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"what's the point again? I'm still missing something here." When you find that missing point, please let me know ..

• tptacek 17y ago
  Troll. I wanted to beta test a cryptography pentesting class in Chicago and figured I'd want to fill 8 seats to make it worthwhile. I twittered "If 8 people tell me they're interested in a free crypto class in Chicago, I'll schedule it". I've now got 40+ people, more than 20% of whom are flying into Chicago for it. The whole process took me something like 5-10 minutes. If you have nothing to say and nothing you want to hear about, there is no point to being on Twitter. But spare the rest of us the snark. I did Usenet since 1994, IRC, IM, LinkedIn and we have a fairly solid blog, and none of those media could have done what Twitter just did for us.
  • DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    I'm the new guy, so I'm going to comment a lot in this thread. Apologies to the rest of HN. I'm genuinely interested at this from both a technology and a startup angle. Were these folks who were already following you? I mean, they already had to express interest in you and what you're doing, right? It's not like you were approaching complete strangers. I noticed I tweeted this weekend about how much fun it was to play keyboards at home with MIDI backup. I got a reply from somebody, even though that person was not following me. So is there some kind of broadcast for tweets that people get even if they aren't following? Search? RSS feed or something? How did that guy reply to a tweet if he wasn't following?
    • tptacek 17y ago
      Some of them had been following me. Some of them found out because a couple people RT'd the message I sent out. Maybe --- I doubt it --- someone found it on Search.