I created a profile on Twitter early last year, but I now have one Twit on record in that time. I just seem to enjoy the cathartic effect of writing articles – much the same way I enjoy writing in my journal at home. I’ve always been an educator at heart, as I really enjoy both learning and then passing that knowledge on to others.
This, obviously, can’t be done in a quick message via a social networking site.
Also, I hate to admit, I really don’t care about what everyone is doing every minute of the day. I know that feature is a big draw, especially for those of Generation Y, but I’ve got more than enough going on in my own life to really be interested that some random person just ate a bad burger at McDonalds, or is feeling crappy this morning because of a hangover.
This process of carefully constructing a coherent, well-structured, and descriptive article about what I’m doing, or events going on in my life, is something that I enjoy too much to attempt to do it on some social networking site.
I even jumped on the bandwagon and joined Facebook earlier this year. I do update my status on there every now and then, but I really just get on to play Mafia Wars and see if anyone’s posted some new pics of their kids.
For anyone who’s excited, addicted, or enthralled by Twitter, can you provide some thoughts on why you enjoy it?
17 Responses for "I Just Can’t Get Into Twitter"
I /want/ to blog… but I fail. I don’t have the attention span to sit and write… twitter… is short.. and takes no thought from me.. we mesh well.. although sometimes… eh… I’m over it… then I’m into it.. then … well. you get the point..
Twitter is for people who don’t value their time.
I use twitter to keep from feeling anti-social whilst working from home. I also leave it up on another computer so I don’t get interrupted every 2 minutes with Important News About What My Friends Are Doing.
Twitter has it’s place.
DW
When I first heard of Twitter and checked it out I thought “How stupid is this, what a waste of time”. I even created a domain: shittr.net. It’s intent was to allow people to send out 140 character messages whenever they used the toilet, so people could know what they where up to EVERY minute of the day. Alas, I got bored with the idea and eventually gave into peer pressure and tried Twitter. For about two months. I found myself constantly distracted by Twitter notifications, 89% of them pure junk I had no interest in.
Needless to say, after keeping Twhirl off for a couple of months I found myself a lot less distracted.
I find the same of Facebook. It’s a valuable tool for sharing with family and friends, but 60% of the people on my friends list were people I never met. Sure, they are al cool people, and I’d like to meet them one day. But I don’t know them so I don’t really care about pictures of their kids, a trillion invites to silly games and the overall expectation that I was to join everyone in everything they do. Plus I had an overwhelming urge to punch a bunch of zombies, vampires and werewolves in the face everytime I got “bitten”.
I see the advantages of social networking, I really do. But I think it’s a lot of noise and also a productivity killer for work. I’m not antisocial, I just prefer to keep my social activities in person, I guess.
I’ll repeat my standard suggestion I give folks who don’t see any value of Twitter: just follow those folks who have similar interests to yours (programming-wise or otherwise) and who primarily tweet about that interest.
Most of the people I follow on Twitter are fellow ColdFusion developers, and they’re almost always posting hyperlinks to interesting tools or articles (usually tech-related), announcing their latest blog post, or sharing some coding story or difficulty that may not quite warrant a blog post. Yeah, there’s the occasional “what I had for lunch” tweet, but they’re easily skipped (and there are some third-party tools you can use to try and filter those kinds of tweets out).
Hey there Brian. That’s a good suggestion, and I even had my wife (who is a big Twitter fan) walk me through how to do just that. It still doesn’t work for me :(
Sounds like you’re following the wrong people
@Joe: Entirely possible.
I’m with you Steve. I can’t really even find the time to give twitter a try.
My work place doesn’t allow personal email, IM, etc., so no twitter there. At home, I’m online for contract work and some personal interests. I’ll use IM sometimes then, but wouldn’t want constant messages from twitter then either.
I keep up with blogs via Google Reader, something I can pull up when I have a few minutes. It goes back to push vs pull convenience. I like to pull updates when it works for me, not have others constantly pushing it to me.
Maybe I’m just missing out, but I haven’t even gotten into texting yet, though I see how it can be useful at times.
Yeah, you just need to follow the right people. For example, there are a LOT of /extremely/ intelligent people out there following me – likely because I’ve never posted on twitter a day in my life. ;)
Twitter for me is two things…Yes it’s a social contact site for the random thought but it’s also a great business tool especially if you are in sales or sales related business. You can send quick info out to a large group and not have to give a ton of detial just send them a link to the detail. Not into the social networkingl thing no problem but if your in business and need to stay in touch then you might want to reconsider.
Do I read everything that everyone that I’m following write? No. I scan. There’s little nuggets of information to have now and then in 140 characters.
I use twitter to social pow-wow with other CF Developers and have a good chuckle now and again. I sometimes get useful links, thoughts and hints. Occasionally I search for Railo/CF, now and then you come across someone that needs help with something small or whatever.
If it’s something larger than 140 chars that I need to talk to someone, I’ll use tinypaste.com or point them at a google document. Ideally, if I had a blog, I’d write up a blog post and point them at it.
It’s easy to quickly share links & pics and see at a glance what’s being talked about today. I agree that it is all about who you follow and skimming for what interests you. It’s easy to interact in real time with whoever is in your stream.
For people who don’t follow your blog, you can introduce a topic and lure them in.
I really struggled with Twitter too but I have found two good ways to use it. The first is for providing a different notification mechanism (like SMS, but thru the “tubes”) and we use it to announce upcoming maintenance windows for our service.
The other thing that I found twitter is great for is using it to stay on top of temporal events. My first real following was during the Mumbai terrorist attack and I’ve used it at cf.Objective() and I’m using it today at WordCamp SF. You can track events through the use of an IRC-like “hashtag” such as #wordcamp. To be able to have what is effectively a “side conversation” during the day or coordinating with where people are going for drinks/dinner/etc is really useful.
I have never been interested in social networking sites, because it seemed to me that the VAST majority of the “friends” are actually people just wanting to collect other names for no other reason than to have the biggest collection of “friends”.
Twitter only seemed to be an even more trivial time-waster to me.
Then my attention was grabbed last week when i was talking to a contract CF developer – far busier than i am – who said he got most of his business though Facebook and Twitter.
HUH???????
He reckoned that he gets most of his work because of his social networking.
NOW i’m interested. If what he does could be applied in my case too, then it would make a significant difference to my life. If my life worked the same way he did, I could say good bye to all those blood-sucking useless, do-nothing recruiters. I could charge less for what I do, and get more in my pocket at the same time.
So i’m interested in finding if anyone else gets actual dollars-in-the-pocket work-in-the-order-book benefit out of the social networking sites, or is this just an aberration in this one guy’s case.
I HATE HATE HATE HATE Twitter. I have never been so frsutrated trying to create an account. They have NO real HELP desk. Just an archives with topics to choose. I cannot email someone at Twitter and ask for help. I have created three accounts and it won’t recognize any of them. It list things I DON’T want listed and won’t let me get rid of them. So, I deactivate that account and try to start a new account and it won’t let me.
IT is the MOST f_____ up system I have EVER seen. It stinks!
Hi! I’m Lejla!
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