My first 48 hours with Twitter
January 7th, 2008 by Ivo
On friday night I created a twitter account. I didn't 'get' twitter, and I've read that it's 'hard to explain' and people 'only get it once they've used it'. So when I saw that even Cal Evans is using it, I had to finally try.
At first I thought it was a form of instant messaging. And while it has some of its characteristics, it's different. I think it can best be described as 'broadcasting your current status'. To people who want to see it. Like the status field you have in applications like MSN and Skype. Elizabeth described it to me as 'more like IRC', and she has a point. It's like IRC, without channels. The '/me' command on IRC is very twitterish even.
Messages are never more than 140 characters, which helps keeping them to the point.
People don't just post their status: it's used a lot for 'look at this' type messages, usually some url that someone has just read and wants to share.
What I like about twitter so far:
- It's simple; it broadcasts a message to people who want to receive it, and that's about it.
- It's open; it has API's which have led to a lot of tools and devices supporting twitter. I have Twitterrific to read messages, and can easily send them through Quicksilver. My tweets are displayed on the right of my blog using a simple wordpress plugin.
- It's addicitive. It gives you a feeling of connectedness, more even than instant messengers.
What I don't like about twitter so far:
- Twittering via SMS is too intrusive; twitter with my mobile phone's browser is decent, but requires me to login each time (but maybe that's a problem with my phone, not twitter).
- There's the danger of information overload. Some people twitter so much that they easily dominate the twitter screen (example: going to the zoo, coming back from the zoo, looking at the pictures from the zoo, discovering there are a lot of pictures from the zoo, filtering the pictures from the zoo, uploading the pictures from the zoo, announcing the pictures of the zoo on flickr and all the tea-drinking that happened in between; hi Skoop!
). I can see this becoming overwhelming as I follow more people.
- Direct messages are inconvenient, I can't see my outgoing stuff; but then again, that's not what it's for.
- I miss a way to channel messages; some things are only relevant to my friends from the PHP community, some only for my coworkers, etc. But with twitter you only have individual messages and messages to all.
In any case, it's interesting so far. Let's see how I feel about it in a week or two.
January 07, 2008 at 11:01 am, Arne Hulstein said:
Hi Ivo,
Great to see you on Twitter. I was wondering when you would join.
Anyway, you ought to be able to tweet from your phone without logging on all the time. You will have to log on to your connection (Vodafone Live! I assume?), but that is just a selection and then the browser will pick it up from there. At least, mine does. 
Information overload is possible, but unlikely if you use filters. Channels are a feature that a lot of people are crying about. On the other hand, channels probably conflict with the whole idea of sharing freely what is keeping you busy at that moment. The only thing I am desperately waiting for right now, is to be able to split the notification and track channels. That way I can have notifications sent to IM and track direct replies through sms. Hopefully they will pick up on the suggestion in the near future.
See you areound! Let’s see how soon you can break 1000 tweets.
(Oh, and it can get slightly addictive if you’re not careful.)
January 07, 2008 at 2:02 pm, Cal Evans said:
EVEN Cal Evans? That one’s gonna cost ya.
Actually, I think the value of Twitter is only now being realized. Early last month I wrote a blog post on The Importance of twitter. Basically, it gives you an API to quickly send out messages to a group or sub-group of your friends/family/associates.
Here in the US we are in election season (I checked, it’s still not ok to shoot politicians though) During the Iowa caucuses people in each caucus were twittering the early results. Those following the main account knew the winner a full 15 minutes before the major news networks called it. It was awesome!
=C=
January 09, 2008 at 2:40 pm, Adam said:
Twitter is such a time-waster in my opinion.
January 17, 2008 at 4:33 pm, Michelangelo van Dam said:
I use twitter for various reasons, but mainly to communicate with the PHP Community when I’m on the go or face issues I cannot resolve by myself.
But now that my customer has blocked all access to social networking sites (including twitter.com), I see how much I miss the availability of twitter.
Yes, I admit I use twitter also for throwing BS to the world, but that’s just part of the game.
As Cal already mentioned here, there can be a great value in using twitter, especially for communicating with customers where you can twit progress of projects, issues you’re facing preparing a meeting, etc…
Of course, twitter can also become an information overload channel, but you need to filter out those messages.
MvD
January 17, 2008 at 8:15 pm, Ivo said:
Is there a good way to filter? I have a few guys that twitter so much (>10 per hour sometimes) that I am very close to unfollowing them. But if there would be some way to filter it a bit, I might not have to.