ReporTwitters Blog

Nate Ritter is a young entrepreneur from San Diego involved in the launch of a business called Hashtags.org. Its potential could be as explosive as the news Hashtags drives straight to your personal Twitter on your mobile phone, IM or the web. Hashtags are a way to track a specific topic on Twitter. This allows for hyper-instant communication which is not dependent on the friend/follower relationship. In case of disasters or breaking news events, tweets by hashtag subscribers who happen to be in the area can be instantly delivered. That means that this service could potentially connect editors to on the ground eyewitnesses. In its full capacity, editors that want breaking news from a personal angle, would only have to input a hashtag and a keyword and bang! the eyewitness accounts would be piling up. The application truly revolutionizes the Twitter concept because it ads a demand function from followers. An interview.

Who are you professionally?

I am a web developer and entrepreneur. At parties, I have a hard time answering the question “What do you do?”. Usually I end up shortening it to “I create businesses, mostly using the web, and sell them.” That seems to sum it up. I love creating new projects, helping people anywhere I can, and facilitating awesomeness. Professionally, this means I (usually) get paid to create value in people’s lives by consulting small businesses and non-profits on web and business strategy. I also make a good portion of my monthly revenue by using the 10+ years of web development in my back pocket.

- What is Hashtags.org?
It is a new service coming out soon. It’s pretty limited right now, but the concept is wonderful. Hashtags.org lets you search twitter for contexts (events, places, subjects), etc. It should be available soon and it will be a great application for finding relevant people and twitter feeds talking about these contexts.

- What is your role?

I am helping a few brilliant guys promote this website and make it better.

-What is the background to this?

You know those people who follow every trend, buying the coolest $175 jeans from Lucky? Well, that’s me minus the money and the jeans, but add in the newest free web application. I get an account almost everywhere. So, I’ve been twittering for about a year now (which is about a year late to the party apparently). I didn’t really see the point of it at the time. More ways for people to talk about their breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Then something crazy happened. The San Diego fires… Suddenly news was the primary use for Twitter (at least for me). Not only could I receive news, but I could then aggregate other formats and publish at an astonishingly fast pace with distilled information. It was great for everyone.

- How do you see news in a Twitter context?

I’ve broken news about companies I’ve worked for in the past. But, I rarely have had juicy info to tell people about. The San Diego fires was the first time I consistently broke news. This time, for 3 days straight at about once per minute, sometimes faster.

I now learn about news via Twitter every day. Earthquakes, floods, political news (although I am not that political), and more. Most of that is kinda bad news, so it’s no different than what the traditional media is reporting on, it’s just faster (I knew about the San Francisco earthquake literally 8 seconds after it happened). Other (more positive) news is harder to come by without being very intentional on who/what you subscribe to. Many of whom I follow on Twitter relay positive news about all kinds of things which affect my personal and private life to a certain degree, and that’s about the moment “news” actually becomes important.

-What happened on the ground in the San Diego fires?

Craziness, that’s what. It began with one or two smaller fires outside of San Diego. Because of the weather conditions it turned into a sporadic inferno for millions of people. When I saw the turning point from “oh, there’s this fire over there” to “we can’t control them”, I started twittering about the fires. I had only about 30 people “following” me at the time I started. Within a few minutes I had been contacted by people in Virginia. A few hours later Florida. A few hours after that India. Each time someone asked about an area, I responded via Twitter.

By the time the fires had been mostly contained, they had reached the ocean, almost a million people had been evacuated from their homes, and many traditional media outlets had proven that they couldn’t relay information fast enough. I had 350 new followers and probably 1000 people actually seeing the news I relayed during the day. I had helped thousands of people navigate the county to evacuate, bring assistance and food to evacuees, and find out information about their homes, families and friends. When it all settled down, I had over 1500 updates in the course of 36 straight hours over 3 days, a local witness hotline, and every communication device I owned tuned to fire information. All of that was relayed over Twitter to people all over the world. Quite amazing, actually.

-What do you think the opportunities are for creating a news service that newspapers would be interested in?

I follow BreakingNewsOn on Twitter now because they are pretty good at distilling world news into 140 characters. I think it only takes a cell phone with unlimited text messages (for Twitter) and a Flickr account (you can email your cell phone photos straight to your Flickr account). If reporters wanted to do voice or video interviews, I think that’s the only mobile thing left to integrate properly. There’s a few apps out there, but I don’t believe any of them do the job perfectly.

Lastly, we need a centralized hub where all this information can be aggregated and distributed. This is where the idea of the Aggregated Citizen News Network came out of (after the fires). A few people and I have been looking at new technologies and trying to figure out what the best possible ways to use all these wonderful things we have now for the best possible news. The results should be very intriguing.

-Do you have any ideas to create Twitter based apps like widgets?

I have not looked into Twitter based apps or widgets. I think there’s a ton of very capable developers creating some very awesome things out there already. I don’t see any needs that can’t be filled by one of these already, other than what I mentioned above.

-What do you think Twittering reporters could contribute to the world?

Speed and signal (as opposed to noise). Accuracy is debatable still, and there is always the potential for people to exaggerate and spread panic. But, I believe in the awesome people overcoming the stupid in the end.

-If you could collaborate on a Twitter app/newspaper feed, what would be your role?

I think probably an editor. I am pretty opinionated about what makes worthwhile news.

-Do you think Twitter creates better lives?

I think, like every other tool we have at our disposal, it can be used for good or for evil. Luckily the evil hasn’t been sustainable yet, but I think Twitter is a great tool for certain things. It can be a distraction, just like TV and email, but it can also be used for amazing positive things as well. I like to imagine what those things might be and how they might apply to my life as well as other’s.

-What other businesses are you involved in?

I’ll try to sum them up quickly. PerfectSpace.com is a business I’ve been running for a few years. It is cool because in Bellingham, WA, when I lived there, there was a severe lack of good information about what rental properties were available (Craigslist didn’t exist there yet). So, I built a web application for the property managers to list their properties.

A new company I’m very excited about is called Consource.us and generates job leads for construction contractors. It’s not quite ready for prime-time yet and it’s in a very unsexy (for us web workers) industry. But, I like unsexy industries. They’re usually low competition and high profit. I’m excited about this one because the timing is perfect for the construction industry to jump into the web, although they’re about 15 years behind everyone else.

And then there’s projects like 50photos.com. It isn’t a business, it’s just a project. The idea is to take awesome photographs licensed under a Creative Commons license and aggregate them together under one theme. With all the photographers’ giving their ok to the project, they get $1 for every photo published in every book that’s sold. Right now, we’re doing a run of 50 books for the theme, “Old”. We’ve gotten some great feedback from people and are very excited about the project, to the point that we’d like to extend it into new themes. It’s cool because it ends up giving money to those who never asked for it, but are very talented and deserve it.

All of the above projects, except for Consource, were products of late night brainstorming sessions while trying to fall asleep. Usually they ended up in 2:30am programming sessions and months of obsession following. This is why I do web development — because it allows me to do business.

-What did you study in school?

Because I started college when I was 24 instead of 18, I studied the intricacies of procrastination and avoidance — a true life skill. I truly had a spreadsheet for each class which kept track of every grade I received and what percentage of the entire grade for the class it was. Many times, I never even went to the final test because I knew I could pass even if I completely skipped it.

But, the classes I actually went to because I enjoyed them were business classes. I graduated from Western Washington University with a BA in Management Information Systems. I now have that piece of paper that says I know what I’m talking about.