September 29, 2009
In Praise of Twitter
I am surprised how many people still think Twitter is a fad or a waste of time. I view Twitter — or some modified future version thereof — as everlasting. Most of all, the search function helps you tap into a real time conversation on just about any topic you want, including the lecture you just gave. Google is wonderful but it’s hard to sort through the mess and figure out where the conversation is now. For sampling opinion on either movies or music, Twitter is essential, or even for researching a forthcoming blog post. Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force. If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.
On the other hand, what is Twitter doing to clusterflock?
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10 Responses to “In Praise of Twitter”
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Dunno. I tweet. It’s different than blogging, kind of like a new way of commenting things in a short way. I find that following too many people gets confusing.
I joined Twitter to keep up with other clusterflockers. That is the only reason. I felt like the conversation had moved there in many ways, and didn’t want to be left out of that.
But I don’t know now.
I think a lot of the conversation is there and lately I feel it is incumbent on me to figure out how to reintegrate that into the site.
Your correct, Deron. I have been mulling it over for some time. I think what ever is the case, it is simply posting tweets on a page somewhere. We need something more than that.
I’ve purposefully avoided twitter, despite occasional temptations to jump in (it’s the only way I’d get to talk to Tracy again, for one thing). But I really, really dislike having to jump around a lot–one thread on cluster, another on twitter, another through facebook, another through email. To me it’s like the burden of having to change clothes to go the gym, then change back to return to work. Fuck the gym.
I’d like to see the Twitter feeds of the flockers who would like to participate integrated into the flow of posts on the front page somehow.
What Cindy speaks of, with the jumping around from clusterflock to Twitter to Facebook is why I had to stop feeding my Twitterstream into my Facebook. It got so confusing and unnecessarily complicated. On Twitter I’d tell y’all about the hard day I was having, and suddenly some girl I went to elementary school with is telling me to hang in there on Facebook. So, now, I use my Facebook to say stupid things that mean nothing to me, and hopefully make those obsolete friends think I grew up to be awesome.
Oh, but that’s not what you were asking about. Twitter has definitely made it possible for some flockers to feel connected to each other’s daily lives without commenting/participating on the site here. Some days my only interaction with clusterflock (let alone the Internet) are through a shout-out of HEY I’M UP ON THIS HILLTOP WATCHING MY CITY, Y’ALL! One-sided and mundane, generally.
Who knows if that belongs on clusterflock!
I’m one of the people Kelsey’s talking about. I’m busy and Twitter gives me that space to quickly interact with flockers and others. As for Facebook, that’s just an account I have. If I update or check facebook, it’s usually on accident.
For the record, I’m fine having my tweets appear on clusterflock just not sure if other people will want to see them.
My humble 2 Euros says Sidewiki will have more of a (possibly negative) impact on blogs than integrating Twitter.
I really don’t think the conversation has moved to twitter. I think the conversation has moved to real life (where it never really left).
I see more of a ‘conversation’ actually happening on facebook, generally. Status updates do actually seem to generate longer conversations on occasion. I am not friends with anyone I went to school with on there, generally it’s actual people I interact with in the real world, but even then, I really get a sense of knowing too much about every random bit of bullshit that all these people are thinking. Twitter seems to me like lots of closed soundbites. The farthest the ‘conversation’ goes is a couple of tweets or so, and that seems rare. It’s good for links and nudges in various directions. I still see the most interesting online conversations happening here on clusterflock, occasionally and consistently.
Lately I like Flickr; I think the sense of commenting on an image from someone’s actual life draws the conversation enough out of the abstract to be somewhat real-ish. Like a knitting club, or something.