Twitter: Lover or Hater?

im a whats a twitterer?

It's kind of like the "What are you doing right now?" box in Facebook. It lets you tell all your friends what you are doing at any particular moment. You can text from your phone too so you can update your friends when you are out.

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
Sign up here: www.twitter.com

I'm a twitter-addict at times.  Love it.  It's a great social tool, and when used correctly, can be a great marketing tool as well for companies both big and small.

Feel free to follow me on twitter -- http://www.twitter.com/robertstinnett

 

I don't know about Twitter. I joined and I think it could be useful, but I don't see the fun of it. Seems a bit narcissistic to me (no offense). It seems like facebook status updates and 99% of the time I find those useless. Now, I'll admit the Blank "is engaged!" was useful to send a "congrats!" but otherwise Blank "is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich" or Blank "is pondering the meaning of life" seems rather useless. I just can't quite get into the idea of doing that all the time, non-stop. But I'm sure I'll get addicted at some point, if my love affair with Facebook in college is any type of warning.

I think I share the same view of Twitter that the Sports Guy does:

'...how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome.' (read his entire mailbag at http://tinyurl.com/ddlbeq

Look, if you want to use it for personal/social reasons (like updating your friends on your whereabouts during a parade), works for me. But I've seen a lot of impassioned dialogue about some sort of intrinsic value in Twitter that I don't believe is yet there- as a sidebar, Twitter says its evolving its fundamental value proposition/unveling a business model... so there very well may be something latent that they will unleash.

Put differently, I'm a big fan of Tony Hsieh... that it took over 1900 words (11,251 characters) for him to articulate his passion for the 140 character format is telling.

I honestly respect the value that Twitter can play- but, for me, a well thought out, deliberate argument is still the compelling framework.

I like twitter because it forces me to examine why I'm doing what i'm doing.  Because I have only 140 characters, and a bunch of followers who don't care about my day to day job, the medium forces me to distill my actions into a pithy, universally applicable maxim.  I find that I'm thinking more about how my actions and beliefs could be interesting to people who really don't know me, which, hopefully, makes me a more interesting person in real life too.

Ahin, I'm not quite sure that the Sports Guy provides you with this deliberate argument you speak of. He starts to blame Facebook/Twitter for American's lack of writing skills, but other than a somewhat witty depiction of the evolution of written thought, doesn't really do much other than make an accusation. He moves on to what fundamentally boils down to "it's boring."

Here's what I would say to the Sports Guy if I was going to reply to his Mail Bag answers:

I'm not sure we can blame Twitter and Facebook for the general population's lack of writing skills. Two thoughts:

1) I would argue that Blogs/Twitter/Facebook aren't eroding writing skills, they are exposing that writing skills were never there for a majority of the population to begin with. (And yes, I'm aware I ended that sentence in a preposition.)

Previously, content outlets included books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television. All of these outlets had hurdles to entry if you wanted to display content - training, talent (and/or money), insightfulness and maybe a little bit of luck.

Now, all you have to do is sign up for a username and voila, you are "published." Sharing your thoughts with the world in whatever manner you know how, with whatever quality standard you care to uphold.

This is closely tied to thought #2, which is

2) Technology is simply exposing what used to be private or semi-private thoughts to a much wider audience.

What used to be journal entries, voiced comments, notes passed in class or scratch paper scribblings are now put on display, for all to see. Significant others have always shared thoughts and movements like "I'm leaving work now" or "I have to go shovel the driveway." Teenage girls have always squealed "OMG, He is SO HOT!" to their like-minded 13-year old classmates. Now it's just on display for all 447 of their "friends", with no targeting or segmentation tools available.

So while I think the Sports Guy may be able to occasionally deliver to you a "deliberate argument", I think you'd better stick with SK-You for this topic.

I just signed up for Twitter and am not seeing the value yet. 

3 questions come to mind for me in using Twitter:

1) If I'm at work most hours of the day Mon-Fri, do I really want to be tweeting about work? 

2) If I'm not tweeting regularly, is it fair for me to only be following other people's tweets and not tweeting myself? and

3) With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SK-You, etc, how do we keep up with status updates on the various social media sites?

Perhaps Sears' new Delver.com site will emerge to a social network epicenter where all your tweets, status updates, etc. from all your friends can be viewed in one fail swoop! And perhaps you'll be able to update all your information on all your social networks at once. Can't wait to see!

Functionality such as that is already available at such sites as Facebook, Bebo, etc.  So I hope Sears isn't re-inventing the wheel.  What I hope they are going to use it for is a recommendation engine based on your social network -- that is where I think the value of this purchase could really benefit the company.

 

Ping.fm lets you contact them with a message (via text, online, etc.) and then they go out and post the message to any location you've registered with them - Twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook, Blogs, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, etc. It's an interesting concept, but where I keep getting tripped up is the slight differences in formatting. For example, Facebook enters "___ is" in your status message, where other sites don't necessarily have that. At least one of your messages is going to seem disjointed.

Build a web site that fulfills the need to be heard...and we will come!

I've dredged up this old discussion post and coudn't resist.

I'm a Twitter has-been. Been there, done that. Will not do it again.

Social networking, I view them all as simple communications resources. People want to be heard, recognized and valued.

Personally, Twitter did not impress me at all. Any message I posted flowed down the river and over the falls, along with all the other messages that were dumped into the "Hey Look At My Dull Life" main-stream. Countless entrepreneurs could be found in the Twitter Ocean. They were all busy selling something, to some targeted group. Get Rich Quick schemes were abundant. I was often solicited by persons selling adults-only entertainment etc...and I saw no attempts by moderators etc. to keep the Twitter site free of such. Twitter did not offer members the ability to self police the environment and Flag/Target objectionable messages and members who abused the site with spam & other garbage.

Having 10,000 +/- friends and followers sounds impressive, but the reality is that the vast majority of of those who say they follow you, and are friends, really do not give a hoot! There is no true connection on a personal level. I realize that real family and friends stay connected via these social networking sites and that is the best reason I can think of for participating in any of them.

The social networking environment is largely a numbers game, geared towards accumulating points and collecting advertising dollars etc. The people who set up these social networking sites understand the basic human desire to be heard.

 

 

Twitter could disappear tomorrow and my life would not change one bit.

 

So I guess I'm a hater then...

I love twitter, I love saying what I'm doing to my friends ha ha ha It's a good way of knowing what you do when you are not able to communicate or see your friends frequently. They'll know before you tell them ha ha ha

I just recently joined Facebook to see what it is all about.  My wonderful grown daughters and a few friends said I finally came out of the dark ages.  I thought I was doing great things by joining here.

I guess the bottom line is I must also be "not a liker" (hater seems to be more than I really want) because I go to facebook maybe once a week or so just for a look.