5 ms·

Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma get

by larrik 12y ago

Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).

gfodor 12y ago
Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.
- giarc 12y ago
  OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.
  - larrik 12y ago
    I remember it, but I also remember Twitter's contribution to it be largely overblown PR.
tdaltonc 12y ago
I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.
pachydermic 12y ago
I think its more about the magnitude of innovation. Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does. I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language. The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows. Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker. And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves? I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.
nightski 12y ago
For me it is the opposite. Many programmers in the Haskell and Machine Learning/Scientific Computing communities use twitter and post useful tidbits all the time. Facebook is full of my older aunts/uncles/grandparents posting memes and inviting me to play useless games. While most of my friends are on Facebook none of them actually post to it. Then again I am 30 years old, the Facebook of a younger person may be very different.
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
I run an incredibly boring business (SSL certs for Heroku), for which: 1. The majority of my alpha and beta testers came from Twitter. 2. The second highest source of traffic to both my marketing site [1] and the actual add-ons page [2] is from Twitter. 3. All of the testimonials on my site (which have been incredibly helpful in convincing people my service is useful are actually Twitter embeds) 4. There was a Heroku presentation given in Tokyo where my add-on was brought up as an example, which someone in the audience then tweeted about in Japanese. This triggered an alert on my computer (from Tweetdeck) and I was then able to on the fly answer questions people there had about it. To me, with the people I follow, Twitter seems more like a programmers / startups meetup or conference than anything else. 1 - https://www.expeditedssl.com https://www.expeditedssl.com 2 - https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
snowwrestler 12y ago
Consider a newsworthy event: a plane crashes. Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces. There's an earthquake. Twitter is absolutely the fastest way to get information in those situations. Tweeting is way faster than updating some website, most reporters use it heavily, and Twitter now has the scale to stand up to even extremely heavy volumes of traffic. The news of Osama bin Laden's death broke via Twitter more than hour than the President's own announcement of it [1]. Tweets about the 2011 VA earthquake arrived in New York before the actual seismic waves did. [2] [1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-twitter_b7922 http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-... [2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-use... As a means of publishing news to a lot of people in real time, I would say that Twitter is the best media service ever created.

by larrik 12y ago

gfodor 12y ago

Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.

giarc 12y ago
OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.
- larrik 12y ago
  I remember it, but I also remember Twitter's contribution to it be largely overblown PR.

tdaltonc 12y ago

I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.

pachydermic 12y ago

I think its more about the magnitude of innovation. Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does. I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language. The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows. Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker. And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves? I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.

nightski 12y ago

For me it is the opposite. Many programmers in the Haskell and Machine Learning/Scientific Computing communities use twitter and post useful tidbits all the time. Facebook is full of my older aunts/uncles/grandparents posting memes and inviting me to play useless games. While most of my friends are on Facebook none of them actually post to it. Then again I am 30 years old, the Facebook of a younger person may be very different.

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

I run an incredibly boring business (SSL certs for Heroku), for which: 1. The majority of my alpha and beta testers came from Twitter. 2. The second highest source of traffic to both my marketing site [1] and the actual add-ons page [2] is from Twitter. 3. All of the testimonials on my site (which have been incredibly helpful in convincing people my service is useful are actually Twitter embeds) 4. There was a Heroku presentation given in Tokyo where my add-on was brought up as an example, which someone in the audience then tweeted about in Japanese. This triggered an alert on my computer (from Tweetdeck) and I was then able to on the fly answer questions people there had about it. To me, with the people I follow, Twitter seems more like a programmers / startups meetup or conference than anything else. 1 - https://www.expeditedssl.com https://www.expeditedssl.com 2 - https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

snowwrestler 12y ago

Consider a newsworthy event: a plane crashes. Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces. There's an earthquake. Twitter is absolutely the fastest way to get information in those situations. Tweeting is way faster than updating some website, most reporters use it heavily, and Twitter now has the scale to stand up to even extremely heavy volumes of traffic. The news of Osama bin Laden's death broke via Twitter more than hour than the President's own announcement of it [1]. Tweets about the 2011 VA earthquake arrived in New York before the actual seismic waves did. [2] [1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-twitter_b7922 http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-... [2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-use... As a means of publishing news to a lot of people in real time, I would say that Twitter is the best media service ever created.