There’s a really interesting iPhone twitter application called Twinkle. It covers the usual bases of allowing you to update your status and receive status updates from your friends, but also it does one more thing; It displays tweets from people who are near you, not just your friends. I found out about this via Kottke, who wrote a short post about the random messages he would get from people in manhattan, and mentioned overhearing (over-reading?) people flirting semi-anonymously with each other via twitter messages. 

This is different to the internet where normally you read things which are organized by topic. Predictably, then, you’ll just read the things your interested in: like technology news, or how dreamy Obama is, and ignore the rest. You can often choose location based topics but most often it’s only based on the closest major city. Language is similar, but you don’t even realize that you’re selecting sites based on it, you don’t think “I’m going to read some english sites” like you would think “I’m going to check out the latest political news”.  But “[t]he Internet suggests a new map of the world, with borders redrawn along language lines.” (Virginia Heffernan wrote in an article for the NYTimes). I would argue that whilst language may form the countries in this new map, topics of interest would form the (slightly blurred) states (or provinces, or cantons…).  Twinkle, then, is like someone who comes in and redraws the map, as a circle around you.  

What is the effect of this metaphoric geographic reshuffling? You’ll get messages in your twitter stream that are entirely without context, some of the particularly random ones will remind you that it’s from someone who is only connected to you by their proximity. There’s not much else to think when you get a message like “@linzerschnitte i werds mit single malt angehen, und du?” These messages will be about things you don’t care about, about things you don’t believe in and in languages you don’t understand; Forcing you to engage with the space, people and concepts around you. The messages will break into the personal bubble that the iPod has helped to create.

It also allows for some interesting discoveries. I imagine if you use it for an extended period of time you’ll  start to notice updates from the same users and  start to learn about some them. By looking at what topics are coming up frequently you’ll get a pretty good idea about what people are talking about, and what news is popular or important.  And whilst there is a bias for people with similar points of views to live in similar areas, there will still be a much broader cross section of opinions than what you usually access by just talking to your friends

So twinkle redefines some aspects of the internet topography, is it really that big of a deal, should I be finding it as interesting as I do?