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How Twitter Makes Things Faster: A Timeline
- jgrahamc 18y agoI took the liberty of flagging this for being vapid.
- CalmQuiet 18y agoFifty words on how we've moved from fax to email to social media to twitter. None of those words mentioning how this abundant "freeness" of vapid information has accelerated intrusion and overload -- way more than it has accelerated sheer speed. IMHO.
- jacquesm 18y agobesides that it will be a long time in coming before twitter text will be considered legal, which is the case with fax and email. Twitter, for all its success is still a niche, not a mass communications medium like email. And I wonder how they expect to get out of that medium.
- bobbyi 18y agoThat didn't explain "how".
- TomOfTTB 18y agoHonestly, I might just be cranky here. First day back at work and all. But this article making the front page seems like a sign that HN's quality controls are failing. As you point out there is no "how" explained. In fact, there's no real insight here at all. Even the logical conclusions are kind of stupid. Blogging replaced E-Mail? OK. I can only hope this is just a result of lower traffic due to the Holiday in the U.S.
- simonb 18y agoThis projection seems faulty (or at the very least it needs more analysis) to me. All the previous [machine] generations yield an increase in bandwidth, something that is not obviously the case for progression from blogging to tweeting. Especially if we consider signal-to-noise ration not brute information.
- hapless 18y agoFax machines are still in use for the most important messages. E-mail is still in use for important notifications. Blogs are still in use for minor items. Twitter is in use for... inconsequential items?
- ivankirigin 18y agoI routinely get contact for business on twitter. That might be because Tipjoy does a lot of business on twitter. http://tipjoy.com/twitter http://tipjoy.com/twitter But the process is awesome: @reply saying hi, follow to get a DM, get a DM with a phone number to call. It takes a few seconds if you're using something like TweetDeck. This is to get a hold of others. I just give out my phone number of email in public, and skip the step to DM.
- chime 18y agoWhy not just use IM then? Make up a screenname and mention it on your site. You get a lot more features like blocking, local history/logging etc. Most IMs now support offline messaging too.
- ivankirigin 18y agoPeople see the conversation, and that is valuable. Public customer support is how Twitter is going to make money (in part). IM clients are extremely distracting. Real-time but asynchronous messaging is not the same as synchronous messaging. You can block people on twitter, and log messages. Better than that, you can access the conversations via an API.
- bbgm 18y agoI definitely do way more important work on Twitter than on Fax machines, and these days probably only behind email. Don't underestimate how useful and fast twitter can be.
- sharjeel 18y agoEven with not being able to explain "how" and to appreciate the importance of fax and other mediums even today, the author also failed to mention the fastest mode of communication: IM. And the reason why Twitter won't replace email is the same reason why IM can't replace email: Email is a standard with no central ownership. On the otherwise Twitter is a "closed" platform with open API. If you want to twitter, you have to use Twitter (R).
- axod 18y agoConveniently forgetting IM,IRC,etc eh?