

Why I Don’t Use Twitter - edw519
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/why-i-dont-use-twitter/

======
zmimon
Funny, I dislike twitter but nobody else seems to share my reasons.

My main reason is that it's a closed centralized service. I suppose somebody
will say "it's not closed, it has an open API" and that misses the point: it's
closed in the sense that you or I can't start a Twitter service and integrate
it on equal terms with the original Twitter. Email / SMTP provided us a
successful model and XMPP followed later to show how to do it for real-time
messaging. It would have been easy to build Twitter on top of these standards,
or to extend them in open ways if necessary. Instead Twitter is a giant step
backwards into a time when technology and services were controlled by single
vendors. We grew out of that and I thought we would never go back. I'm
horrified that the tech digerati are all enthusiastically embracing a headlong
rush back into it. I can't understand why nobody seems to care - it's like the
enthusiastic embrace of the Iraq war by the media - there's hardly a critical
voice to be heard, and yet I can see it will only be a short space of time
before people are all realizing the cage they have built for themselves and
asking what everyone was thinking.

~~~
al3x
Actually, we at Twitter are thinking quite a bit about exactly this.

~~~
aaronz3
I was brainstorming a bit about this the other day as well, but I don't have
the time/resources to do anything with it. Why can't we have a digital
identity that isn't attached to a particular service? If I want to change cell
providers I can take my phone number with me, but if I want to switch
ISPs/Email providers I have to get a new email address. It would be useful
(and in the interest of competition) to provide a way to contact your
identity, and you can configure your identity to dispatch messages to whatever
service you happen to use at that given time (somewhat ala Google Voice
maybe?)

------
pavs
Why I don't use techcrunch:

Its always about twitter.

~~~
timr
I'm going to infer that 30 people dislike TechCrunch so intensely that they're
willing to vote for any negative remark, because otherwise, I can't find any
insight in your comment.

There are many possible intelligent criticisms to be directed toward
TechCrunch, but _"always about Twitter"_ has never been at the top of my list.

~~~
pavs
You don't have a problem with a guy rambling about why he doesn't use twitter
in 100s of words. But you have a problem with another guy rambling about why
he doesn't use techcrunch in 140 characters or less?

There is very little to nothing insightful to add to a discussion about why
some guy doesn't like twitter.

twitter is not for everyone the same way facebook is not for everyone, IM is
not for everyone, IRC is not for everyone.

If it's not for you, its not for you. What insightful discussion you could
possibly have about this? I added a not very insightful comment on a not very
insightful topic. Which is what it deserves.

I haven't been following TC for sometime, but until few months ago, when I was
actually following them a majority of their story was about twitter.

~~~
timr
At least the article made some interesting arguments about the value of
twitter, the feature-completeness of twitter, and so on. What did the comment
add?

~~~
pavs
It didn't add anything that anyone, who uses twitter, already didn't know
about.

You could disagree, but as far as I am concerned, it is one of those articles
about newsflash about non-news that will get some extra page-views. You might
enjoy the mentality and trash journalism quality of TC - but I don't.

For more similar trashy post please read "How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And
Love Google Voice" by Arrington few days ago. Judging from the comments number
on that article, TC realized this kind of posts get massive pageviews (more
money) so they continued the trend.

Don't be surprised if you see another post soon about "why I don't use x",
that will pull some nerves from fanboy resulting in massive page views.

~~~
timr
I'm not going to get in an argument with you over the merits of TechCrunch.
The article contributed more to an interesting discussion than did your
original comment.

~~~
knightinblue
No. It didn't.

------
hschenker
I don't use Twitter myself (either to follow anyone or to post my own
stories), but I work for a large tech company, and I fundamentally disagree
with the article's first assertion:

> Tweets have no value

For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure
the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers,
prospects, media, partners).

Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized
by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be
fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer
than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.)

For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural
human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my
own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are
extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt
in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and
they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's
thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment.

Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.

------
teeja
He doesn't use Twitter because he can't rattle on and on for paragraphs saying
what he could say in 140 chars or much less.

~~~
astrec
Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc.

 _I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead._

~~~
gruseom
_Reminds me of a quote often attributed to Cicero, Pascal, Twain etc._

In this case, for once, we have a definitive source: Letter XVI of Pascal's
_Provincial Letters_ :

 _The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to
make it shorter._

[http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-...](http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/letters-c.html#LETTER%20XVI)

I haven't found any evidence that Mark Twain or Cicero said it. Especially in
Twain's case, I suspect people just decided he said it because he's known to
have been witty.

~~~
swombat
It is very likely that this was said by many, many people throughout history.
Great ideas are rarely picked up by a single great person. See this extract
from the introduction to a book about Borges' short stories, posted in my blog
at [http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-
great...](http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great-
bloggers-steal) :

 _[Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything,
and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine
Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it
only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal
wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose
circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through
the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with
certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe
is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able
to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation
borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible
sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”_

------
pibefision
Totally agree. There is so much vanity & too much noise.

Also, it's very difficult to have an interesting conversation.

It's better to follow interesting people using a reader (i prefer Google
Reader)

~~~
ludwig
Why not do both? Some tidbits of information don't merit an entire blog post,
but in aggregate they can be quite useful. I do agree with you regarding the
noise level, but followcost.com has helped me a lot when deciding whether to
follow someone or not.

Incidentally, @newsycombinator on twitter has been one of my favorites, due to
the steady stream of interesting links :-)

~~~
Periodic
Re: @newsycombinator

But then you've thrown out the voting and the comments, which is the whole
reason I come to news.ycombinator.com.

Did this article get 100 points or 10? Does it have 50 comments or 5? Time is
precious. I need context!

~~~
ludwig
Re: Re: @newsycombinator

No, if it's interesting enough (which is most of the time), I'll actually
visit the site again. But you're right, I do wish it linked to HN first
instead of sending me directly to the article.

------
chrischen
> (”Brunch at Hi-Spot at 1!”) becomes impersonal and meaningless when it’s
> sent to so many

This somehow happens to all social networks. They try to be more open when
what we really need is a _closed_ network. I have > 300 friends on facebook
(cause I just can't say no), constantly spammed with meaningless invitations
like ("lost my phone need your number," and I barely know the guy/girl) and
whatnot that i've finally completely stopped using facebook.

Proud abstainer of facebook and twitter here.

------
symesc
Why I Don't Care If You Don't Use Twitter: because if you don't get it, you
just don't get it. It's ok.

~~~
Periodic
I'm getting really tired of people saying, "just use Twitter, then you'll get
it and you won't know how you lived without it."

I tried, but I still don't get it. If I am just not using it "correctly",
perhaps someone could enlighten me as to what I'm looking for?

~~~
seldo
If you don't get it, then perhaps it's not a good service for you. There's no
law saying any website should be universally useful or popular.

~~~
pyre
That is true. On the other hand, saying that someone "just doesn't get it"
until they've used it implies that _anyone_ will 'get it' once they've used it
for a while.

~~~
catch404
There is a difference between not getting it and not having a use for it
though, I've seen too many people complain about not getting twitter -
suggesting they don't understand the simple concept. Perhaps this is a fault
of the Twitter UX? I "got it" straight away.

------
unalone
Facebook's last redesign killed any lingering desires for me to use Twitter. I
don't like the constant Twitter-hate some people think is necessary, but I
don't feel the need to tweet, either.

~~~
Legion
Facebook and Twitter are completely different. Don't see how a redesign of one
would matter one iota for the other.

Facebook is about one-to-one relationships. Yes, there are "groups" and
"become a fan of X", but the essence of Facebook, as in other traditional
social networking sites, are bi-directional relationships. When I "friend" you
and you accept, we are "friends" in both directions. There are no one-way
"friends".

Twitter is broadcasting, one-to-many relationships. "Following" someone is a
one-direction relationship. You can tell the people from older sites who don't
grok this, insisting that all follows need be "followed back". But that fails
to understand the power and appeal of Twitter. You can follow Oprah's Twitter
feed, but you can't be Oprah's Facebook friend. (Replace "Oprah" with someone
whose words you think hold value).

~~~
Legion
Also, something I left out: one of the most valuable parts of Twitter comes
not from following certain people, but following a search term (or "hashtag").

Example: Michael Vick signing with the Eagles this past week. I found out
about this from following the #NFL tag. I saw it there _hours_ before even the
first rumor blog picked it up, let alone ESPN.

For something more appropriate for this site: following the #defcon tag was
easily the best resource I had during that event while I was stuck at work.
Anything interesting that happened appeared instantly there.

Twitter is amazing for unfolding events. There's absolutely no counterpart to
this on sites like Facebook, it's just a completely different focus.

~~~
pyre
> I saw it there hours before even the first rumor blog picked it up, let
> alone ESPN.

Does it really matter that you got the rumor/news _hours_ before the story
'hit'? I can understand that getting such news as fast as possible might be a
utility if you are a sports gamble, or sports reporter... But for the vast
majority of people, do those extra couple of hours really matter?

------
cbarning
Funny how this was posted by them to Twitter and drives more traffic to
TechCrunch than digg. [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-
twitter-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/for-techcrunch-twitter-
traffic-a-statistical-breakdown/)

------
idlewords
I tried Twitter for a few months as a personal service and found it useless
and noisy. But as a method of monitoring support requests and chatter about my
project, it's been invaluable. I think the site offers a lot of value as a
kind of customer support hotline.

------
redorb
My reason for using twitter is on my site that provides vital information on
weather, its the easiest way for me to currently connect to all my followers
cell phones...

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alex_c
The Onion did it 9 years ago:

<http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694>

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jrockway
"My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."

Oh sorry, but that's the tone of voice I used to read this article.

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afed
No one doing anything important uses Twitter.

