The Twitter thread

There, now we have a Twitter thread.

The value of Twitter is aggregation. Follow people/organizations which give you content, news, links, etc that you care about.

The empegBBS members generate have valuable opinions, ideas and other output, so it would be valuable to follow you. Feel free to share your Twitter name here:

@lemonbake is me, until I think up a better name.


As we get more people, I'll add you to the empeg list: http://twitter.com/Lemonbake/empeg

Careful now...

?????? A search of the BBS didn't show much about Twitter, so I assumed you'd all just skipped over it. Is there some aversion (besides Bruno)?

I think there's a reason we all skipped over it.

RSS feeds provide aggregation. Twitter provides self-aggrandizement.

In all seriousness, Twitter is absolute garbage.

• First and foremost, the much-discussed 140 character limit.
  • It does not lead to pithiness, it leads to an unreadable mess of SMS-speak so people can cram their thoughts into such a small space.
  • It also leads to a proliferation of URL shorteners, which are an absolute diaster in terms of the longterm continuity of the web.
• The Twitter database is a big, flat just-barely-searchable mess.
  • Hashtags are such a ridiculous hack that it's hard for me to believe they haven't come up with something less brain-dead.
  • No threading to speak of. Really? It's 2010 and we can't get threaded conversations right for the most hyped social networking site on the planet?
• The site goes down more than a junkie hooker. Protip: if people the world over recognize your system outage page ("Hey, look, it's the Fail Whale again!"), it's time to get your head out of your ass and use web infrastructure that doesn't suck.

Ultimately, Twitter's "design" "philosophy" caters to the least common denominator and leaves out features that any such system should have. The only reason we know about it is because it had first-mover advantage for the one thing it does well (SMS to web.) But the idea that a platform as rich as the web (including all of our web-enabled cell phones) needs to be tied to the restrictions and conventions of SMS is absurd.

Now give me my butterscotch, turn up Matlock, and get off my fucking lawn.

I only signed up for Twitter because Android didn't have a good Facebook app yet, and it was easier to update my status through Twitter. I echo everything Tony just said.

I currently follow a bunch of people from the tech industry, so you'd think I'd see some interesting stuff. Nope. I'd break it down as follows:

90% of the posts are @ replies to things other people have said, requiring me to track down whatever that person said, but that only takes me to the other person's page, not the comment they made.

5% of the posts are self-advertising, notifying people of their latest podcast or article or whatever.

1% are retweets.

The rest is actual original content, but most of that is the usual stuff people make fun of Twitter for. Like "this is a great ham sandwich."

So out of 100 posts, I'd say that only one is interesting or informative.

Lastly, I really don't see how Twitter is an efficient means of social networking. It's such a kludge!

There's an empeg group on Facebook.
Feel free to 'friend' as many of those members as you like.

I wouldn't wipe my arse with Twitter.

Tony summed up perfectly the whole thing in the first sentence. I'll add that Twitter is inane garbage and this year's buzz word. Most feeds I've checked out are just mumbled twat-speak and impossible to follow.

Any time I see someone write a name with an @ in front of it (especially outside Twitter) I feel like punching them in the mouth. Especially if they're also the same kind of asshole who uses the word "meme." It's *never* ok to use the word meme, even when used correctly, which only accounts for about 2% of its usage as of late.

Most twitter feeds might as well be written in alternating case or 1337-speak to illustrate the douche-baggery of the writer.

Most twitter feeds lose nothing of consequence -- and gain occasional excursions into found-art genius -- when they're accreted onto http://www.longestpoemintheworld.com

Peter

I have twitter functionality built on my moblog page - but although I have tried to like it, I can't.

Am playing around with Google Wave and to be honest if you wanted a twitter with decent functionality you could just use wave. And then it can also do live same time meeting functionality, collaborative editing blah blah blah.

meh - just decided this post adds nothing of value to the world...

I've been using Twitter for a few months now, and overall I like it. Sure, RSS exists, but for that, you have to have your own web server, and some way to get your message out to follow it. Twitter offers the hosting and the directory service.

I follow a fair number of my friends, and for me it offers a quick view of what they are up to as well. And this is the basis of why Twitter exists. It's supposed to be a quick status update mechanism.

I've gotten some good things out of Twitter, including:
- Two free movie screenings
- A free T-Shirt
- Ability to provide feedback on a large commercial program I use daily
- Insight into a few podcasts I listen to

I'll agree it has issues, but for me, it works well enough. I do use apps to access Twitter, and rarely actually see the web site, so that may have something to do with my perceptions of it.

http://hijinksensue.com/2009/11/11/shittheyputontv/

My fav- 'poop is coming out'

I also enjoyed this one. They posted that comic on the same day that I had just read a Game Developer Magazine article about including social networking features such as Facebook and Twitter into your games.

Yeah. I was playing Uncharted 2 at that time. Oddly enough, Twitter was down most of the time I was playing. :P

That's one of the games I intend to get and play through this holiday season. Along with Assasin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2. It seems to be the year of second sequels. :-)

Definitely a must play in my opinion. Play the first and the second. They are the best games for the PS3 so far.

I'm on Twitter (@danwallach), but I don't tweet very much. I have it all rigged together, via FriendFeed, such that my Facebook status text and Google Reader "shared" links are all cross-polinated, which also includes Twitter.

I found Twitter to be vaguely useful when I was attending a Usenix conference and various people were tweeting away on the #usenix hashtag. I use TweetDeck, where you can turn any query into a separate column, making it easy to follow these sorts of things. TweetDeck also lets me separate a set of Houston foodies, who seem to have nothing better to do than tweet all day, from my other friends, who are lower volume but I wouldn't want their tweets to blow past me without me noticing.

In short: Twitter has marginal value greater than zero. I fully expect the company to go out of business once they realize that they're not making money and they're not going to. At that point, hopefully some vaguely distributed, interoperable Twitter-ish solution will come out. (A former student and I worked on just such a system.)

::shrugs:: I'm just trying to stay current. Ignoring potential new paradigms is a bit Luddite.

Perhaps Wave is the evolution of Twitter, a better first step into the real-time web. Who here will thrash a product from the proven-legitimate Google?

If anyone cares, all of my accounts on the various sites (Friendfeed, Twitter, etc) are linked from my site, either on the right hand side, or on the about page.

Also, [email protected].

Wait, the dude who was running Windows 98 in 2004 suggests that I'm being "a bit Luddite?" Wow, that's gonna leave a mark!

Does Twitter render properly on your Netscape browser?

I do actually have a Wave account, and it looks to be more useful than Twitter will ever be. That's not because it's from Google, rather, it's because it actually tries to do more than Twitter does. Maybe it won't succeed at half the things it tries, but Twitter isn't even trying.

Out of curiosity, have you ever signed up for a twitter account and used it for more then five minutes? Personally I saw very little value in it as well, until I used it for a little bit and added a few people to follow. If not, I'd recommend trying, and run a client like Tweetie.

As for Wave, I still have no idea what to actually do with it. I logged in a while back, invited someone else, then stopped using it. With no notifications outside wave when something changed, it's a pain to have to log in all the time to see nothing. I suppose both services need some sort of critical mass for it to work.

You are so right. I'd use Twitter on my cell phone, but it's not supported on the StarTac 7868W.

No, I haven't created a Twitter account. I do, however, subscribe to a couple of Twitter feeds in my RSS reader, e.g. the hilarious Fake AP Stylebook. I've also searched through Twitter a few times in an effort to find information on local events.

My aversion to Twitter's architecture, design, and implementation dose not blind me to the fact that there is legitimate content therein that, unfortunately, can't be found anywhere else. Still, I think that Twitter's sudden emergence as a core component of the Internet's communications infrastructure for so many people is a bad thing, for the purely technical reasons I've outlined above.

I thought you'd gotten a Treo?

Or were you being cheeky?

Damn, my cell phone still has a rotary dial.

I'm not a luddite and I love technology. And new technology. I just don't like lame rehashed fads. Twitter is centralized mini-rss. Twitter is a centralized mini, frequently updated, .plan or .project file.

I'm sorry, but greater than 95% of twitter use is just crap I would never care about regardless of the medium. And the 5% that I might care about is generally hacked and deformed by twitter's requirements and usage patterns/styles.

Twitter has caught on because of the tween/teen generation. All the "blogosphere" pundits are using it because little kids out there actually made it popular and somewhat mainstream.

About the only thing I would consider using it for would be as a way to subscribe to magnet links for TV show torrents. But there's already rss if I want to do that.

Besides, I'm not generally a follower. And I have no desire/intention to update people when I'm going to the bathroom.

That's not quite true. The distinctive element of Twitter is that it's "push" based. Which just makes it lame middleware, or maybe lame multicasting. I'm somewhat surprised that no one (that I've heard of, anyway) is using Twitter as an implementation of wide-area RPC for something. That is, computer-to-computer communication rather than person-to-person.

I guess it's somewhat elitist, but it bothers me that they reinvented the wheel, except they left out the axle, and it's a Reuleaux triangle instead of a circle.

I have. I signed up, I followed a number of "interesting" people, including many tech people, and a bunch of friends followed me. I used it as advertised for several weeks. I don't like it. I just haven't found it interesting, and I don't care about broadcasting what I'm doing to people who don't know me. I guess I feel it's a tiny bit narcissistic to think that people I don't know care what I'm up to every minute.

I also have a bias against Twitter. Apparently I have the same name as some Canadian Christian Rocker, and I get a ton of people following me because they think I'm him. Every once and a while I send out a message saying that I'm not him, but because of that wonderful stream that everyone touts, I'm sure they never see it.

As a certified narcissist, you'd think that Tw*tt*r would be right up my alley, but the thought of it pretty much drives me nuts. I joke with friends that I have a Facebook profile....but I just ain't tellin' anybody what it is. Yeah, I'll be on Facebook. Just as long as I don't have to deal with any goddamn "friends".

Seriously, though. I get paid to be the techology guy. Shouldn't I be more hip? more curtting edge? Well, if Tw*tt*r is cutting edge, count me out. To me it is just another fad -- TQM-meets-People's-Choice-Awards writ Web 2.0. I *love*, no *LOVE* the poem this beautiful woman sent to NPR's Tw*tt*r-infatuated Scott Simon:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/sundaysoapbox/2009/03/tweeting_scott_simon_tweetnot.html

Apparently, narcissism alone isn't quite enough.

OMG LOL

Try the name Michael Johnson... At least with how many people there are with my name it provides some level of anonymity.

Well, that's the conventional wisdom. Reality is that that's a damned lie.

Now I have no idea why Twitter is popular. It's just RSS with an SMS gateway.

The simplicity of it helps. Starting from scratch, here is what you have to do to post something on Twitter and RSS:

Twitter:
1. Goto twitter.com
2. Create an account
3. Post
4. Tell friends your twitter ID

RSS:
1. Research various web hosting companies
2. Sign up for one web host, by paying a monthly fee
3. Research RSS programs
4. Decide on an RSS program
5. Write something and post it
6. Tell friends a complicated URL to follow, and also help them understand what RSS is and that they need a program

Accessibility is a big thing, especially when talking about a product or service for the mass market. Twitter is a consumer service, not just "RSS with an SMS gateway". It lets people tell others what they are up to, in a quick and efficient way.

Yeah, but you can do the exact same thing with, for example, Facebook, which was already wildly popular before Twitter was developed. Not that I'm intending to promote Facebook, either.

The big difference is that Facebook lacks a native SMS implementation, and also lacks a lot of third party apps to interact with the service. I never post to Twitter via their site, it's always via a program either on my Mac or on the iPhone. Facebook is also a mostly closed loop type of setup, whereas Twitter has some value in the openness of most users posts.

Overall, I've found value in both Facebook and Twitter. Sure, I could go make my own site somewhere and post similar things, but the centralization the two services offer is a big deal.

It's interesting you keep mentioning SMS. I know a large number of people who use Twitter on a regular basis and none of them use that mechanism. They all use a web browser or app on their phones.

SMS was popular with a lot of the early users of Twitter from what I remember hearing of it on podcasts. Mostly because it provided people without a smartphone with a way to post when away from the computer, and keep tabs on friends. A friend of mine still uses the SMS method of posting, even now that he has an iPhone. Guess I should recommend an app to him.

I thought the whole point of twitter was so you could post using an old phone via sms. If you have a phone with a real browser why not just have a blog ?

I don't use it so I a probably missing something.

Mainly because "I'm going to the bathroom, be back in 10" doesn't make for a very interesting nor compelling blog entry. Besides, Twitter allows you to keep sending out little messages even while you're on the throne.

Twitter's the greatest thing since appendicitis - and it fits in a bread box.

Well, the real reason is that instead of a blog, which is essentially an island, you get Twitter...which is like millions of tiny, really close islands

But that's basically it. Twitter is more community based than millions of disconnected blogs, and a whole lot easier for the average person to get started on.

There are some really cool products that try to make blogging more community-driven, like Disqus, but that requires a lot of setup and hoping that everyone else uses the same commenting system.

So that's my one defense of Twitter. It's not a solid one, though.

It has exactly the same problem as blogs which is that to be blunt most people/blogs/feeds really aren't that interesting. You have to sift through the dross to find the handful of decent blogs or twitter feeds. This isn't a problem with the actual service behind it though. Just that there really is a lot of junk and its hard to find the decent stuff.

I can see some uses for Twitter but I'm not personally a fan of it. The artificial limitation to 140 characters just promotes the compression of messages into barely understandable gibberish. At least with SMS you generally have the ability to span multiple messages if you want to send a long message.

Oh god, I hope I wasn't coming off as anything but agreeing with everything you just said I don't mean to defend the service, only to explain the idea behind it. I don't agree with it, though.

For one thing, there is absolutely NO defense for Twitter as a commenting system. It utterly fails as one, as you usually can't see all the comments, and even if you could, you'd see too many repeated comments (which isn't usually a problem for blog posts), and there's no threading at all. Even a blog with a flat comments thread on posts can develop a real conversation. Twitter fails completely at this.

One could certainly imagine Twitter supporting a real notion of a comment as distinct from a top-level post. FriendFeed got this better than Twitter. The place where this falls down is if the comment volume is too high for any one user to digest. At that point, you need some sort of collaborative filtering, as in Slashdot, to help you ignore the bogus comments.

Wow... The latest. All the adults who wish they were emo kids and many "web-pundits" are lamenting the disappearance of a site that tracks "favorite" twitter feeds. "favrd" - how trite. I suppose it's shorter than "fav0r17e" but only slightly less nausea inducing.

Twiter = world's biggest circle-jerk.

I can't wait for Web 3.0 when we can move past all this pretentious and self-important crap.

We have so failed as a species. This is the "best" of Twitter.

I'm going to start using "twitter" as a the 2010's version of the word "lame." Maybe I should get a twitter account and post that.

I kind of chuckled at the Tiger snipe.