Twitter plus filters = scary potential

It's with filters that Twitter starts to show its full potential. For example here are the tweets from the audience in time sequence during my talk at Thinking Digital (#tdc10), and here is a gallery of tweeted pics from the conference as they happened. This is just the tip of the iceberg... one talk at the conference showed how deeper data analysis can reveal a lot more than people think they are: taking every tweet that said 'just landed' and adding the home location created a realtime map of journeys for thousands of tweeters. 

This kind of data mining have massive potential for good, for marketing exploitation (as Facebook are discovering now) and of course for those with ill intent as well. Spamming is irritating but dumb, whereas evil data mining is going to be a major threat. The balance between connectedness and security is one of the two huge challenges facing the new digital world - the other being how to pay for content without restrictive rights. Watching these play out in the next couple of years is going to be fascinating.

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