10 ms·

I think the more interesting story might be the role Twitter played in all of this.

olefoo 18y ago
It does give new wings to the old saying about "A lie can travel around the world before the truth can get it's boots on." I suspect this leads to several niche brand watch agencies that specialise in twitter quick response. I would be interested to see the coalescence around the #amazonfail tag; I'd also like to know whose realtime analytics would have caught it earliest.
cookiecaper 18y ago
What impact did Twitter really have? I'm annoyed with all of the constant Twitter hype -- I think it's overblown and that there's not much behind the fad. It seems like a case of everyone jumping on the bandwagon to me, especially in the cases of MSM; they're just desperate to be on the brink of the next big thing, and so everyone jumps all over Twitter not because they appreciate Twitter but because they're all trying to be cooler than each other. Twitter is pretty lame, and it's pretentious, and I don't like it, and I don't think that many other people do either. So, is Twitter really significant here or is this just another case of wannabe hipsters attempting to appear clairvoyant so that everyone will complement their impeccable fashion sense?
- njharman 18y ago
  Don't underestimate the easy, quick, instantaneous, and always present nature of the mobile platform. The "new thing" / the impact is there is now a global communications medium that is mobile(hence "always on") which interrelates (generally without restriction/permission/barriers) disparate peoples through a dense tree of connections. [Not sure how much relevance to the speed and distance at which memes spread is due to forcing short communications. But, my gut feeling is quite a bit.] Nearly instantaneous broadcast from almost anywhere to a large group of strangers where ever they are who are in turn incentivised and empowered to easily rebroadcast is altogether new. That it's called Twitter is an unimportant accident of history.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  I keep hearing Twitter bashing on this site and it's starting to bother me. Twitter is what you make it. It all depends on who you choose to follow. It's perfectly fine if you haven't found a way to make use of Twitter, but for an increasing number of people, Twitter is starting to play a pretty important role. I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. I've used it to communicate with friends and coworkers, to see what interesting people in the open source community are doing, to communicate with people during conferences such as at PyCon, to ask for help and to help others, and for entertainment. Yes, there's plenty of hipsters and social media experts that do nothing more than add noise, but the asymmetrical follow model and the ease to start and stop following people means that you shouldn't care. Choose the people you find interesting and it will make all the difference.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    I like Twitter, but a Twitter mob is no more attractive than any other group of angry villagers with pitchforks.
  - moe 18y ago
    I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves (speaking for us, the twitter immune here). My opinion towards twitter as a technology is fairly ambivalent - It's a horrible implementation but as long as I'm not forced to use it I couldn't care less. What's annoying is all those people who feel a need to cite the medium as if it added any kind of value to a message.
    - cstejerean 18y ago
      "That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves" When making statements of that nature you should rely try to elaborate more. What exactly is a stupid thing to say? Claiming that I rely on Twitter as a source of news? Why is that stupid? I've been doing this since August and it's worked out really well so far. I'm not trying to convince anyone else to do the same, I was just responding to a question of whether or not Twitter provides actual value. To me it does. The medium does not provide value to the message, but it does provide a very powerful way to spread messages and to organize people. What alternative communication medium would you recommend for organizing a protest? (Like the one that happened in Moldova http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas...)
- gojomo 18y ago
  What impact did Twitter really have? Twitter's impact was negative, getting a lot of people righteously worked-up over an error that Amazon is generally fixing in less than one business day.
- yef 18y ago
  You hate Twitter because you don't get it. That's fine. I just don't get why you got 7 points for this invective...

It does give new wings to the old saying about "A lie can travel around the world before the truth can get it's boots on." I suspect this leads to several niche brand watch agencies that specialise in twitter quick response. I would be interested to see the coalescence around the #amazonfail tag; I'd also like to know whose realtime analytics would have caught it earliest.

cookiecaper 18y ago

What impact did Twitter really have? I'm annoyed with all of the constant Twitter hype -- I think it's overblown and that there's not much behind the fad. It seems like a case of everyone jumping on the bandwagon to me, especially in the cases of MSM; they're just desperate to be on the brink of the next big thing, and so everyone jumps all over Twitter not because they appreciate Twitter but because they're all trying to be cooler than each other. Twitter is pretty lame, and it's pretentious, and I don't like it, and I don't think that many other people do either. So, is Twitter really significant here or is this just another case of wannabe hipsters attempting to appear clairvoyant so that everyone will complement their impeccable fashion sense?

njharman 18y ago
Don't underestimate the easy, quick, instantaneous, and always present nature of the mobile platform. The "new thing" / the impact is there is now a global communications medium that is mobile(hence "always on") which interrelates (generally without restriction/permission/barriers) disparate peoples through a dense tree of connections. [Not sure how much relevance to the speed and distance at which memes spread is due to forcing short communications. But, my gut feeling is quite a bit.] Nearly instantaneous broadcast from almost anywhere to a large group of strangers where ever they are who are in turn incentivised and empowered to easily rebroadcast is altogether new. That it's called Twitter is an unimportant accident of history.
cstejerean 18y ago
I keep hearing Twitter bashing on this site and it's starting to bother me. Twitter is what you make it. It all depends on who you choose to follow. It's perfectly fine if you haven't found a way to make use of Twitter, but for an increasing number of people, Twitter is starting to play a pretty important role. I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. I've used it to communicate with friends and coworkers, to see what interesting people in the open source community are doing, to communicate with people during conferences such as at PyCon, to ask for help and to help others, and for entertainment. Yes, there's plenty of hipsters and social media experts that do nothing more than add noise, but the asymmetrical follow model and the ease to start and stop following people means that you shouldn't care. Choose the people you find interesting and it will make all the difference.
- gojomo 18y ago
  I like Twitter, but a Twitter mob is no more attractive than any other group of angry villagers with pitchforks.
- moe 18y ago
  I dropped my cable subscription when I moved to my new apartment last August and outside of HN I've been relying mainly on Twitter to hear about what's happening in the world at large. That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves (speaking for us, the twitter immune here). My opinion towards twitter as a technology is fairly ambivalent - It's a horrible implementation but as long as I'm not forced to use it I couldn't care less. What's annoying is all those people who feel a need to cite the medium as if it added any kind of value to a message.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    "That's just a stupid thing to say and exactly the kind of hype that's getting on our nerves" When making statements of that nature you should rely try to elaborate more. What exactly is a stupid thing to say? Claiming that I rely on Twitter as a source of news? Why is that stupid? I've been doing this since August and it's worked out really well so far. I'm not trying to convince anyone else to do the same, I was just responding to a question of whether or not Twitter provides actual value. To me it does. The medium does not provide value to the message, but it does provide a very powerful way to spread messages and to organize people. What alternative communication medium would you recommend for organizing a protest? (Like the one that happened in Moldova http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas...)
gojomo 18y ago
What impact did Twitter really have? Twitter's impact was negative, getting a lot of people righteously worked-up over an error that Amazon is generally fixing in less than one business day.
yef 18y ago
You hate Twitter because you don't get it. That's fine. I just don't get why you got 7 points for this invective...