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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 blog

by 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.
- axod 17y ago
  The fact though is that twitter is mainly a tool to promote yourself. It's mainly a one way broadcast mechanism for one->many. That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.
- elblanco 17y ago
  > I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting). Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/ http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/ http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator. Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
- vaksel 17y ago
  the difficult part is to filter out the noise to find the 2-3 gems. The home page twitter feed, is the equivalent of having your TV flipping through, 1 channel a second. Except, every few seconds it'll go back to that one spam channel. the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.
wyclif 17y ago
It's too complicated for real people Wow, entering text into a big fat field and pressing Enter is too complicated for end users? I think your threshold is much too low.
- axod 17y ago
  I think the issue is more: * OK, I update my status fine. * How do I know who to follow? :/ * Whoah holly crap now I have 1000 tweets from idiots and spam and stupidity, how do I make this usable etc
elblanco 17y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026128
- catfish 17y ago
  What you make of twitter depends upon how you seek value in its application. I run over 50 accounts for businesses and the key opportunity for customers isn't in tweeting endless streams of news links, or building huge follower list, or adding a 100 friends a day. The key value can be found in the @mention box on the right hand side of the interface. If people are making mentions with your name, that appears in your @mention box. Every time that happens that is an invitation for you to "ask a question". Ask enough questions and in short order you will establish a relationship with a prospect. Ask the right questions and you will convert that prospect to customer status. If you do this right, and your honest with the account, i.e. your profile, your twit background, and your tweets openly publicize your business status, you will be rewarded with 5-10 new leads a day who are actively interested in what you offer. That begins by carefully selecting who you follow. Don't follow more people in a day than you can actively interact with in a single day. Don't ask questions that are leading. Always ask questions that require a reply. Don't press anyone who isn't engaged in the answers. Always acknowledge the answers. Take your time. Be patient. Offer value when asked. I tell clients to imagine you have entered a coffee shop and every table is taken. Find an empty seat near someone who has a profile you think would make for an interesting conversation. Be polite. Ask for permission to sit down. Do not talk about yourself. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your table mate. At some point that person is going to become actively interested in who you are. They will visit your profile, look at your tweets, click through to your site. And if you are providing value at any of the touch points they see, your going to convert many to follower status, and some to customer status. And the best thing about this approach is that you never spammed anyone. The entire cycle began with them talking to you. The only part of this method i left out is the step where you get them to mention back to you. I will leave that to your imagination. And if your a bright cookie, you will find a quick answer to that. For those of you who find this methodology tedious, and too hard to sustain, GOOD. That's better for me. The barrier to entry is hard work. Every day. And a bit of imagination.

by vaksel 17y ago

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.

axod 17y ago
The fact though is that twitter is mainly a tool to promote yourself. It's mainly a one way broadcast mechanism for one->many. That's why there's a fair number of bloggers, personalities, spammers, etc on there.
elblanco 17y ago
> I don't understand what's do difficult to understand about Twitter. It's a communication tool. This isn't the problem with Twitter. I think everybody gets that it's a communication tool. It's just that it's an awful tool for communication. It's designed with a number of ridiculous and artificial constraints to conform to an aging and rapidly dying technology (phone texting). Almost the entire ecosystem of communication you see on Twitter is designed to overcome the limitations of the medium, from Twitter specific acronyms (RT, OH, b/c, etc.) to url shorteners (http://bit.ly/ http://bit.ly/, http://tinyurl.com/ http://tinyurl.com/, etc.) to multiple tweets to cover a single topic, and on and on and on. Most of the time, things like urls are simply designed to be pointers to actual content anyways, because you can't fit the content into a Tweet. In effect Twitter becomes an RSS/link aggregator. Sure it's different than other communication mediums, but it's not really solving a problem that anybody in particular had, and ends up creating a whole new slew of problems because of the poor decision to tie the entire architecture essentially artificial limitations.
vaksel 17y ago
the difficult part is to filter out the noise to find the 2-3 gems. The home page twitter feed, is the equivalent of having your TV flipping through, 1 channel a second. Except, every few seconds it'll go back to that one spam channel. the homepage only has 20 positions, and it doesn't discriminate whether that spot goes to someone who puts out 1 tweet a second, or someone who puts out 1 tweet a year. I had to make a list for a single person, just because I kept missing his tweets in all the noise.

wyclif 17y ago

It's too complicated for real people Wow, entering text into a big fat field and pressing Enter is too complicated for end users? I think your threshold is much too low.

axod 17y ago
I think the issue is more: * OK, I update my status fine. * How do I know who to follow? :/ * Whoah holly crap now I have 1000 tweets from idiots and spam and stupidity, how do I make this usable etc

elblanco 17y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026128 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1026128

catfish 17y ago
What you make of twitter depends upon how you seek value in its application. I run over 50 accounts for businesses and the key opportunity for customers isn't in tweeting endless streams of news links, or building huge follower list, or adding a 100 friends a day. The key value can be found in the @mention box on the right hand side of the interface. If people are making mentions with your name, that appears in your @mention box. Every time that happens that is an invitation for you to "ask a question". Ask enough questions and in short order you will establish a relationship with a prospect. Ask the right questions and you will convert that prospect to customer status. If you do this right, and your honest with the account, i.e. your profile, your twit background, and your tweets openly publicize your business status, you will be rewarded with 5-10 new leads a day who are actively interested in what you offer. That begins by carefully selecting who you follow. Don't follow more people in a day than you can actively interact with in a single day. Don't ask questions that are leading. Always ask questions that require a reply. Don't press anyone who isn't engaged in the answers. Always acknowledge the answers. Take your time. Be patient. Offer value when asked. I tell clients to imagine you have entered a coffee shop and every table is taken. Find an empty seat near someone who has a profile you think would make for an interesting conversation. Be polite. Ask for permission to sit down. Do not talk about yourself. Ask questions. Learn what you can about your table mate. At some point that person is going to become actively interested in who you are. They will visit your profile, look at your tweets, click through to your site. And if you are providing value at any of the touch points they see, your going to convert many to follower status, and some to customer status. And the best thing about this approach is that you never spammed anyone. The entire cycle began with them talking to you. The only part of this method i left out is the step where you get them to mention back to you. I will leave that to your imagination. And if your a bright cookie, you will find a quick answer to that. For those of you who find this methodology tedious, and too hard to sustain, GOOD. That's better for me. The barrier to entry is hard work. Every day. And a bit of imagination.