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TWITTER....Today the New York Times christens "The Buzzwords of 2008," and one of them is:
This is designed to memorialize all forms of the word Twitter, whatever they may be. So as long as we're on the subject, can someone help me out with the whole twitter phenomenon? I'm pretty used to things that I'm not personally interested in but that I still get (like, say, texting), but twitter is something that I don't even really get. So if you're a twitterer, tell me in comments what you use it for, why you like it, how it makes your life more worth living, etc. I'm just curious.
i use personally use twitter for random thoughts, to update my facebook status, and keep up to date with friends throughout the day.
i can send messages via twitterific (a program for macs), via text message or twitter.com.
i used to chat on aol or yahoo IM, but not so much anymore. twitter, for me, fills that need.
I started using twitter this year and now use it regularly. I'm in my forties and have been using email since the late eighties (before it became popular).
Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with people who are important to you. It takes a while to learn how to use it and why, and it depends on network effects so it won't work for you until enough of your friends/correspondents/idols start using it.
For me, it gives me the feel of being at a conference, being able to see who is saying what to who, getting a sense of what the issues are.
I work from home, and it is partly for this reason that i use twitter. If some big news event happens during the day, i usually will hear about it first on twitter.
It's like stream of consciousness - all over the intertubes. No matter how anyone explains it, that's what I think of. I agree with Kevin, exactly what is the purpose? I'm not being facetious. I'm as curious as Kevin is about this.
it captures the dynamics of conversations you have when mingling at a party nearly perfectly. That's kind of how I look at it.
While most people just focus on the "blast out 140 characters to the people following you" part of the service, it really becomes more powerful when you start using the replies and direct messaging functions.
At this point, it becomes a lot more like IRC used to be - place to hang out and wander in and out of conversations people are having.
The push nature of the service (things get sent to my phone or to my client), plus the full API from day 1 have opened up a lot of other things.
Also, locally, I've got a lot of people I know who use it, including hartford city council members, local bloggers, and other folks. They're folks I would have a hard time getting the attention of, but here can send a short msg to them that is more likely to be read (easier than wading through tons of emails, for example).
I love Twitter. It's part microblog, part chat room, part news feed, and part customer communication tool (you'd be surprised how many of the customers I work with have figured out that sending me a DM on Twitter gets a faster response than sending me an e-mail).
One of the fascinating and sticky things about Twitter is how many ways different people can use a very simple tool. I use it one way, other people use it in completely different ways. You can Tweet on your phone, in your web browser, or via a desktop client. It's easy, portable, and fun.
Like most "social" software, it gets better when you're plugged into a network. Once you get past a certain volume in your follower / following list, Twitter goes from being an interesting curiosity to an extremely useful tool.
I write a book blog, and I use Twitter as my on-the-go commonplace book, throwing in lines I particularly like in books I'm reading as I encounter them. At the same time, I use the Twitter feeds of my friends as a way of keeping up with the interesting stuff that strikes them throughout the day.
There's a surprising amount of science content out there. I get tweets whenever there's an earthquake anywhere in the world stronger than a 5.0, I get brief updates on a number of NASA and USGS programs.
I'm also following Lance Armstrong and his coaches and trainers as he prepares to race.
Also Ana Marie Cox and a couple other journalists.
I don't send out any messages because, frankly I have a difficult time imagining that anyone really cares what I'm doing at any given moment.
It can be useful for real-time event coordination since it essentially is a mass texting device. I've set up ad hoc accounts for two events and had the people I was coordinating with sign up for the day. It worked great.
I just started using it in October I think. A lot of interesting people use it so I follow them. Rachel Maddow will tweet a list of guest for her show that night. Ana Marie Cox says things regarding news stories and her own personal life that are interesting. Rick Sanchez is great. Sometimes he uses twitter on commercial breaks. Sometimes when I'm watching news early in the morning, I will tweet something I heard that was fascinating. Also, it's kinda nice to read what other people find interesting about their daily lives in other places. It's not like chat where you have to respond. It's nice having the option to just listen sometimes.
I'm a self-employed software developer who works from home most of the time. I mostly follow and am followed by others whose work is similar to mine. For me, Twitter serves as a kind of "virtual water cooler", where I can exchange thoughts, rant, or even ask programming questions throughout the day. It helps provide a little bit of socalization, rather than spending every work day at home without much interaction with others.
Twitter is so last week. http://plurk.com is like Twitter with comments. I use it to keep in touch with my friends, and to set up impromptu gatherings (drinks, lunch, that sort of thing.)
The "watch a video!" link at the top right of Twitter.com might be the best elevator pitch i've ever seen for a website. I think that's all you need.
I've read every comment and I still don't get it...how is it really different then sending out an e-mail to a certain group people that I wnat to commmunicate with? I'm with Kevin
You wouldn't use email to replace an active chatroom, and twitter is like a personal chatroom that you build contact by contact.
A lot of things don't make sense until you try. If you're curious, try it. Or as I said before, the "watch a video!" link on the top right sums it all up.
I follow a lot of journalists and during the campaign it was amazing to see the CW form in real time. For example when McCain called Obama "that one" during mone debate, all of them were saying "Did you hear that?" and arguing if it was a big deal moments after it happened.
You can also use it almost like a RSS. NPR, the NYT, CNN and even my small homenewspaper use it to notify you of new stories. My college uses it to update game scores in real time--- useful for away games not televised or on the radio because we are so small.
I wake up out of my drug induced coma and this is what the world has to offer?
Judging from the comments so far, I'd say that Twitter is just another way to spend your time staring at a glowing screen while avoiding any meaningful interaction with the real people around you. A great invention... if you aspire to be one of the plump, preoccupied residents of the Axiom in WALL-E. No thanks.
I see either two or three main ways people use Twitter, depending on how you count.
First is social networking: You and people you know are all on the service, and when you "tweet" (send out a message) they all see it. Group conversation by text message that's not limited to one-to-one. This requires that the people you correspond with also be on the service. It's different from e-mail in that it's much simpler, quicker and shorter.
(Some folks have noted that this sort of use can create an "ambient" awareness of your contacts' lives, where you know what they're up to from minute to minute if they tweet a lot and if you tolerate receiving a lot of tweets.)
Second, or possibly a subset of the first, is tweeting anything interesting you come across -- Web sites, news stories, interesting quotes, ideas you just had that you haven't fully formed or that you want comments on from others. A lot of people do this.
Third is the way Paleoprof described, which is how I use it too: Just follow what interesting people post. I'm following Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen and Warren Ellis, among others. And if you like, follow publications or events (such as Rachel Maddow, as mentioned above, or CNN or Obama or whatever) to get news and updates.
You can do all this through Twitter.com, your mobile phone, or third-party software on your computer. (I use Twhirl for Windows.)
I really like the links and ideas I get from the people I follow. So I find it a very valuable service -- infinite benefit-to-cost ratio, since it's free.
When my wife was looking for sponsors to fund a volunteer trip, i asked for sponsors on twitter. Two came forward.
I knew both, but only one of them was close enough that I would have dared to ask by email.
Actually, twitter is a great tool to use if you have some question (like say "what is twitter good for?") that you want help with and don't know who to ask (so email isn't a good fit). If you have a popular blog that lots of people read everyday, you could post your question to your blog. But for the rest of, there is twitter.
(I also have a blog, but only post about once a month. Maybe if i was a better blogger i wouldn't see the point of twitter.)
It's a public txt conversation.
Person-to-person, near-realtime, but also very public.
It's a far better ice-breaker than emailing or commenting on a blog.
Hi Kevin,
I didn't understand it either, so I checked in the Wikipedia:
Tweaking is most often used by the general public to describe someone exhibiting pronounced symptoms of methamphetamine or amphetamine use, including punding (the repetitive performance of useless tasks), hyperactivity, an inhibited ability to relate socially, lack of appetite, inattention to bodily hygiene, exaggerated fidgeting, formication (the false sense of things crawling on or under the skin), or an incessant desire to fiddle or 'tweak' with objects in their surroundings.
Amongst amphetamine users it sometimes refers only to the negative effects of the drug's use; other times it may be used to describe being under the influence of the drug whether or not this is obvious to others.
The term may also refer to the effects of other (non-amphetamine) stimulants, such as cocaine, methylphenidate or even caffeine. Tweaking-like behavior may be one of the first symptoms of amphetamine psychosis.
The term is also slang to describe someone who exhibits high degrees of anxiety in stressful situations.
In the electronics trade, tweaking is typically used to describe adjusting or tuning up equipment for maximum performance. This especially holds true, as some electronic equipment is sensitive so that even the slightest adjustments can bring about significant performance gains.
For a wikipedia entry, I think it's actually a pretty accurate description of the phenomena.
What scares me, honestly, is the claims I've read in the press about how our new Cabinet members are expected to be big users of online social networking tools like Twitter, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Webkinz, MySpace and Facebook.
Kevin,
I too was a skeptic about the value of Twitter until I succumbed to peer pressure and started using it this spring. I use Twitter in two ways, one personal and one public.
1. Personal: As an on going conversation/random thoughts whiteboard with my real world friends and coworkers who are also Twitter.
2. Public: following different news services, like NPR, or political things, like the Obama campaign.
I enjoy the service and think I've found a way to use it that makes sense for me. I think it is best if you have people you actually know to follow and be followed by.
jkb
I have to agree with Oregonian above. Twitter is a pale replacement for the deeply-felt human interaction one gets by commenting on someone else's blog.
Dr. Drang FTW.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
It actually took me a while to warm to Twitter, but once a bunch of my friends and colleagues started using it heavily, I suddenly got it: it's a new channel for social proprioception. Yes, what my company's art director is doing tonight is trivia, but it's trivia I care about because I like her. I'm sure this is all dreadfully inauthentic and unlike the rich, nuanced social life universally enjoyed by people before the invention of the interwebs, blogs, LiveJournal, Facebook, etc. Also, young people never used to disrespect their elders, and the fishing was better.
For me it would be a huge distraction. I enjoy being away from my email for hours at a time. Can anyone handle listening to their own thoughts anymore?
And I can't really think of anyone interesting enough to stalk. Certain types of real time alerts on my cell phone might be interesting but I don't think it would justify getting off my minimal cell phone plan.
I have to say though I didn't really get internet research back in 95. I didn't want to waste hours looking for something that only took a few minutes at the library. I also couldn't figure out why companies would waste money digitizing stuff or start up online grocery delivery services.
So anyway, I'm up in the air. I'm either a hopeless dinosaur or we really do need to start putting prozac in the water for the rest of you. One or the other.
Personally...I don't get it and i'm not interested in it. What's the point? To provide some sort of record showing that your life is not mundane? To see how many 'friends' you can interact with and make yourself feel popular? To convince yourself that your experiences are somehow more interesting than others? I just don't see the value in it. It seems psychologically perverse to me...feeding egotistic and narcissistic behavior and is probably a crutch for a few other personality disorders too.
I have four AIs on the net constantly sampling other tweets, blogs as well as RSS feeds from the various news organizations. They sample and resample, apply a Pohl Gateway filter, randomize, project across an elliptical curve and use that to model upwards of six bloggers and tweeters that I use as cutouts to throw the CIA, NSA, and SMERSH off track. I find the use of steganographic techniques to embed an actual faux signal in the midst of the AI generated noise very helpful in throwing off trackers.
I've been tweeting for a year or so to keep up casually with a circle of friends and colleagues around the country that I would lose touch with otherwise. Very valuable. And fun. Like a mailing list, but more flexible, easier to tailor to your own tastes.
I've noticed a certain syndrome from twitter bashers like eric. They've never used it, but instead of shrugging it off like Kevin, they have this hostility that leads to aggressively dismissing anyone that uses it. It's as if Twitter represents all they hate about our society. Twitter I get, but this hostility borne out of ignorance I don't get.
It's just a piece of software. Use it, or don't use it. But either way, it's really not that big a deal.
Facultative symbiosis, without the sex, most of it forgettable (the twish, not the sex), with a large potential for enabling and cultivating voyeuristic personality types, and their symbiote primadonnas, not unusual in our TV age, just amplified by another 1000% along with returning some control to the voyeur/consumer/producer, as well as the usual minority currents of creativity, knowledge sharing and organizational productivity which will inevitably arise with any new and improved, widely adopted networking technology.
In other words, it's nothing new, the platform is just more advanced, which probably isn't all that great, because we need to be getting back to nature, figuring out how to live in this world as responsible ecologically-minded individuals and cultures, not obsessing over the minutiea of everyday ish, because I assure you that 99% of that garbage going over the twit airwaves is meaningless gossip and trivia, something you could easily do without in a heartbeat, and yet the further you get sucked into it, the more BS nonsense you'll have to dig through it get to anything that really has any meaning or constructive use, and all the while you'll probably lose track of how much time you're wasting doing that, as I'm sure will happen with a large population of adolescents most vulnerable to this kind of curse.
Am I fucking with you or just kidding, or perhaps a little of both? You decide.
I'm not against it but it doesn't fit me. I'm more often in search of solitude and quiet than in search of more distractions. I find that it takes about a half hour or more of quiet for the more interesting and useful and creative thoughts to surface.
I'm sure this is all dreadfully inauthentic and unlike the rich, nuanced social life universally enjoyed by people before the invention of the interwebs, blogs, LiveJournal, Facebook, etc. Also, young people never used to disrespect their elders, and the fishing was better.
Now, get off my lawn!
larryb is right. plurking is going to be the new twitter.
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
I just registered for Twitter. I'd love to follow journalists, as Shaijinx does, but I can't for the life of me figure out how. It seems that I'd have to know their email addresses first. There doesn't seem to be any list of just names. Can anybody give me a clue?
Swift Loris, check out this wiki:
http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/
A good place to start is the "By Topic" listing.
I don't get "twitter". And what the fuck does it mean to send a "virtual sheep"?
"A new channel for social proprioception." I like that.
Twitter is less formal than sending an email. It's like sending a thought. Sending an email is more formal, esp for people in my generation, i.e. young.
I also use it to get news before other people. I work in the media and to have a story a few minutes before a competitor is an advantage.
Depending on who you are following, you may gain insights that you wouldn't otherwise get, For instance I follow Lessig, and he often tweets thoughts or things that he doesn't write in blogs or anywhere else. I also follow many economists, politicos, and journalists. Journalists can sit in a courtroom and twitter and let you know a verdict before anyone else, before AP, Reuters, etc.
It can also link journalists up with certain populations they're following. Josh Harkinson here at MoJo followed the olympic torch through SF by jumping on twitter.
I think there are a lot of reasons to use twitter, and I wish you'd start using it, Kevin!
In honor of Rule 34, there is also:
twatter.org
boobik.com
and
m.twitter.com/Twitterotica
"h t t p : / /" removed due to MoJo's inability to run a blog.
So it's more immediate than email and less demanding than IM?
Sounds kinda intrusive to me.
Sounds kinda intrusive to me.
A new channel for social proprioception
Whatever happened to 24 hour portable web cams? Are there still guys out there with LCD glasses and webcams stuck to their helmets or did they all die in terrible car accidents.
Maybe Verizon could provide an option where your cell phone just sends a new picture or video clip to the world every few minutes.
Thanx, lux! Why isn't there something like this on the Twitter site itself? I even read the FAQ before I asked here and could get *no* idea of how to find interesting people to follow.
As is true with most other communication technologies (telephone, web, email...) it can be used in silly ways obviously, but also in very useful ways.
Kevin could use it to announce cat feeding times and what each cat eats and how much. That would be silly.
But he could also use it to announce new blog entries, do the blow-by-blow coverage of debates (or football games), and send mini-thoughts as he does his daily reading -- and that could be fun and maybe useful for many here.
Tweets are more "lightweight" than blog entries or email. Organizations (schools, government, companies) send out announcements via twitter, often reminders, or about new items that appear on their websites. Unlike email, twitter is a broadcast service: it is received by those who follow (or subscribe to) a particular source.
But...but...but... "meaningless gossip and trivia" is the glue that binds human society. We've been doing it since we first developed vocal cords. Be honest. Imagine your life without any meaningless gossip and trivia.
From the comments, I now understand better; but, also realize that there is no peer pressure from my age group to use twitter, which is probably why I ignored it. My peers still pressure me to use snail mail.
Here's a good thing that Twitter could do, but not enough old people have signed up yet:
Aging people could use Twitter to easily check in with each other every day to see if they're still alive. Not nearly as intrusive as a phone call. All you'd have to do is send a tweet saying NDY (not dead yet).
Aging people could use Twitter to easily check in with each other every day to see if they're still alive. Not nearly as intrusive as a phone call. All you'd have to do is send a tweet saying NDY (not dead yet).
Sigh. If only old people would do that, we could get browser extensions similar to AbeVigodaStatus http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/13/firefox-extension-di.html
Silly old people.
You may also want to check out yonkly. It's the first "create your own" microblog to integrate with Twitter: http://yonkly.com