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Letter from Silicon Valley
If a tree falls in the forest and no one tweets about it, did it happen? Or, at the very least, was it something about which any of us should care?
That's a very Valley conundrum these days. Take the ease with which I was able to answer the following question last Thursday night: how many people are outside the Apple Store in Palo Alto right now, waiting for the new iPhone 3G S to come on sale?
There were precisely two, it turned out. All I had to do was to search Twitter, where the first person in line was plaintively tweeting about how lonely he was feeling.
By early Friday morning, though, a real queue had formed, populated almost entirely by local people tweeting and live-blogging pictures of themselves standing in said line. My Twitter feed was buzzing.
The rate at which people blog or tweet about events around here has become a popular way to gauge their import. And to be sure, for the fans lined up outside the Apple store last week (and all the people receiving their feeds), the status and size of the queue (which was actually small compared with other iPhone launches) was a big deal.
More insidious, though, is how we're treating events that no one tweets, blogs, diggs or raves about on Facebook. Do city council decisions, local drug arrests or personnel issues in the fire department matter to us any less because they hardly ever get mentioned on social networks?
We like to talk a lot about "the wisdom of crowds". But even in the Valley, only a tiny subset of the local population tweets or blogs at all. And while that remains the case, we need to be wary of letting those few, self-confident technophiles, even if they're our closest friends, decide what's "news".
Folks lining up for the new iPhone outside San Jose's Apple store did have something slightly more substantial to blog about: Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak jumping the queue to be first in line for his 3G S. The question isn't so much whether the Woz was rude (the people he barged in front of were delighted to see him, it seems). No, it's why Apple's co-founder needed to be in line at all.
In the past year, the Silicon Valley area has lost 40,000 jobs, according to figures just released by the state employment development department. But we're looking on the bright side: in the past month the number of people employed has actually risen, if only by a modest 400 jobs.
