The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 5:24 UTC (Tue) by ewen (subscriber, #4772)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

140-Character broadcasts look an awful lot like a combination of the worst features of cellular short messaging and Usenet

(As a non-Twitter user) I've long considered Twitter to be a combination of SMS and IRC (rather than Usenet). People seem to use it as an IRC replacement (often without ever having seen IRC; "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"). The "killer app" seems to be link sharing, which it manages only tolerably well due to length limitations. (It surprises me that one or more of the "link shortening" services hasn't been found to be Man-in-the-Middling large numbers of users.) Like IRC it copes fairly well with "temporary community" due to the extremely ad-hoc means of creating a new community (hashtag, in both cases). (The irony for me is that there've been multiple "broadcast" based message services over the last 25 years, including Usenet and IRC, and they seem to keep being reinvented in a centralised fashion only to suffer terrible scalability problems for a while. Who knew, right?)

All that said, I too found searching on Twitter's web interface somewhat useful (to find links to photos) in a recent major event near me. It does appear to be the place the "crowd effect" is working at present.

Ewen

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 14:47 UTC (Tue) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (3 responses)

A lot of people express strong opinions about the value of twitter/identi.ca without having seriously used it. I did too! But of course it is usually a mistake to think that I know better than other people do about something that they are doing and I am not.

Because when I eventually gave in and tried it, I found that twitter/identi.ca provides great value to me, when used in the way that I use it.

One thing that I appreciate about our grumpy editor's journalistic practices is that he doesn't opine on a subject without having first-hand experience to report.

One tip our grumpy editor might consider is to rely more on the follow button, and on reading the streams of individual twitter accounts, and less on the search feature.

I've never used twitter to follow "breaking news" (about emergencies or exciting events in the worlds of celebrities or politics, for example), but for the uses that I put twitter to, searching mostly turns up noise (to my ears).

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 17:49 UTC (Tue) by jpnp (guest, #63341) [Link] (1 responses)

...when used in the way that I use it. ... but for the uses that I put twitter to, searching mostly turns up noise.

Care to enlighten us on what you do find it useful for?

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 14, 2010 18:15 UTC (Tue) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

I use twitter and identi.ca for learning, teaching, and interacting with a small group (between 50 and 1000 people) in a combined social+professional+technical way. You can see my activity here: http://twitter.com/zooko and http://identi.ca/zooko/all

The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

Posted Sep 15, 2010 7:56 UTC (Wed) by ludo (guest, #5052) [Link]

One tip our grumpy editor might consider is to rely more on the follow button, and on reading the streams of individual twitter accounts, and less on the search feature.

Good tip!

I found that following the right subset of twitter users provides both quick access to world news and forms a good barometer for public opinion. "Searching" provides noise, but "following" provides added value.