“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.” — Nassim Taleb.

When asked what I read, I always plug Twitter. It is one of the most effective communication devices ever invented, I usually say, with no exaggeration.

Twitter has become so important to finance that it is taking over the role of the Wall Street analyst. As news broke of the Cyprus bailout last month, Twitter was a mile ahead of Wall Street. Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider wrote:

Twitter is increasingly equaling or surpassing the value of traditional sell-side research from Wall Street analysts … Because the [Cyprus] news was so surprising, and because there’s so little time between when the bailout was announced early Saturday morning, and when trading begins Sunday evening, there’s been an aggressive thirst for information and analysis on what it all means. But the sell-side has been fairly slow, and the Twittersphere has come to the rescue.

He is right. When big financial news is breaking, all the money in the world can’t buy the information streaming from Twitter’s free iPhone app. It is indispensable. 

But there is another side of Twitter, as Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein recently wrote:

Toward the end of the election, I pretty much stopped reading Twitter altogether. It improved my life, and the quality of my work. There was so much partisan sniping and gaffe-driven garbage that reading almost anything but Twitter was a huge improvement in the quality of the information I consumed.

Most forms of information are slow-moving, Klein writes. “If I neglect my RSS feed today, the posts will still be there tomorrow,” he says. “The same is true for the books I’m reading, the magazines piled on my nightstand, the tabs open in my browser.” Ditto for conventional journalism. If I check WSJ.com at 4 A.M. or 9 A.M. or noon, I will find the same stories. There is no rush.

But on Twitter, not checking your feed for an hour can mean missing something important. Since there’s no easy way to see what everyone you follow has Tweeted in the last day — to say nothing of the last week — the best way to stay on top of what’s important is to become a Twitter maniac, glued to the screen all day. It’s as if you didn’t know when your favorite TV show will air, and there’s way to record it when it does. Not wanting to miss it, you sit in front of the TV all day, waiting for it come.

But that means having to sit through a lot of soap operas and realty TV shows. Which is exactly how Twitter can feel sometimes. And I feel it’s getting worse.

In decade’s past, top investors wrote their clients once a quarter, maybe even once a year. Top newspaper columnists wrote once or twice a week.

Twitter has sent those expectations through …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance