Esquire watched the #worldcup hashtag on Twitter and determined that only 7.6% of the tweets contained meaningful conversation.
I think that’s not a #worldcup-only phenomenon. I’ve been making one of my every-so-often efforts to try to understand the appeal and usefulness of Twitter and I’m stumped again. There are a few gems (like BPGlobalPR and FakeAPStylebook) that have original, funny content, but they’re the exception. Wonkette is pretty typical — they just use Twitter like a RSS feed. Even Roger Ebert’s Twitter feed, which is pretty good, has too much RSS-like post pimping and retweeting for my taste.
I will admit that it’s pretty addictive. If you follow enough people there’s always something new in your Twitter stream, even if only 8% of it is worth reading.
cleek
fuck Twitter
John Cole
I use twitter to launch pointed and personal attacks at mainstream journalists. I find it 100% cathartic.
Chris Johnson
It’s literally like birdcalls- “I’m here I’m here I’m here I’m here” :)
The ones I follow are people I’m honestly interested in how they’re doing on a day to day basis, convention announcements, woman I’m secretly in love with… ;)
I’ve also used it as an emergency alert system for the comic I used to do, because I could put a tweetbox on the page and then if something went wrong and I couldn’t update or even reach my site, I could change the twitter post to ‘Locked out of my site, ohnoes!’ and it would be displaying on the page, giving progress reports of my getting the site back :)
I’m jinxtigr on twitter, only follow about 60 people, most of whom aren’t crazy active. I’ve unfollowed otherwise nice people for blowing away my entire screen with extended rants delivered 140 characters at a time. Part of the appeal of Twitter is, it’s always a summary. No single update should take more than ten seconds to read and process :)
daveNYC
I like William Gibson’s feed. GreatDismal.
Random, and not as prolific as Ebert’s.
dmsilev
Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap”.
It’s one of those universal truths.
dms
jb
Twitter is fun, but unlike blogs, which take up way too much of my time, both reading and writing one, and Facebook, which keeps me modestly in touch with people I would not otherwise be modestly in touch with, Twitter is just a time-killer. Reading it is like playing a couple of games of Tetris or something. There’s no real there there. At 140 characters, it’s good mostly for A) a surrogate RSS feed; B) dick jokes; C) the deep thoughts of Sarah Palin. I use it to launch bon mots into the void, but if it stopped working tomorrow, I don’t think I would miss it.
Exceptions: Tweets of Old and Rosanne Cash’s feed. Those I’d miss.
Libby
What John Cole said. Its greatest value is even for a nobody like me, chances are the journotwits will read the tweets. Sometimes they even respond. Better than emailing them.
Otherwise, it’s kind of cyclical. When there’s a lot of news, sometimes you’ll find good links you might have missed. But admit it can get pretty shallow and silly when the news cycle is slow. Really, its value is all about who you follow.
cmorenc
If you look at the contents of any medicine or insecticide, the % of active ingredients is nearly always much less than 8%. So the operative question might be: is twitter medicine or poison to informing your mind?
mistermix
@John Cole: Well, that’s much better than, say, pushing your FourSquare feed onto Twitter, I’ll give you that.
J.W. Hamner
I started an account to give it a try… only to follow others… and I don’t exactly get it either. Occasionally you get an interesting link, but I still have a visceral fear of links I can’t see the full url of, honed by years of internet surfing.
If I was in high school or college right now I could see how it would be awesome to communicate with friends… but for news it seems like it it’s only good if sitting on CNN’s website and constantly refreshing just is not fast enough… and you don’t mind a lot of rumors and nonsense to sort through to hear about some event 35 seconds before everybody else.
PeakVT
DPRK_FA is amusing, though obviously it has a limited future.
twiffer
that is in line with the general stats on twitter usage patterns. of course, it all hinges on what is considered “meaningful”. i believe that “pass-along value” is the criteria used. granted, that is still highly subjective; what i deem important, or amusing, or interesting enough to pass along to another (offline even!) is going to be unique to my personality.
scbarr
Twitter is a fucking useless waste of time. Seems to me the cable pundits are the only ones really using it, and it’s all just a bunch of re-tweets anyway.
Funkhauser
I was trying to track down a Senator (from Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil), and reading his Twitter feed let me know when he was back in Campo Grande and when he was off in Brasília. Of course, this only worked because he extensively details each thing he does. When I called to talk to his secretary, I could say, “Look, I know he’s going back to Brasília on Tuesday; can we set something up then?”
It’s a professional tool, in some (rather idiosyncratic) cases.
Rommie
Twitter is best when event-driven. It’ll make it’s mark when the next big Collective event hits.
It’s also valuable to online game developers, as they can comments on updates and problems quicker than posting on boards.
I like Ebert too, but sometimes he can tweet like a Blue Jay on crack.
Pigs & Spiders
Newspapers and Magazines would be so lucky if only 92% of what was in their folds was crap.
arguingwithsignposts
@Rommie:
Given his unique circumstances, I’m willing to give him a pass. If I couldn’t speak, I think I might tweet more often too.
Brien Jackson
So far as politics go, the only usefulness I get out of Twitter is people re-tweeting links from sites/writers I don’t go to much or don’t know. Other than that, I basically don’t use it for much beyond baseball discussions now. It’s pretty useful for that.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Twitter is just too much. The only purpose I can find is that it’s another outlet for stupid people to say stupid things that might or might not cause a stupid shitstorm.
Twitter is a great tool for stupid people in that they’re limited to 140 characters so they don’t have to formulate complete sentences or coherent thoughts.
I think it’s appropriate to call people who send Twitters “Twits”. The people who read Twitter are “Twats”.
Libby
@Chris Johnson: Yeah, I’ve unfollowed perfectly nice people too for a) too many extended negative rants, b) too many RTs of personal convos about nothing in particular. If I wanted to sit in on every convo I’d follow both and c) too much snarky hashtagging. Sometimes I play too, but often I don’t have time and it overloads the feed if they put up three dozen in a row for every single game. I try to limit my participation to three or less entries if I play.
Comrade Javamanphil
If I need a laugh, I fire up Twitterific on my iPhone and I’m about 75% likely to find something amusing in my feed. I need nothing else from Twitter. Getting called a caped crusader by Jake Tapper was a definite bonus though.
Michael D.
I love the FakeAPStylebook:
Never use anti-gay epithets such as “faggot,” “fudge-packer,” or “conservative Christian activist.”
Angelos
I use Twitter as a business and networking tool, and it has been very valuable.
I’ve “met” many people in my industry and in connected industries, had interesting conversations about related topics. Many of them I’ve subsequently met at trade shows and conferences, and considering how painfully shy I am in person, it was great to have a bunch of people I already knew to hook up with for conversation, lunch, drinks, etc.
I also follow/am followed by many home brewers and wine-makers, baseball fans, whatever.
You can manage and filter the noise with twitter apps, and if you don’t follow too many people, you achieve much higher than 8% value.
So, I’ve made friends, made connections, and made money with Twitter.
But I’ll get off your lawn now.
Saragon
My basic rule is that if the people you’re following aren’t interesting people, you’re using Twitter wrong.
The best analogy I’ve ever heard for the service compared Twitter to a dinner conversation: Quick little blurbs and comments that, when put together, can make for either extremely interesting or extremely inane conversation, depending who you’re talking to. Moreover, both dinner conversations and Twitter are public—you shouldn’t say anything you don’t want overheard in either place.
Personally, I’d say at least 85% of the people I follow on Twitter are extremely interesting. I play a lot of tabletop RPGs, and so a lot of the people I follow work in that industry. They trade ideas around on Twitter, discuss how to run games well, answer questions, alert followers to useful or interesting websites (yes, including their own), and even arrange online games—just as a crowd of people sharing the same interests might do. The only difference is that each sentence has a 140-character limit.
I suspect that a lot of the people who despise Twitter either have only pictured the boring person tweeting “Off to the bathroom!” as if it’s important (Facebook gets a lot of this), or follow everyone they deem “important” in the real world no matter how interesting they actually are. (I pity reporters who have to subscribe to every pol’s inane Twitter feed, for example.) Do these boring and useless people tweet? Yes. Do you have to follow them? No. Let them blather on into emptiness while you engage in useful, intelligent dialog with people you care about.
That bears repeating: If you wouldn’t hold an interesting conversation with a particular person, why would you follow them on Twitter?
Sheila
Doesn’t the name “Twitter” say it all? As far as I’m concerned, “Twitter” is for the birds (and they do it well, unlike their human counterparts).
Linda Featheringill
Choose who you follow.
I follow some relatives [because I really am interested in what they are doing], the Science Editor at The Guardian, three astronauts, two veterinarians [one in US and other in Ireland], that BP global thing, a cat, and a bird. And SkyTruth.
Because I am probably silly, I also follow Big Ben from London. Love it.
What’s not to love?
JGabriel
OT, but: former GOP Congressman, and current McCain primary opponent, JD Hayworth has been caught serving as pitchman for scam infomercials promising Free! Government! Money!
Hayworth’s latest defense: Blame a black Republican!
Such appealing sensitivity. GOP minority outreach efforts always give me the warm tingles.
.
SealDeal
I think JoeBobBriggs found one of the best uses for the abbreviated format, Twitter haiku:
twitter.com/therealjoebob
Brian J
It’s helpful to think of it like an aggregator where you do less and less of the work. If someone you know is on Twitter, like a journalist or blogger of some type, following them is an easy way to keep track of their work. It’s also a great way to find new and interesting voices about areas you like. I’ve come across numerous people who work in finance and financial journalism and the media work. Sometimes, I’ve even engaged them in a conversation, which is pretty cool, although they usually stop responding to me once they find out I am a nobody.
The biggest problem for me is the limit on characters. Sometimes, there’s just no way to effectively convey what you are thinking without bleeding into several different tweets. It’s also annoying that links count towards the character limit, although, assuming I did not hallucinate this, I think I remember that might be changing.
I was very skeptical of it, and in some ways, I still am. No, there’s a large part of it that isn’t useful, but if someone isn’t worth following, you can just not follow them. That’s what I do. And really, how different is that than any other information source? I love The New Yorker, but a lot of it, I ignore, because I don’t have much interest in poetry, dance, or a lot of other stuff like that.
ellaesther
As someone who used to feel like J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford, I can say that my opinion has shifted 180 degrees.
Well, probably 150 degrees.
IT’S A TOOL. IT DOES WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO.
I use it largely as a clipping service and as a way to spread word of my own writing or to advocate for causes I believe in. I often find interesting articles that I would not have found were I not plugged into Twitter’s hive mind, and I have found new readers/compatriots.
For instance: I wrote about the Holla Back movement (anti-street harassment) on my blog the other day, and in searching for twitter feeds for the two local Holla Back sites I knew of (NYC and DC), I found a third site that’s global. I tweeted about my post and about the sites, which led to a few entirely new readers on my site, one of whom said she wished there were a Chicago Holla Back. When I discovered that there was one, I tweeted about it, both generally and directly to the commenter in question.
Because I’m careful about who I follow and I block people who I can tell are just following me to sell me their services, my feed is fairly narrow-focused and almost always interesting — often in ways that surprise me and add to my day. Do people occasionally tweet stupid things? Sure. But I challenge you to find any form of human interaction which does not occasionally contain stupidity.
Even Balloon Juice.
Brian J
@JGabriel:
I’ve become more and more open about the fact that, on at least a professional level, I despise a lot of Republicans. For a long time, I tried to be a nice guy and assume that, for whatever flaws they had, there was some redeeming value to current and recent-past Republicans. Hayworth was the exception to that rule. He’s a truly useless piece of shit. I fully hope that he knocks McCain off in the primary and the Democrats pump money into the campaign so he can lose and take the blame for handing the seat to our side.
Brian J
@Saragon:
There’s a guy I work with who is famous for doing this on Facebook. He will type pretty much whatever thought pops into his head, no matter how useless, boring, or disgusting. A few weeks ago, he described how he was up all night running to the bathroom because of broccoli. I like him much of the time as a person, but he’s a gigantic guy (probably pushing 300 pounds) who can be pretty crude, so you can imagine how horrified a lot of people were.
twiffer
@Saragon: i don’t really despise twitter, just don’t use it. certainly it is most useful as a conversation tool, but if the people you desire to talk with aren’t using it either, there really is no point.
but again, interesting conversation for one person is useless babble for another.
r
like any tool, it can be misused. If you follow crap, you’ll get crap in return. dont blame twitter, blame yourself.
CJ
Does anyone remember Christopher Walken’s twitter feed? It turned out to be fake, but was still the funniest thing ever inspired by twitter. I almost … almost … signed up for that alone.
Rommie
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yeah, I don’t mind Ebert’s tweeting volume, or I’d de-follow him. He can really get to chirping sometimes :0 but most of it is interesting reading.
fucen tarmal
i find twitter to be amusing as hell in that you can find random doses of things you wouldn’t spend more than 140 characters reading….from some of the nuts on the right, to idiot celebs performing without a publicist(you can really tell) to the more interesting or relevant topics…
also too, say there is a game on between the schmos and the underroo bandits. you can follow some conversation between fans of the two….for off color color the paid announcers won’t give…and dick jokes…
sherifffruitfly
Uh… the internet itself is 92% useless you tard.
In that case, as in this case, the trick to getting utility is to be able to quickly filter signal from noise.
Just go tell some kids to get off your lawn or something. urdoinitwrong.
J.W. Hamner
Maybe it’s that I don’t follow the right people, because while I mainly follow people whose blogs I read, it seems for the most part all I see are links to blog posts already in my RSS feed reader… or links to articles that will become a future blog post. I have yet to see a single interesting “conversation” and am sort of at a loss to imagine how one would occur 140 characters (or less!) at a time… but then I never got IRC either.
Tom Hilton
Mostly useless, but it depends on whom you follow. Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War, Gates of Heaven) is always interesting and usually funny. Some feeds I follow because they link to posts I don’t want to miss (TPM, Greg Sargent, Ta-Nehisi Coates). I tend to go mostly for snarky one-liners (@tvhilton), myself.
But acknowledging the uselessness of most of Twitter, I think there is potential value for liberals in the effort of trying to distill their positions into a 140-character format. The right has been doing exactly that, successfully, for decades.
Xecky Gilchrist
@sherifffruitfly: I was gonna say – 8% useful is probably higher than the Web taken as a whole.
I (probably mis) quote Kibo himself: “The ‘net is like a vast sea of lutefisk with tiny dinosaur brains embedded in it, such that most spoonfuls have an IQ of 1, but occasional spoonfuls have an IQ of more than six times that.”
And that was about Usenet circa 1992, before the AOL shitstorm really hit.
Brian J
@Xecky Gilchrist:
For a long, long time, I’ve thought that it’s a great thing if you want what’s out there. If you want to read articles from a think tank, it’s now a helluva lot easier than it was before the Internet came along. The same thing goes for following sports, or getting porn, or just laughing at something or goofing off. But that’s what most people do, or want to do. It doesn’t make the medium less useful. It just means that the people who using it have different priorities.
mem from somerville
I think if you can find the right targeted topic, with the right user base, it works. In my field there is sort of a core of folks who actually do tweet useful things, interesting papers and news, good blog posts, conference talks, etc. And it is rarely mis-used as a hashtag. (if it matters, I’m talking #bioinformatics and #genomics)
My non-field acquaintances though…eek. I had to uncheck a few from my tweetdeck list due to their twitto-rhea. Don’t they have other stuff to do?
MMonides
Compared to … ?
Twitter-bashing is just blog-bashing, but for bloggers.
Remember November
The characters of True Blood are tweeting. That’s a reason.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Brian J: I quite agree. For me, the ‘net is a massive playground, though it’s also a great way to store and retrieve ephemeral tech reference materials so we no longer kill trees for them.
Sentient Puddle
How about the people who link their Twitter accounts with their Facebook status…and then proceed to be part of the 92% of useless tweeters? Can I bitch and moan about them, at least?
Bill in Portland Maine
Ahem.
I fear I’m not contributing to the usefulness of teh twitter.
But I hardly ever link to nuthin’. It’s virtually 100% pure Billy, baby!
–
jron
my wife uses it for post-partum depression advocacy and to promote and discuss her artwork. recently she and some others were able to help a suicidal ppd-sufferer find help, and learned of the woman’s problem through twitter and were able to follow up with the woman’s friends via email.
I use it to throw observations out every few days, but mainly it just lets me know when there’s an update here or at rumproast. I found some new blogs there, and have occasionally found articles via hashtag when working on a specific project, but that’s mainly luck.
8% seems high, but I’d peg the blogosphere in general at around 1%. and my own facebook page at around 1.5%. So all in all less time-wasting than some other things.
jron
@Bill in Portland Maine: yeah that’s why I follow you!
Lurker
@mistermix – I think Twitter exists solely to deliver Sh*t My Dad Says. Funny stuff.
WereBear
I use Facebook & Twitter as a way of sending out old posts to new readers who might not have the time or inclination to wade through my previous stuff.
So it’s not a duplicate of my feed.
Catsy
Normally I don’t have a visceral hatred of tools. A tool is as good or bad as the way in which it is used. The problem I have with Twitter is that by design it dramatically increases the signal to noise ratio of the internet, and encourages shallow thinking and discourse with little forethought or mental filter.
Every single human being in this world has incredibly stupid thoughts running through their head on a regular basis. Most of these stupid thoughts get filtered before they reach the mouth, and fewer still make it to email or blog posts. Even IM–subject to similar character limits–has the advantage of being a conversation between a small number of people, usually two.
Twitter, on the other hand–as overwhelmingly utilized by its users–is analogous to hooking your brain up to an RSS feed and instructing it to pick the foremost thoughts out of your stream of consciousness and broadcast them. It’s like reality TV for people who don’t have the attention span to watch an entire half hour of television. There is a very real and growing problem with shallow thinking and short attention spans in the internet age, and the ubiquity of Twitterrhea is making that problem worse by orders of magnitude.
I’ve thought about getting an account, mainly to use it as a glorified RSS feed for announcing new builds, project brainstorms, or WIPs. I’ve hesitated mainly because the last thing I need in my life is a new way to put things on the internet that entirely bypasses the mental filter and revision process that I rely on to (not entirely successfully) avoid being an asshole on the intartrons.
Comrade Kevin
Twitter was designed the way it was so that the messages could fit inside a cell phone SMS.
Catsy
@Comrade Kevin:
Yes, I’m fully aware of the reason for the 140-character limit.
That does not in any way alter a single word of what I wrote.
Nutella
Twitter is terrible for conversation. I’m surprised Esquire found as much as 7.6% of it had useful conversation.
It’s for announcements or as someone said upthread its purpose is to launch bon mots into the void.
Complaining that you can’t have a good conversation on Twitter is like complaining that you can’t order a pork chop at a vegetarian restaurant. It’s not what they do there, and if you insist you’ll only get a poor imitation of the real thing.
If you want good conversations you need a different medium. If you want interesting announcements you need Twitter with a good follow list.
Lumpenprole
There’s a twitter feed for riders of the SF Bay Area Caltrain system that is simply awesome. Tweets include the station, train #, time, north or south bound and the status. Makes it very easy to determine if you’re going to be delayed or stranded. Helpful stuff too – train #x is standing room only due to the game, #y is just five minutes behind.
I have yet to see a personal or media tweet that made me value Twitter over email, blogs, txt, rss, etc… Then again, I don’t give a shit about 99.99% of TV and magazine content, so maybe there’s nothing to see here.
Resident Firebagger
Twitter is just more blog comments, but the collected blog comments of a single person. For all the bloggers/commenters (just on B-J alone) who I enjoy reading, I honestly can’t think of five people in the world who are so amusing that I’d like to know what they’re thinking 24/7.
That I actually spend some time reading blog comments (or that anyone reads my comments) is bad enough. I truly will never understand the on-going appeal of Twitter…
Angelos
This is news to people who have conversations on Twitter.
fucen tarmal
when we had the huge snows here in february, and the city utterly botched the clean-up, mostly by waiting til snow had already packed most people in, to call out the crews, which exponentially increases the impact of 2 feet of snow….
twitter was great crowd-sourcing for updates on which roads were passable, or not worth trying….
Lysana
I use Twitter to keep up with friends both local and far-flung, read about lives I don’t lead but find interesting, and to get news and opinions in an easily accessible space. It is indeed possible to have decent conversations on Twitter. I know someone who participates in a daily literature discussion via the #litchat hashtag. I don’t follow it, but what I see of her commentary is sufficiently interesting that I know I’d love it if I wanted the timesuck it represented.
Twitter is also very useful for the up-to-the-minute short stuff, as has already been noted. When I commuted via Caltrain, that feed was irreplaceable for me. I keep it around in case I need it again.
Quiddity
@PeakVT: You beat me to it. They are doing a good job. Very funny with yesterday’s 7-0 loss.