Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

They track all the media, including social media, in real time and can report to their customers what stories appear about them in the media anywhere. They can also inform the customer in real time of the top twenty subjects people are talking about and in what proportions. It is all displayed on a dashboard in colored boxes with the headline and percentage in each box. “The Turkish presidency is a customer, and through our system they can receive a real-time poll service—every minute you can poll the public,” Yildiz explained to me.

data is making things easy for everyone now. The software that we have developed in-house aggregates all the news sources in Turkey and the United States every five minutes—even Google News does not track every source at this pace all the time. We track all the existing stories on Twitter, and we archive all the stories that we track—one million stories a day; no one is archiving like that even in the United States—so if a news source deletes the story they publish about you after it is circulated, you can still use our system to retrieve it and use it for judiciary purposes. And then any government or company can use that to track what is said about them.” How do you make money? “The business makes money on a subscription basis depending on how many keywords you want tracked and how many users you will have,” explained Yildiz. “ ‘Thomas Friedman’ would only be one word.” (A bargain!) “They can give you content analysis, what is being said about you, break it down by geography, where it is coming from, how many people in which city are reading it, who started the story about you or the trend first—that is, who are the influencers—and how many followers used the same wording or how the original wording evolved and changed.” I was intrigued. It turns out that whispering—like guessing—is also officially over. “All the members of the Turkish parliament are using it to track about themselves,” said Yildiz. “So are some news agencies, [who can] judge their reporters by whose sto...