Here is what I don’t understand about twitter. When blogs came out and started to rise in popularity, lots of folks in the MSM and elsewhere said “Great. Just what we need. The undigested, unedited thoughts of the rabble.” If blogs are the undigested thoughts, tweets are the orts.
And I say this as a guy who fires off numerous posts a day without properly thinking through most of them, usually in a fit of pique, later having to come back and apologize and correct the record or both. I had a twitter account for approximately an hour and thought to myself “No good can come from this.”
And not only that, the few times I have attempted to read “tweets,” I can never figure out who is saying what and why, and they all read like cell phone text messages between 12 year olds.
/fuddyduddy
p.a.
That’s why twitter-like communication will thrive. Humans are among the most social animals on the planet, and can’t resist checking out car-wrecks.
Athenae
I like the link-exchange factor. People saying no more than HEY LOOKIT THIS. Also sarcasm is what my people do instead of God, so it works for me that way.
A.
Lit3Bolt
hey JC jst putup pst abt how old n outoftch heis lollol PS lets gt sme brnch after we wash Lrd Chny’s feet on Sndy k? —-intercepted Villager tweet
Little Dreamer
Not only are they good at rubber necking to see the wrecks, they’re really good at causing them too.
Humans are a disease on this planet. John is correct, no good can come of it.
gex
My girlfriend follows a bunch of her favorite Internet cultural icons (Kottke, Merlin Mann, John Hodgeman, etc.). I guess if you pick interesting enough people who also have sense enough not to tweet every last thought, it can be pretty entertaining.
But you want to turn off your message notification when SXSW starts. Her phone has been buzzing constantly.
geg6
Well, if you’re a fuddy duddy, so am I. I simply don’t get this Twitter craze among our political and media elite. What I’ve seen of it seems little more than the notes we passed in class in junior high. And surely anything that crowd is so enamored of must be a trend that jumped the shark long ago, if it ever was the "latest thing."
Little Dreamer
@Athenae:
Sarcasm is a religion? Who knew?
Doctor Gonzo
If you are using the website to read/tweet, you will get frustrated. You need to use another client like Twhirl (which I use) or Tweetdeck (which I have heard some good things about).
Zak
I understand pretty well why people, um…tweet. A new outlet for our narcissism is precious indeed. I’m mystified, though, why anyone would want to readsomeone else’s…er, tweets. I’ve tried, and I can’t imagine anything more tedious.
Svensker
Fixt
(And damn you, WP Ajax, damn you with a thousand damns.)
calipgyian
They should have named it "twaddle". And the people who use the service "twats".
Libby
Sign me up for the fuddy duddy list. I blogged yesterday’s twitterwar which I sort of half followed. And last week I spent a couple of hours reading tweets trying to figure out what the attraction is. Don’t see it. But then I don’t text msg either.
I did figure out what bothers me about it yesterday. It seems that the ZOMG Obama dissed special needs people frenzy started because of Tapper’s tweet. Tapper at some point yesterday said he was blocking people because he had been misquoted. I’m thinking it just feeds the whole media frenzy for immediacy over accuracy. I find it hard to believe this is a good thing for responsible journalism.
Bad Horse's Filly
@geg6: I, too, see Twitter as a short-lived phenom, if only because it’s been embraced by people with no cool factor at all, and OMG over 35. Nothing kills a trend faster than it being faved by your parents and grandparents. You had to know when MSM showered it will all this love, it was doomed.
Bill H
Not to mention the 13,000-odd people (odd people?) who think they are "tweeting" Keith Olbermann. They’re not. It’s a fake. I wonder how many more people (odd people?) are not "tweeting" the person they think they are "tweeting."
And I’m just starting my second cup of coffee and, wait… Ah, I just farted. God, aren’t you thrilled.
But don’t worry, it wasn’t me. It was someone else pretending to be me.
Ned R.
@Doctor Gonzo:
If you are using the website to read/tweet, you will get frustrated.
Actually that’s about the only way I want to read it! (Though I do have a client for my iPhone.) Pretty much the trick is to make sure it never sends you any individual messages to your phone — ever — and to idly glance at the most recent posts once or twice a day and maybe check out a couple of links of interest. I usually only post there once or twice a day, and often it’s me posting a link to one of my own stories after having been published. I only follow friends so it’s more like checking in with everyone and going ‘oh hey, what’s up.’
John Cole
@Ned R.: You mean people actually have that shit sent to their phone? So you can’t escape it? And all through out the day, depending on how many people you “follow” and how much they “tweet” you will get hundreds of phone alerts?
This is worse than I thought.
Ned R.
@John Cole: You mean people actually have that shit sent to their phone?
It was the first thing I noticed when I signed up for an account there. I just thought, "That sounds like the stupidest thing ever" and immediately disabled that option.
AhabTRuler
What doesn’t that cover these day?
I only use my phone to make phone calls, but hey that’s me. I have been a Grumpy Old Man (GOM) since I was 8.
bootlegger
One more sign of the End of Modern Journalism. Nothing, I repeat nothing, can be reported in 140 characters or less.
And I vote with the it-feeds-narcissism point above, no doubt it explains its popularity. Imagine the shudder of delight as people’s high opinions of themselves are fed by the notion that people care to read your latest brain fart. At least with blog discussion there is a non-zero probability that you will be ignored or blamed for your smelly fart. The tweet is the old silent-but-deadly fart, but instead of quietly leaving the room people are owning it and expecting the crowd to thrive on the fart’s ambrosia.
I seem to have farts on my mind, not new I suppose.
Rex
Amen, John.
Throwin Stones
Add me to the list of old and in the way.
I use my cell to make phone calls and barely have time to check in on a couple blogs a day. BJ, of course is mandatory ;)
Incertus
@John Cole: Closest I come to Twitter is following status updates on Facebook, and I unplug from that a good deal of the time. If that’s all Facebook was useful for, I’d have quit it a long time ago. That’s what Twitter feels like to me–the status update section of Facebook, without any of the other stuff to go along with it.
OriGuy
I don’t even like to text people I know. I’ve misunderstood and been misunderstood too many times. I prefer to communicate in complete sentences.
Ricky Bobby
Being on the bleeding edge of news in someone else’s life has never appealed nor interested me. I figure if it’s important enough I will find out in due time, and maybe with pics (hopefully some nudes if she’s a hottie).
Other than that, I could really give a flying fuck about what other people are doing this very second. Having a group of fawning losers "following" my every twitch on the interwebz is my idea of a living hell.
I’m sure my kids will laugh at me about it, but aren’t dad’s supposed to be hellaciously out of the loop?
/living up to expectations
GSD
One need only know that Karl Rove is considered THE most influential Twitterer in DC to know that this is the playground of the dessicated, corrupt establishment.
Twitter away MC Rove, and dance, David Gregory, dance, dance, dance.
-GSD
Bruce Baugh
Meh.
I find Twitter very useful. I have about a hundred folks I follow, and about that many follow me. Something like half of what I do is work-related – I’m a game designer and author, almost entirely housebound by disabilities, and we do a lot of tossing around nuggets of ideas for writing projects, forum posts, and the like. The other half is the sort of chit-chat I’d get in an office if I were capable of going to an office on a regular basis. I follow one celebrity I know, and two I don’t, but the vast majority of of my Twitter history is simply exchanges with folks I know.
I admit to being annoyed at some of the sniping I see about Twitter just because this comes up every damn time anything is so unfortunate as to become popular. "Word processing is ruining prose! Anything worth writing is worth more effort than that. Look what it’s doing to people’s already slopping spelling and grammar!" "Who needs e-mail? What the hell are you saying that’s so important it can’t wait for a letter to get delivered? And look what it’s doing to people’s already slopping spelling and grammar?" "What’s all this damn HTTP stuff? What’s so all-fired important that you have to show pictures – can’t you illiterate morons just describe it? And look what it’s doing to people’s already slopping spelling and grammar?" And on and on.
It’s one thing to say "I don’t see anything very appealing to me." I do that myself all the time. It’s another to be so confident that therefore there isn’t anything of value, and yet another to act as though it’s any surprise that a lot of people using it type badly and often think sloppily. If that’s an argument against it, it’s also an argument against allowing most people to speak in any way whatsoever.
AhabTRuler
@GSD: You HAVE to be kidding.
Tom
I think Twitter is pretty cool. I don’t have an account but follow a bunch ofTwitterers on RSS and I enjoy the hell out of it. Some of the best links on media criticism come from Jay Rosen’s tweets. That medium is just made for him. I follow some of my favorite blog commenters as well.
Some of the serious journos have great twitter threads — kind of personal impressions on events or on the pieces they are doing, or the mechanics of the job, or asking for input. Sometimes you think someone can be good to follow and you find out they are boring as hell, then you just stop following. David Gregory’s twits are just as unsweetened oatmeal-like as his journalism, for example. Sometimes I pick up a thread just for the existing controversy, like that Big Unfollowing between Tapper and the twitterverse. Funny shit. Really funny shit.
You hit it lucky when someone is witty but in a limited way, not too prolific, and has interesting stuff to say. Too much snark without substance and all capital letters is boring and tiresome. Bottom line, they are just tiny blogs. Kinda fun.
passerby
What’s been puzzling me about the whole Twitter thing is how fast it came onto the scene. It happened suddenly and was, all at once, everywhere.
Were people being paid to Twitter? Why did so many politicians and media folk start touting it like they were major stock holders? Someone is making money off of it but how and who?
It took off like gangbusters and for the life of me I can’t imagine why the instantaneous broadcasting of just-hatched musings would be of interest to anyone. Twitter schmitter.
I don’t get it.
Signed,
Your Fuddy Duddy Buddy
Tom
The thing’s been going for awhile, but it got really big when a couple of events were first reported via Twitter: Mumbai, when the plane went into the Hudson, the China Earthquake, stuff like that. People Twittered from like the DNC stuff that was happening for people who couldn’t get in. Then one journo broke a story when Inofe or Hoekstra or someone disclosed confidential info on a trip to Iraq and a journo picked it up.So with that kind of emergent breaking news, journos thought they’d better get on so they didn’t miss out. Result: explosion in mediocre anchors following twitter. Some of them are pretty decent though.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but I think it’s pretty cool. I don’t follow Rove, of course. Who gives a crap what he has to say?
JayAckroyd
It’s impossible to characterize Twitter because it is used in so many different ways. I like it for the same reason I like comment threads–I like conversations with interesting, literate, funny people. There are plenty of them there. The weird embrace of the medium by the Beltway media is, I expect, going to be short-lived. They’re just doing it, IMO, because Rick Sanchez at CNN got a huge ratings spike for making social media part of his dead time zone’s programming.
As the TapperTwitGate thing yesterday indicated, they are not interested in interaction with the dirty people. They’ll soon get tired of it.
aimai
still, huge points for using the word "orts."
aimai
Tom
I follow you Jay. JayAckroyd is a Twitterfeed not to be missed. Seriously.
Twitter / JayAckroyd
Martin
Well, Twitter is over 2 years old, so it’s been out there longer than most people think.
Twitter really took off when the iPhone got good twitter clients. Ease of use is more of a barrier to technologies than people realize. Before that it took quite a bit more effort to do from a phone and left out the audience most likely to use it (iPhone owners).
But if John had tweeted: "I think we are at peak wingnut" we would have all forgotten about it after 2 days. But because he blogged it, its officially an internet tradition. The news guys like being off the record only if everything they say is quickly forgotten.
Tom
Well, they are definitely not "off the record" on Twitter. If anyone thinks that, they are in trouble. Like that Repub who twittered about his Iraq trip in real time, or Tapper who is publicly making a big ass of himself. It may seem like they are off the record, but nevertheless, a public record is there.
You are right, "peak wingnut" would have been quickly forgotten on Twitter. It isn’t a venue for sticky deep thought. It’s a venue for emergent conversation. Some of that is really very interesting.
Bvac
twitter has been around for two years, it didn’t just spring out of nowhere. I only started using it frequently when I got an iphone. Sending alerts to my old phone via SMS never worked well, and updating your status doesn’t work very well when you can only do it when you’re home. Aside from my friends, I only follow about 10 "celebrities" and it gets boring after you realize they only respond to their celeb friends and not you. Except Shaq, he replies to everyone.
The reason why DC loves twitter is that it is the soundbite version of blogging that they are in control of. They can have conversations with their beltway buddies and not have to deal with us. And they can use it purely ad a promotional gimmick.
Bad Horse's Filly
This sums it up for me
Emma Anne
What I understand from my teenager is that texting is a conversation with one person at a time (you might be texting two or three people at once, but they don’t see each other). So teenagers who like to be in each other’s pockets as much as possible probably use it like multi-party texting.
It does seem much like the status line on Facebook, but for people who want much higher bandwidth. Not for me (I even leave my cell phone in the car), but I bet I would have loved it when I was a teenager.
Anton Sirius
@Incertus:
And, not coincidentally, Facebook’s latest facelift emphasized the status updates to try and make your home page more Twitter-like.
Deborah
I was introduced to tweets when Ambinder would use them to watch the blog while he was traveling. My usual response was "sounds like an interesting story; why can’t I click on it?" Eventually I figured out that the little headline was the story.
As social networking, sure, go for it. No reason 20 people shouldn’t constantly broadcast short random thoughts to anyone whose e-mail they have, who will tolerate it. It’s the part where it’s used by news organizations and politicians and other serious people that I don’t get at all.
Anton Sirius
@Bruce Baugh:
Bruce, my big problem with Twitter (and the reason I haven’t signed up) is that it seems like a half-developed mess to me. I am quite convinced someone else will come along, take the same basic idea, clean it up and make it more coherent and usable.
Twitter isn’t Facebook on the innerwebz evolutionary scale. It isn’t even MySpace. It’s freakin’ Friendster, and as such I fully expect it to be obsolete twelve months from now.
superking
Twitter is instant messaging for wankers.
Phoenix Woman
Twittering is useful when it’s used by people with 1) something to say and 2) a limited time in which to say it.
The best users of Twitter that I’ve encountered are the folks who staff The UpTake, which does citizen video journalism. Their Twitter feed is dead useful for those of us trying to follow the Franken-Coleman recount and trial, as well as other Minnesota-related matters. But too many Tweeters are Twatting, as Stephen Colbert put it so elegantly the other day.
Ray Radlein
I’m siding with Bruce Baugh (Hi, Bruce! Didn’t know you were on Twitter — somehow missed picking you up from any of our mutual acquaintances’ follow lists) and Jay Ackroyd on this one. Twitter isn’t the Ultimate Thing of All Eternity, but it is entertaining and worthwhile if you follow entertaining and worthwhile people.
In a lot of ways, it’s like one giant Open Thread — like the ones on Eschaton, say — only where all of the messages are from people you like. It’s a vastly improved Haloscan, with a built-in ability to thread replies.
As for the SMS phone update thing, you can turn that off (I suspect almost everyone does), or enable updates to your phone on a person-by-person basis (so that you could get phone updates from just your family, say, or your co-workers). And even with updates to your phone turned off, you are still able to send updates to your account from your phone if you wish.
Twitter doesn’t replace blogging, of course — I mean, this message here would have had to be broken up into how many separate Twitter updates? — but it does do many things very well.
Hell, back when I was all over usenet, at least half of my messages were one-liners of less than 140 characters in length; they would have worked just fine as Twitter updates.
Bruce Baugh
Anton: For Twitter users, its relatively undeveloped nature is very much an advantage, because it allows for a lot of different approaches at the client end and working on a tremendous variety of devices, including very weak ones. In my corner of Twitterdom are users and programmers with memories of overdevelopment running back to, in some cases the FidoNet echomail spec becoming overdetermined in ways that cut off formerly productive nodes, and from there through HTML mail , table abuse in HTML 2, and like that, and who specifically want to keep things minimal.
And hey, it keeps people like Superking (@43) away, so that’s all good.
Phoenix Woman: True enough. :) Another thing about it is that it’s asynchronous in a way that reminds some of us of Usenet, which we liked. People can sit and refresh obsessively, or let things sit for hours or days and then catch up, and it works. My set, at least, expects that people will be drifting in and out, and this is okay; in terms of engagement it occupies a useful middle ground between e-mail, IM, and blogging and forums.
Hey, Ray, likewise on the missing. Glad to connect. :)
Ray Radlein
@BVAC:
In general, nerd/geek "celebs" are a lot more likely to reply to mere mortals than "traditional" celebs are. For instance, one of my friends from high school signed up for Twitter recently, and found me almost immediately — almost certainly because I had just gotten a reply from MST3k‘s Kevin Murphy which he noticed when he went to follow @kwmurphy.
And, yeah, Shaq’s stream-of-consciousness Twittering is pretty damned amusing at times. I know a lot of people who know nothing at all of basketball who nevertheless follow Shaq.
tbogg
I’m finding Twitter allows me to find the stuff I blog about easier to track down. This frees up time for more important things. Like masturbation.
I should totally tweet about that! Mankind must know!
Laura W
@OriGuy:
Word!
Rev. Bob
I use Twitter mostly because it’s a handy way to set my fb status, but I’m with John.
I remember the first time I installed AOL IM. I said to myself, "I just installed an app that lets other people annoy and interrupt me. I did this on purpose?" Zap. End of IM.
Anastasius
Twitter has a low enough entrance barrier that just about everyone can use it. Blogs are still a step above it with choosing layouts, maintaining forums, etc. That still scares people away but even most grandmas can operate a cellphone today.
And most important, Twitter isn’t about information or communication, it is about ME! How many people are following ME? Lets compare our number of followers! All the tech illiterate monster egos have a platform to spread their wisdom now. It’s all about the narcissism, otherwise you would just keep messaging your friends.
Bruce Baugh
"And most important, Twitter isn’t about information or communication, it is about ME!" And people say we’ve entered a new age of realism, or appreciation of the limits of one’s perspective, or anything like that. Clearly, the blogosphere is not about to run out of people who think they’ve got the Cosmic Cube anytime soon. Because we obviously haven’t had enough ignorant proclaiming to last us all multiple lifetimes yet.
The Other Steve
There was an article the other day about Dr. Drew Pinsky’s new book… and he talks about celebrity narcissism and how our media culture is encouraging it. He he mentions they look for people with outrageous behavior. Recently I noticed some idiot on some wife swap show made a statement about rednecks or something. A bunch of people got outraged and called to boycott the show. All they accomplished was to bring the show ratings, cause that was the goal of the stupid idiot and why they filmed his dumb comment.
Twitter is all about that. So too is facebook and myspace and so on. They are fads, they’ll die eventually. I just wish I knew what was next.
Granted, blogs were always about that too. Everyone knows the way to get a popular blog is to write something that pisses people off. If I wanted a popular tech blog, I’d just start writing about how much I hate Apple, for example. That’s how it works. It’s how you get hits.
One thing to watch, IMHO, is the direction television shows go. It seems to me that reality TV is already dying. We’re on the last legs of American Idol and Dancing with the Stars even. The new shows are back to drama and comedy, which is good. I prefer fake escapism rather than reality.
Bruce Baugh
Visual: gets popcorn, waits to see who else knows a whole lot more about my life and motives than I do, and hopes that the various Superior Rationals will end up in a fight with good sound effects.
Speaking of which, a little garlic butter melted and drizzled on popcorn is really nice, but Orville Reddenbacher’s Buttery Garlic is a horrible failure of the sort to make you think the Gnostics were right about God after all.
Tattoosydney
@Rev. Bob:
It says a lot about me that I read "fb status" as being something about your availability as a fuck buddy…
I hate facebook, but not as much as I hate twitter.
JayAckroyd
Ray R
The comparison to the Atriot’s crack den is very apt, and occurred to me as I wrote my comment. There are differences; people do post comments that are quite long, but ftmp the content is fast-paced, witty and filled with inside jokes.
I do find it a little odd when people say "Man that really sucks. I don’t use it." Doesn’t matter, of course, any more than it matters whether Tapper wants to hear contrary points of view. Plenty of room on the intertubez for all of us.
Tim in SF
@Doctor Gonzo:
I second that. DL and install Tweetdeck. It makes sense out of twitter, especially if you run search panes on keywords of your interest. And, you have to be "following" a good number of intelligent people.
I recommend:
@markosmoulitsas
@ranggrol
@HighTechDad
@jaketapper
@Count_Down
@craig_crawford
@JohnCleese
@laughingsquid
I’m @redtimmy in case you’re interested.
Adina
The key is to follow people who are saying things that are interesting to you (because you know them personally, or because they are sharing interesting stuff). And unfollow people who aren’t. You only see the people you’re following (unless you’re look at the whole twitter stream, and don’t do that). There are millions of people on Twitter; you should only be paying attention to the 20 or 50 or other small number of people you want to listen to.
Scott Lilwall
I’m going to defend Twitter here. I find it incredibly useful for my job – 24-hour news radio. It’s designed to rely heavily on our web presence and focus on hyper-local news. Twitter allows us to get alerts out to followers right away, long before a full story can be written and uploaded to the web.
Those who say you can’t report on something in 140 characters are absolutely right. But if a road closes or a courtroom verdict is handed down, you can get the information out there quickly.
The most attractive thing about Twitter, however, isn’t just how immediate it is, but that it’s a two-way street, even more than a blog is. Not only can I tell followers what is going on around the city – they can tell us when a street is closed down due to a waterbreak, or send us pictures of a rally that happened in their neighborhood.
Sure, Twitter can be narcissistic, insipid and shallow. So can blogs. It’s just a delivery device. The trick is to pick the good content. Follow the good Tweeters and skip over the crap – just like you do with any other media.
Jennyjinx
Twitter is actually 3 years old (today) and is just another communication and networking tool. It’s no more and no less. I really don’t get all the angst and hair pulling that’s been going on about it the last few days. Is it because the MSM finally discovered it? Pfft. They should’ve been doing their jobs and they wouldn’t have been left so far behind (and much of the "mainstream" liberal blogosphere was apparently left behind too).
I’ve been doing it for 2 years and find the best use for it is talking with friends and getting links to interesting blog posts (got to this post via Twitter, as a matter of fact). If you follow people that are more about sharing information and with whom you have something in common then you’ll find it a lot more interesting. If you don’t want the noise then there are ways to filter it– with apps (Tweetdeck) or your limiting follow base.
Right now the Conservatives are trying to take it over. They think they’ve finally found an online medium they can dominate and, with some of the attitude I’ve seen from the left this last week, it’s no wonder why. I’m glad to see that some of the Liberal/Left/Progressive Blogging "elite" have finally discovered it, but it’s a little depressing when so many of our best voices are busy poo-pooing the service.
Jill
@Tim in SF:
Keith Olbermann is not on Twitter. In fact Twitter earned his worst person in the world the other night for abetting this charade by refusing to take his picture down from the impostor’s account.
Twitter could turn out to be the FOIA of the 21st century
cbmc
wait, do I understand this right – the people citing Twitter as narcissitic navel-gazing are people who’re leaving comments on a political blog – possibly even, perish the thought, regular commenters there? log from thine own eye, etc, people
Terry
@Bad Horse’s Filly:
That was a link to a youtube video. I wanted to check it out, only to discover that it’s not available in this country (Ireland, not that it’s relevant). I’ve noticed this unavailability of this or that video a few times in the last month or two, whereas I never had in the years preceding. Same thing recently trying to take a gander at an SNL clip on the NBC site.
Sorry to stray from the topic, but what’s up with this new development? Any thoughts? It’s insignificant at present, for me at least, but I admit that such things tend to strike me as ominous.