5 ms·

Why Twitter Will Endure

14 points by robg 17y ago

djm 17y ago
No matter how much I have tried to understand twitter, I have never really gotten it. I can only see it as being a fad. The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it. How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can practically write. But those limitations will go away in time. I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek communicator. Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't get it.
- amichail 17y ago
  It's a place for real-time news. Although the news reported in any particular tweet may not be reliable, you can easily examine many tweets (as they are short) perhaps taking into account follower count to try to figure out what's likely to be true.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I agree with djm. I've found no "news" via Twitter that was was either interesting, informative, had actualy content, or was not spam. At best, I get a link to a longer form of the news anyway on some other site (but usually with an impossible to decipher link shortener so I can't tell if the link is just spam anyways), usually to something I've already read and found through news aggregators or google news or some such anyways with more information and content.
    - amichail 17y ago
      But twitter has news on an enormous number of topics, many too obscure for Google news. For example, you could get real-time news on a conference.
      - elblanco 17y ago
        This is a good point. But I've followed conference blogs before as well, and got more information content than what I could get out of a tweet (and got real-time updates via RSS).
- novum 17y ago
  Most people new to Twitter don’t get it or the value it provides. That’s understandable for any new social network. I joined Twitter in June 2007, didn’t understand it, and my account sat dormant until just a few months ago, when I became an active user. The value of Twitter is entirely derived from those users you choose to follow. It's not all about banal updates about meal choices, goodnight wishes, and Twitter slang. But some people will post that stuff, so your course of action is simple: if these people bug you, unfollow them. Pruning and managing your following list is an ongoing effort, but it can yield excellent results. I follow a wealth of different types of users on twitter - from tech journalists/commentators (@gruber) to startup CEOs (@jasonfried, @ev) to companies I deal with (@thinkgeek) to former university professors I’ve had (@edbarr) to friends and family. And that’s just scratching the surface. These people provide me an interesting stream of updates on things that matter to me. You might not enjoy the same set of users, and that's ok, but that should be your end goal - develop your following list into something that provides you with value. And you know what? You don’t even have to tweet. Build yourself a following list and consume consume consume. Not everyone is—or should be—a content producer. But Twitter gives you the option to be one, and if you're not, you can still benefit from the community at large.
- sachinag 17y ago
  Networking. Interruption. That's it. Everyone says that Twitter is all about who you follow, and that's necessary but not sufficient. But judicious use of @replies and @mentions (when you don't start your tweet with a @username so everyone can see it) is easily 10x more powerful for business and personal networking than LinkedIn, which I find 10x more powerful than anything else (meatspace meetups excepted, of course). Of course, you can leverage Twitter to make your meatspace life better - where to go at conferences, a "hey, can we meet up" in advance of events, where the afterparty's at, etc. If you think of Twitter as a business tool like LinkedIn rather than a personal tool like Facebook, you'll get a lot more out of it immediately. If you develop a decent following base that's actually paying attention to you, then you can do second-level stuff as "what is the best [x] for me given [y]" and get exceptional answers. But that only works once you've cultivated a good following.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that Twitter is a high-bandwidth medium. For readers. (It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of magnitude more readers than writers.) It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that information would not only be useless (you probably don't care to know the exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I shaved this morning) but positively negative (because it will distract you, detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is the bane of modern existence). What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And, what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially for events that are evolving in real time. --- [1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter, just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Now say all that in a single tweet.
    - catfish 17y ago
      Put the comments in a blog. Tweet the link.
      - iron_ball 17y ago
        Then Twitter is essentially an RSS front-end.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
vaksel 17y ago
Twitter won't endure, it's a land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff. It's too complicated for real people, and unlike the bloggers they don't have an incentive to figure it out. I'm a perfect example, I tried twitter like 6 months ago, tried it for a month, than gave up because there was just too much noise. I'm now back, but only because I use twitter to promote my own site. And since I now had an incentive to figure things out, I found things like tweet deck and lists that make things a lot easier.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Maybe it is for you, but I have a cohesive group of friends who use twitter. For me twitter is a way to keep in touch with them. Twitter gives you complete control on who you follow, if you choose poorly and end up with a low signal stream you have only yourself (or perhaps your selection in friends) to blame.
  - jmatt 17y ago
    But sometimes there is little that you can do about this. My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it. I agree it can be a useful tool for some but it has yet to sweep through and suck in most of my friends. Who are still on IRC, IM, email... All viable options and for me real time when I want them to be real time. EDIT: word order ~
    - elblanco 17y ago
      > My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it. This is similar to Wave as well. Once I got my friends to use Wave, we use it for all kinds of things, from IM to group chat. Except in Wave, I'm not artificially limited to a sentence and a half of typing full of acronyms and shortened links. Heck, I can even inline post images.
- trevorturk 17y ago
  I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. It's valuable if/when there are useful things being communicated with it. To say that Twitter is a "land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff" is like saying that telephones are only useful for telemarketers. To say that Twitter is too noisy is like saying that there's nothing good on TV. If you don't like what's on _your_ TV you're free to put on whatever you like.
timr 17y ago
"I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)" For me, the one enduring lesson of Twitter is that if you build something that makes journalists and "public-relations professionals" feel important, you will get lots of free press.

14 points by robg 17y ago

djm 17y ago

No matter how much I have tried to understand twitter, I have never really gotten it. I can only see it as being a fad. The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it. How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can practically write. But those limitations will go away in time. I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek communicator. Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't get it.

amichail 17y ago
It's a place for real-time news. Although the news reported in any particular tweet may not be reliable, you can easily examine many tweets (as they are short) perhaps taking into account follower count to try to figure out what's likely to be true.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I agree with djm. I've found no "news" via Twitter that was was either interesting, informative, had actualy content, or was not spam. At best, I get a link to a longer form of the news anyway on some other site (but usually with an impossible to decipher link shortener so I can't tell if the link is just spam anyways), usually to something I've already read and found through news aggregators or google news or some such anyways with more information and content.
  - amichail 17y ago
    But twitter has news on an enormous number of topics, many too obscure for Google news. For example, you could get real-time news on a conference.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      This is a good point. But I've followed conference blogs before as well, and got more information content than what I could get out of a tweet (and got real-time updates via RSS).
novum 17y ago
Most people new to Twitter don’t get it or the value it provides. That’s understandable for any new social network. I joined Twitter in June 2007, didn’t understand it, and my account sat dormant until just a few months ago, when I became an active user. The value of Twitter is entirely derived from those users you choose to follow. It's not all about banal updates about meal choices, goodnight wishes, and Twitter slang. But some people will post that stuff, so your course of action is simple: if these people bug you, unfollow them. Pruning and managing your following list is an ongoing effort, but it can yield excellent results. I follow a wealth of different types of users on twitter - from tech journalists/commentators (@gruber) to startup CEOs (@jasonfried, @ev) to companies I deal with (@thinkgeek) to former university professors I’ve had (@edbarr) to friends and family. And that’s just scratching the surface. These people provide me an interesting stream of updates on things that matter to me. You might not enjoy the same set of users, and that's ok, but that should be your end goal - develop your following list into something that provides you with value. And you know what? You don’t even have to tweet. Build yourself a following list and consume consume consume. Not everyone is—or should be—a content producer. But Twitter gives you the option to be one, and if you're not, you can still benefit from the community at large.
sachinag 17y ago
Networking. Interruption. That's it. Everyone says that Twitter is all about who you follow, and that's necessary but not sufficient. But judicious use of @replies and @mentions (when you don't start your tweet with a @username so everyone can see it) is easily 10x more powerful for business and personal networking than LinkedIn, which I find 10x more powerful than anything else (meatspace meetups excepted, of course). Of course, you can leverage Twitter to make your meatspace life better - where to go at conferences, a "hey, can we meet up" in advance of events, where the afterparty's at, etc. If you think of Twitter as a business tool like LinkedIn rather than a personal tool like Facebook, you'll get a lot more out of it immediately. If you develop a decent following base that's actually paying attention to you, then you can do second-level stuff as "what is the best [x] for me given [y]" and get exceptional answers. But that only works once you've cultivated a good following.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that Twitter is a high-bandwidth medium. For readers. (It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of magnitude more readers than writers.) It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that information would not only be useless (you probably don't care to know the exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I shaved this morning) but positively negative (because it will distract you, detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is the bane of modern existence). What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And, what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially for events that are evolving in real time. --- [1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter, just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Now say all that in a single tweet.
  - catfish 17y ago
    Put the comments in a blog. Tweet the link.
    - iron_ball 17y ago
      Then Twitter is essentially an RSS front-end.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

vaksel 17y ago

Twitter won't endure, it's a land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff. It's too complicated for real people, and unlike the bloggers they don't have an incentive to figure it out. I'm a perfect example, I tried twitter like 6 months ago, tried it for a month, than gave up because there was just too much noise. I'm now back, but only because I use twitter to promote my own site. And since I now had an incentive to figure things out, I found things like tweet deck and lists that make things a lot easier.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Maybe it is for you, but I have a cohesive group of friends who use twitter. For me twitter is a way to keep in touch with them. Twitter gives you complete control on who you follow, if you choose poorly and end up with a low signal stream you have only yourself (or perhaps your selection in friends) to blame.
- jmatt 17y ago
  But sometimes there is little that you can do about this. My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it. I agree it can be a useful tool for some but it has yet to sweep through and suck in most of my friends. Who are still on IRC, IM, email... All viable options and for me real time when I want them to be real time. EDIT: word order ~
  - elblanco 17y ago
    > My friends have yet to adopt twitter and thus I rarely use it. This is similar to Wave as well. Once I got my friends to use Wave, we use it for all kinds of things, from IM to group chat. Except in Wave, I'm not artificially limited to a sentence and a half of typing full of acronyms and shortened links. Heck, I can even inline post images.
trevorturk 17y ago
I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. It's valuable if/when there are useful things being communicated with it. To say that Twitter is a "land of marketers and bloggers and personalities pushing their own stuff" is like saying that telephones are only useful for telemarketers. To say that Twitter is too noisy is like saying that there's nothing good on TV. If you don't like what's on _your_ TV you're free to put on whatever you like.

timr 17y ago

"I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)" For me, the one enduring lesson of Twitter is that if you build something that makes journalists and "public-relations professionals" feel important, you will get lots of free press.