia, or logorrhea — a condition which causes people to talk uncontrollably.
In other words: Twitter.
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Most people engaged with TCBMNT as another Web prank, not a deeper psychological phenomenon. Urlesque, an AOL blog about funny things on the Internet, called it “hilarious nonsense.” Sam Biddle, a writer for Gizmodo, the Gawker Media gadget blog, got a bit closer, labeling it “less a Twitter toy than a disturbing peer into my subconscious.”
“I really like that last notion,” wrote Hazenberg. With, I should note, a smiley emoticon.
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So what was the point, I asked Hazenberg: Were you making fun of Twitter? Celebrating it? Just playing around?
“Just curiosity,” said Hazenberg. “The output of this specific program made me laugh, so I thought maybe others would like it too. There was no agenda and I really don’t like to be all pretentious with this program, but of course it could raise questions.”
Some questions Hazenberg suggested:
- Are most tweets nonsense?
- Is it really important to tweet all the time?
- Do people feel the need to constantly come up with new tweets?
- Are auto-generated tweets funnier than your own? Why?
- Do auto-generated tweets inspire you to have new ideas?
Deeper philosophical questions aside, “I really love the fact that this little program makes people around the world laugh a little,” said Hazenberg. “That feels really good.”
He’s not kidding about “around the world”: Do a search on thatcan.be on Twitter, and you’ll see people from Brazil, Turkey, the Netherlands, all joining in a global mashup.
Hazenberg said he hopes to keep experimenting with surprising ideas like TCBMNT: “I expect that most of them will fail, and every now and then, something nice will grow out of it.”
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It’s worth remembering that Twitter itself was an experiment — a side project of another startup called Odeo, an ill-fated podcasting platform.
When it comes to things like Twitter, I’m a surly adopter. I actually signed up for it grudgingly and complained about how some people were using Twitter, originally designed to keep friends updated on where you were and what you were doing, to share links instead. That’s cheating, I said!
Of course, it’s the sharing of links — the essential currency of the Web, the most basic form of information online — that has made Twitter so powerful and vibrant. Google, in desperate need of a credible alternative to Facebook, reportedly made a casual offer of $10 billion to buy Twitter, according to Fortune — and was told Twitter wasn’t for sale.
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Twitter cofounder Biz Stone addressed this and other reports of board disarray, CEO turnover, and business-model confusion at his company in a blog post. (Sometimes it takes more than 140 characters.) He argued that the storm of skeptical stories was just the media’s typical hype cycle.
One criticism he didn’t address: What exactly does he do at Twitter these days?
“For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article,” Stone wrote. Well, that’s one way to stay busy, I suppose.
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Hazenberg said he hadn’t heard from anyone at Twitter Inc. about the project, though two Twitter employees raved about it to me — via Twitter, of course.
I was going to ask for some official comment, but instead I persuaded PR rep Carolyn Penner to take a break from getting teased by Stone to run Twitter’s official @twitterglobalpr account through Hazenberg’s grinder and came up with these observations:
“Been playing with numbers. Big Q1 stat – now at 5pm CET/8am PST. It goes directly to lead the Twitter -!” And: “The experts on Twitter account signups from Twitter is designed to successfully tweet.”
Better than any PR statement I’ve ever gotten.