

What's wrong with Twitter? - dennismoulton

I'm curious to get some feedback here.  Sorry for the loaded question but I'm hoping to gain a sense for what this group thinks about Twitter and their partner ecosystem.  To begin with if you use Twitter (or identi.ca) are there limitations that should be explored via the platform or third party?  If you did try it but don't anymore what happened?
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cpr
I think if you're a social "hub" yourself, such as an Arrington or a Gruber,
it's ideal.

If you're a techie who needs to actually get work done on hard technical
problems, it's a total disaster, time- and distraction-wise.

One analogy would be the tech pundit (forget whom it was) who said reading the
NYT at breakfast would send him into a mental maelstrom for the rest of the
day, on overload. Twitter is like 100 micro-NYTs. ;-)

At least that's my (admittedly short stabs of, now and then) experience.

[Edit:] I suppose if you had a reasonably-sized close group of associates who
only twittered a few times a day, you could keep it under control as a 'water
cooler' experience.

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dennismoulton
So in your case....dealing with a hard technical problem the current
establishment of forums for richer discussions and interaction could leverage
the power of community, no? Would a microblog version of what is now specific
forums be enough of an experience to handle the majority of what needs to be
covered? Would you be willing to participate in this manner if there was an
extra step to finding the specific conversation home (within the platform) for
the request, question, or dialogue?

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sharpn
for me, signal < noise.

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bscofield
Doesn't that just mean you're following the wrong people? It's not like
Twitter forces you to listen to (or continue to listen to) people when you're
not getting value from them.

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dennismoulton
Glad you brought that up....what is valuable in twitter? The tangential
ramblings of a handpicked group? I would argue that only a small subset of
even the very best lists actually equates to value for most users.

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bscofield
I've used Twitter to poll peers, learn new things, coordinate meetups, find
out breaking news, discover useful resources, and more. All of those are
valuable to me.

In the end, it's what's valuable to you. If you can't (or don't want to) find
a group of people to follow that you find interesting, helpful, or whatever,
that's fine. Just because you (or sharpn, or my wife) don't find the service
valuable doesn't mean that there's no value in it for anyone, though.

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sharpn
Good point - I can't find anything twitter does better _for me_ than my
current behaviour, but if others do then that's great; I might find a use for
it in future.

