Eccentric Flower:200911/That Goddamned Bird
From Eccentric Flower
«November 2009 «Eccentric Flower
That Goddamned Bird
OK, so, as you know, I can't stand Twitter. I think it promotes short attention spans. I think it facilitates the sort of petty "did you SEE what he said there?" kind of bickering I ranted about in the previous entry. I think it encourages people to think that the rest of us care what they had for lunch. I think its accessibility on mobile devices encourages a horrid trend for us to carry some sort of little electronic pacifier with us everywhere we go. I think it has a really stupid name. I think it is twee. I think someone's getting rich off it and shouldn't be. (See comments. -c) And if you give me an hour I'll think of ten thousand other reasons why I don't like it.
Nonetheless I just started a Twitter account.
And I have done so for one reason only: LiveJournal is falling down on the job as a notification mechanism even more than usual these days. And several of you have complained, justifiably, that you have no idea when there are new words here.
So: If you are the sort of person who would prefer to get word of new stuff here via Twitter, I will attempt to oblige. I have not managed yet to create any kind of automatic post from here to there, so right now I'm updating it by hand when I post, which means I may slip occasionally. But I'll do my best.
And you can just restrain your laughter right now. I bite.
I don't think Twitter promotes short attention spans so much as takes advantage of them. It's a great little tool to post something quick to let people what's going on in your day. Sure, a thousand words are good, but a lot of the time, 140 characters will do.
Besides, the Big Ben Twitter account that goes BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG at 5 o'clock (and so on) makes me smile.
-- 18:33, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Between you, me, and the wall, I'm having a lot of fun with it today. I'll see if the impulse lasts.
-- 18:43, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Twitter revelation - the ministry of justice is on twitter. I can get the local court decisions on twitter.
Why do I find this not as inspirational as I should?
-- 20:18, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Iain:
Judging by your output today, you're already finding Twitter somewhat useful for things other than replicating your RSS feed.
-- 20:56, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Yes. I'm skeptical but, as I say, I'm having fun with it. What will likely happen is that I will use it and yet continue to denounce it as evil. Some people will term this "hypocrisy." I prefer to call it "pragmatism."
-- 21:01, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
Or if not pragmatism, then joy at twiddling with new toys.
And inventiveness is good.
For me Twitter looks like the dead crow from tale. Should be picked up in case it would prove to be useful in some way. But most likely will be thrown away after some time, unused. Just like the crow carcass in the story was.
-- 21:09, 19 November 2009 (GMT)
So, far from assuming someone's getting filthy rich from Twitter I am now wondering exactly how long they'll be around. I thought Nonelvis was kidding, but no ... right now Twitter's business plan is, "We'll just burn through VC until we decide it's time to find a way to make money." It's right there in black and white. I am astonished.
-- 04:02, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
So here are my two Twitter questions.
1) When does it decide to convert a URL to bit.ly format?
2) Why do so many people have a location of "Tehran"?
-- 04:15, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Mel:
I think there was some sort of thing during the Iran protests about changing your location to Tehran to confuzzle the Iranian powers-that-be, or something like that. Presumably a lot of people just never changed it back again, or just like it that way.
I have had a Twitter account for ages but I rarely remember to check it. I do better (for some values of "better") on Facebook because there are games to play there.
-- 04:31, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
What makes looking at followers of followers of followers of followers on Twitter different from my previous (admittedly ancient in online time) experiences is that much more accounts are locked today.
Or am I just drawn to that kind of people - who are likely to lock their accounts?
-- 05:46, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Mel:
Apparently people are locking their accounts a lot more. At least, I just looked at who follows me and I found a lot of locked accounts.
-- 06:13, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
If you are conversant in Perl, you can automate your Twitter account with Net::Twitter. I use it to automatically run my own Twitter account siwisdom (even more amazing is that people follow that account).
-- 06:37, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Twitter has strange influence. Around a day of having an account and 26 entries.
-- 21:27, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Yeah, I know. I see a crow dinner in my future.
I'm still not entirely happy with the way some people use it (Roland Burton Hedley style usage), but here's the thing. When I first started echoing my journal on LJ, way back when, the idea was to use LJ only for notifications and really short link items. The problem is, brevity is not my strong suit, so the short links got longer and longer and eventually took over the place. Twitter is essentially forcing me to segment; I can't post long material there.
Mind you, I'm not convinced anyone will follow things I link there any more than they do here; and there is an "archival" issue in that I lose any real record of things I've linked over there, whereas if I link them here I have them in permanent storage. Still, I probably won't want to remember I linked the Harlequin stuff or Ebert's New Moon review twenty years from now, so who cares.
-- 21:45, 20 November 2009 (GMT)
Iain:
right now Twitter's business plan is, "We'll just burn through VC until we decide it's time to find a way to make money." It's right there in black and white. I am astonished.
I'm not so much astonished that this is their plan as the fact that the venture capitalists seem to have just shrugged and said, "OK. Fine with us. Here, have some more money." Venture capitalists are normally a bit more hard-nosed than that.
-- 01:47, 21 November 2009 (GMT)
Danima:
Now seems an appropriate time to post this: "The New Blog Entry," by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
-- 18:12, 19 November 2009 (GMT)