

Buzz Kill - harscoat
http://leoville.com/buzz-kill

======
telemachos
_I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because
they were too busy shouting themselves._

This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog
posts (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html>):

 _Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find
it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally
stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one
sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the
abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a
page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free
sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn
out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series
Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a
headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve
more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820._

~~~
mechanical_fish
Two words: _Learning curve_.

It takes time to understand what new media are for. _Real_ , human-scale time,
measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B
technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in
their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph,
amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording
memos and stuff.

Twitter _et al_ are in their infancy and are still growing. They get new users
all the time; the new users happen upon different aspects of the tool and use
it differently; some uses are ultimately better than others. It's the blind
men and the elephant, except that the elephant is the size of the Library of
Congress and there are seven billion blind men, two thirds of whom have yet to
touch the elephant.

I, for one, don't have so many problems with Twitter, but that's probably
because I use it differently from others. Let me offer some suggestions:

If you find that you feel lost because you no longer remember how many of the
people you follow on Twitter are still alive _you need to follow fewer
people_. I follow 97 people. Even that may ultimately be too large, although
most of those people are very quiet, so I can probably keep growing it,
especially as the client software gets smarter.

Remember that Twitter is RSS for humans. It's Delicious for non-nerds. It is
for exchanging links, not ideas. If you have an idea that can't fit into 140
characters write it down in 2000 characters and then tweet the link.

Of course, Twitter can also be used to exchange ideas that are not worth more
than 140 characters. Sometimes these Tweets are short because they are poetry.
Sometimes they are short because they are stupid. Follow the poets; unfollow
the stupid. Just because people are shouting nonsense doesn't mean you have to
hear them. The Internet's soundproofing is very good.

Speaking of Internet soundproofing, signal-to-noise, and maintaining one's
sanity: I don't follow hashtags. Like, ever. I'm not quite ready to pound the
table and declare that hashtags are never going to work, because they're
eventually going to be nothing but SEObots retweeting other SEObots in a vast,
roiling AI botwar, but I for one don't miss them. Important things get
retweeted by your followers or echoed in some other medium.

If someone's Twitter feed is not a net win you need to unfollow them. This can
hurt. I kind of like Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, but the guy does. Not. Stop.
My feed is like 85% Ebert. And almost everything he says is interesting, or
could be interesting, but I'm not suffering from a shortage of interesting
things, and he's drowning out the quiet folks. I need a Twitter client that
has better stream management. For example, it could throttle access to my main
stream: Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream; to
see Ebert's full stream I need to click on something.

Speaking of which: I know there are ten thousand Twitter clients already, but
there will be more. Client development is also in its infancy.

~~~
rimantas
Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than
14 seconds a new technology too.

    
    
      Twitter is RSS for humans.
    

Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than
140 chars and hate context.

~~~
pyre
For a lot of sites, the RSS feed is basically a headline and a link to the
actual article. 140 characters can be sufficient for those purposes... Not
that that's necessarily taxing the limits of RSS or anything though.

------
naner
<http://www.ryanholiday.net/the-imaginary-audience/>

_Schopenhauer had a name for this empty talk, he called it “fencing in the
mirror.” It’s more common than you think. Consider all the times you’ve seen
some blogger apologize for not posting recently – profusely addressing some
concern that likely was never expressed. Or the Twitter updates to 38
followers, half of which are bots or uncaring companies. More realistically,
maybe you’ve read too much into looks from a table of girls at a restaurant (a
type I evolutionary error). Maybe you like like to roll down the windows in
your car, turn up the stereo and know that everyone is just so impressed by
your classic taste._

This isn't really directed a Leo since he does actually have an audience, but
people obviously aren't hanging off of his every utterance. The same goes for
all of us (for the most part) and our comments here, haha.

------
m0nty
I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more
"social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why.
They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population
will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what
he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And
nobody was really listening because it's not really a conversation, it's all
about self-promotion and that tends to be a very one-sided activity.

Buzz and Wave will never take off with the people I work with, or my friends,
because we're all a bit old-fashioned and I doubt any one of us would sooner
"tweet" a message than phone someone up and talk to them directly. Sure, I
realise it's a one-to-many operation (unlike a phone-call) but honestly, what
do I have that's worth actually _broadcasting_?

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?"

It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its
intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace,
foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently
_where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self-
fulfillment.

Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone noticing your daily
playlist, you have an admirer. That admirer might want to know more about you
based on that superficial quality, and follow you on your social update tool
of choice. It's a tool of communication, much like a phone (actually more like
a partyline, but I digress).

When it boils down to it, people need people, and as social creatures, we find
every convenient avenue of acquiring and managing our social sphere as we can
without expending too much energy. If we didn't care about any of that, hell,
we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?

~~~
m0nty
"we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?"

I guessed someone would try to make that point :) You'll notice I rarely do
comment here, and I don't on reddit, youtube, Digg, etc. At least here, there
is something approaching a conversation. But, Golden Rule: if I have nothing
to say, I don't.

~~~
heinel
But you do acknowledge that you are a user in those networks, correct? You
check those sites, and by reading (even without active commenting) you are a
participant. Some people project themselves, others observe, that was how
social interactions had always been.

~~~
m0nty
> You check those sites

My apologies if I was unclear: I don't check those sites. Also, this insight
you have that people are basically social animals, that's not exactly a
revelation. But I would contend, along with OP, that our natural sociability
is not best served by social networking.

------
MC27
Not sure what to think about this post. I've heard Leo speak about the likes
of Twitter being the "internet's nervous system." In reality, these social
networks - although useful for certain activities, like networking - are
mostly superficial and disposable. Perhaps, when you are surrounded by pundits
and PR types, it becomes difficult seeing beyond the hype.

~~~
megablast
The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial
people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about
the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater
understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it
is to actually listen to any of these people.

~~~
dingle_thunk
... But the people with real insight very rarely share it. All you get from
these sorts of networking tools is a mishmash of mediocre gibberish.

~~~
megablast
it is useful to have a pulse on what the majority are thinking, talking about.

------
skybrian
Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? Does that mean
Hacker News isn't valuable? What if someone decided to stop editing Wikipedia?
When you read the news, do you remember the byline of every story you read?

For large public conversations, most of what you read is contributed by people
you don't know. Your friends' contributions are only a small part of what
makes the place what it is. And yet the overall effect is valuable.

So post or don't post, as you please. There are only a few people whose
posting schedules I keep track of, but I still value the overall effort.

~~~
bad_user
> _Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News?_

HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly
seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many
cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background
or your body-language.

The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a
synchronized motion going on, much like dancing. It is said that skillful
sales people are so persuasive because they can get other people to dance on
their rhythm.

Twitter is to me a tipping point ... an ADHD epidemy going rampant /
information overload showing its side effects.

Ever seen a 14 year old teenager talk to his friends on messenger ... context
free, incomprehensible, pointless messages written with a bad grammar and lots
of misspellings because typing is just too much work.

That's what Twitter is ... a communication medium that's bringing everyone's
communication style to a common denominator.

~~~
marknutter
You're bordering on Andy Rooney-ism here.

------
jwr
Finally! I've been hoping this would happen. About a year or so ago Leo's
podcasts became all about Twitter. Twitter this, twitter that, people on
twitter, followers, yadda yadda. It got so tiring for those of us who really
couldn't care less.

I'm glad Leo has seen the light.

~~~
spudlyo
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening
to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on
the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans
they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.

~~~
Splines
Yeah, while I enjoy the long format and the lively discussion (it keeps the
car commute enjoyable), the TWiT podcast is very much an echo chamber. I've
since stopped listening to it and instead have broadened my podcast list.

~~~
michael_h
Can I ask to what you have broadened your podcast list? Sometimes twit gets
boring, and that leaves an hour long void to fill during my commute. Searching
for 'technology podcast' unsurprisingly returns a lot of terrible podcasts.

~~~
Splines
Currently I've been catching up to old episodes of Radiolab. I've had a hard
time finding tech-related podcasts that are enjoyable to listen to. Currently
what I listen to are:

* NPR: Car Talk

* NPR: Planet Money

* PRI: Selected Shorts

* PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge

* Stuff You Should Know

* This American Life

* WNYC's Radiolab

* Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio

That's usually more than enough new content to last me through a week (1.5 hrs
per day in the car). Sometimes TAL has re-runs that I've already listened to,
or SYSK has a not-so-interesting topic, but it's usually not a problem.

I really miss the Stack Overflow podcasts, but I suspect they just ran out of
material.

I've tried listening to Software Engineering Radio, but I'm practically ADD
when it comes to podcast hosts, and it's difficult to pay attention to this
sort of podcast (others seem to love it, but it's not for me). This is one of
the reasons why I love Planet Money and Radiolab. Both usually talk about
topics that aren't in my field, and usually do so in a very interesting
manner.

------
motters
That's a timely article, because I looked at Buzz within my Gmail account just
the other day and found pretty much a similar story to Leo. I havn't really
made any significant use of Buzz, and it didn't seem to be adding any value,
so I disabled it. Fundamentally there was no activity going on within Buzz
that I really cared about.

Maybe if Google do something more interesting with Buzz in future then I might
re-enable it one day, but otherwise it seems to have gone the same way that
Wave did.

------
zmmmmm
Doesn't this say more about his observation skills and his style of
interaction than anything about social media? He says himself that there was a
big drop off in engagement over the last few weeks. The fact that he didn't
notice that is hardly the fault of Twitter or Buzz.

------
jasonkester
Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've _ever_ read anything on
Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would.

What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of
text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for
one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another
reason I'm missing?

~~~
jschuur
The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their
Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were
wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion.
They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to
read it.

That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time,
that's not the problem. The issue is they only read the most recent stuff
river of news style and who knows how many people they follow?

Leo's Buzz to Twitter cross-poster should have had some kind of link tracking
built into the URL to tell him if people were clicking on his updates.

Leo says he had 15 updates in 2 weeks not broadcast, but when you look at his
usual posting style, it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I
get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's
eating. That's not exactly quality material that people will click through to.
Had he posted more appealing content, his lack of updates would have been a
greater loss.

~~~
elblanco
>it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes
automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating

Leo, after the thousands of words he's written promoting these types of social
media, found out that that's what most people are writing about, trivialities
of interest to no-one/notification information we already have two dozen ways
of getting...and thus everybody finds everybody else's tweets annoying and
instantly put into that same part of the brain that selectively ignores web
advertising.

That's why nobody noticed. I doubt most people would notice if most of the
people they follow stopped tweeting. They're probably ignoring most of it
anyway.

------
DotSauce
With such a following does he not have a responsibility to curate news and
resources? I did not see that within his boring stream.

------
protomyth
" was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because
they were too busy shouting themselves."

I really don't think this is true at all. Leo runs a media company and many
people follow him to keep tabs on what he is doing. It is not a personal
relationship. He doesn't answer a large percentage of his audience so there is
no true conversation. Most people probably thought he was on vacation or
something. They were probably listening to others or talking to the people
they actually have real "engagement" (oh, how I hate that term) with. Dunbar's
number seems to be in affect.

The funny part is that many people with high follower counts crowd source
answers instead of doing research, but don't balance that with answering
questions themselves.

~~~
csixty4
He was absent from all of his podcasts for a while to take his daughter Abby
off to college. I noticed he hadn't tweeted for a bit. I just figured he was
relaxing after all that stress.

------
heinel
I actually see this as a strength of Twitter-like microblogging services. If
you have no more contributions you fade gracefully into the background while
the collective move on uninterrupted.

I think Leoville is misguided for treating microblogs literally as a lite
version of blogs. I guess the term is a little misleading but the platform
really isn't a place for any random blogger to find a cult following.

Individuality is not that big of a deal. Trends are. I wonder if this is a
contributing factor to Twitter's success in Japan, which has a culture
favoring the collective over the "me" mentality.

------
nopal
I hope that when he posts a picture of a sandwich he posts an update to
Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I hope he posts updates to these services in a
selective manner.

I like being able to follow people on Twitter because it gives me a convenient
way to see snippets of info about what's going on in their lives. I think he
should continue to provide that for the the people that want it, even if the
hub of the information is once again his blog.

------
olalonde
In the comments:

Why traditional blogging is a better medium than micro-blogging or social
media _\- via Twitter_

Quite ironic.

~~~
zacharyz
This is the gist of the article for me, in particular because his tweet is the
way I found the post.

I think if anything it just goes to show that buzz is way more personal than
twitter and most people unfollowed him on it because he was too spammy. My
small circle of friends still routinely use it to share stuff that we find
amusing/interesting.

~~~
jamesjyu
+1 for finding the post via twitter.

------
MicahWedemeyer
Twitter is awesome if you're a brand or company doing the shouting into the
darkness. It's a great way to advertise or promote for free. You can also
identify and engage with your most ardent supporters.

Otherwise, from a personal standpoint, it's pretty useless. I just post to
stroke my ego every now and then.

------
pacemkr
Twitter invented a problem and then solved. They just solved it in a way that
made people feel self-important, hence the growth.

I don't yet know what social media is. I just know that we're doing it all
wrong.

~~~
bad_user
> _Twitter invented a problem and then solved_

They haven't invented anything ... they just brought an existing paradigm to
the Internet: and that would be SMS messages.

And don't know about the US, but SMS messages have been all the rage and are
still really popular, with some anecdotal evidence of how similar they are
....

Retwitting (CHECK): I got the same jokes over SMS from multiple people.

Many-to-many communication medium (CHECK): Around every holiday, people are
sending SMS messages with greetings to a whole list of people. It costs a lot
more than on Twitter so it only happens around holidays.

List of connections (CHECK): it's called a phone-book, and phones have one
incorporated.

Messages limited to 140 chars, encouraging retard-like talk (CHECK): of corZ,
ritN crrct sentences S jst so lst yr

------
makmanalp
tl;dr: Dude was posting things on google buzz, for some reason it stopped
posting, no one noticed including the author.

~~~
nkassis
Yeah but if Leo Laporte can go that long without anyone noticing, what are the
chances anyone cares about us tweeting.

He has a large fan base, and I believe is well liked. I think he points out
that twitter isn't building up peoples attention span but making it much
shorter. The vast amount of tweet poring in just drowns out the individual
posters. I can tell you right now, I wouldn't notice if a couple of people I
subscribe to disappeared from twitter except maybe my wife :)

~~~
jeremymcanally
I think you hit it on the head at the end of your post. His status as a nerd
celebrity essentially ensures that many of the connections he has via these
social networks will be tenuous at best. You can't classify the connection you
have a to guy who's heard your podcast the same as your good friends and co-
workers (or your wife! ;)).

This will sound conceited, but I think most people I'm associated with via
Twitter would probably care if I disappeared without a peep for more than 5
days. So I think that while most people don't really care about _his_
tweeting, nearly every other user's connections to their followers/followees
will be much tighter.

~~~
thorax
Why not try it? Go silent without mention and see what happens.

------
klbarry
What shocks me: I can't imagine being surprised at a result after two years.
Analytics, while having many flaws, tell me the impact of my companies social
media projects pretty quickly.

------
yanw
"Buzz can tweet is not affiliated with Google or Twitter"

It's not really any of these two services' fault that this obscure addon
stopped working.

~~~
points
You missed the point though.

No one noticed, or cared that it was broken.

~~~
gvb
...and the money quote: _I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one
could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves._

It would have been more accurate as "I stopped shouting into the vast echo
chamber but nobody noticed because they were too busy shouting themselves."

~~~
__david__
No, I think his point was that no one was hearing him even _before_ it stopped
working...

