The twittering classes

What's the big deal with Twitter? As far as I can see it is a mechanism to allow large quantities of low value noise into your life while at the same time being a device for ego stroking. No I'm not interested in your every idle non-thought, and I don't need to feed my ego hourly. And it doesn't work very well.

Twitter decided my New Zealand mobile phone number doesn't exist. So then I figured I'd add the RSS feed to my Google reader. Unfortunately the RSS feed requires a sign-on across an unsecured connection so that won't be happening. Which leaves me with browsing the website whenever I remember.

This is probably a mercy because even the feeds from those I respect still end up being the sort of thing you would say to a companion in a car on a long journey when you had run out of all the really interesting things to say.

"Look! A tree!"
"I hate Volvos"
"Why isn't the zero next to the one on keyboards?"

I go to great lengths to reduce the daily media bombardment. Why would I connect a new hosepipe of drivel?

Comments

The Grauniad

The Grauniad always does do a nice line in April Fools

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/San_Serriffe/

James Finister

twitter on

OK I've enabled twitter. You can follow my squawks at theitiskeptic

I still don't understand how I am supposed to receive responses? Mobile phones are only supported in four countries (yes guys there are other countries).
the RSS feed requires a log in over an unsecured connection, no?

So i have to remember to look at twitter webpage? Hardly the immediacy that twitter promotes eh?

What have I missed/misunderstood?

Twitter

I'm trying it as alphasong (charb@visi.com), if anyone is interested. Same questions as Skeptic but what the hey.

Charles T. Betz
http://www.erp4it.com

A great technology: But the killer app ??

I think we have yet to see the killer app for the Twitter style, multi-cast messaging service..

Some have mentioned more real-time communication to a larger support community etc.. which I think is definitely part of it.. Harnessing the shared intelligence of the internet in real-time is a good idea.. Needs more focus than is evident today.. There are lots of spin-off tweet communities which offer services of this nature, Single Mom's, 12-step programs, etc.. etc..

$0.02

Brad Vaughan

A helpful overview

What is Twitter and how can it be useful?

http://www.weaverluke.com/blog/2008/10/twittercom.html

Luke Weaver provides a better explanation than I ever could.

I was also about to thrash twitter but then...

I was also about to thrash twitter but then I integrated it with Facebook and then installed BeTwittered onto my page on iGoogle. I now find it pretty useful (but not yet mind blowing). Many idle thoughts have an underlying reason, like why do you really hate Volvos?
But alas old skep, you contradict yourself. You once told me that the most idiotic of blings is useful if it attracts even one hit to your site, :-)
BTW: You can following my idle thoughts and stroke my ego on http://twitter.com/redpineapple

You know what

I thought exactly the same for the longest time. And certainly, there is a healthy proportion of ego stroking that goes on but it's easy enough to un-follow anyone who irritates. In the meantime, for virtually no mental input, I get a stream of interesting comment, links and information from people I find engaging. In my field of storage, there are nine or ten excellent bloggers who Twitter. For me, there is no question that their Twittering adds value to their other communications.

The really interesting thing I discovered as I started to use twitter more though was that there is real value in snippits of information. It takes me twenty seconds to catch up on Twitter as a walk down a corridor or wait for my lunchtime sandwich and most days, I will get something useful out of that twenty seconds.

The trick is not to follow the world and don't worry about the numbers following you. It's all about following the people that you find interesting. Certainly, I would be interested in seeing your daily ruminations and brain farts. What's your Twitter username then?

MattPovey

PS - RedPineapple - Followed.

PPS - Your Captcha is a nightmare.

Blogging is so 2007...

Geesh, Skep. I would have thought you’d have gotten it immediately. Think about it for a sec.

- Think asynchronicity. Twitter has the power to become a new distribution channel for your blog. I’d go as far to say it has the potential to *replace* your blog.

- Think service strategy. By integrating Twitter with some other services you can potentially increase the level of traffic your blog receives. It can even act as the central point of all your blogging services.

- Think mass collaboration. Say you have a coding problem on your site. If you have a large enough Twitter following, you may have the solution in minutes without having to resort to a service desk.

- Think personal productivity. Coordinate with client, wifey and son, while you assail the walls of castle ITIL, and execute your Christmas shopping.

And so on.

I use it as a tool to communicate what I am doing in my business, as well as interact with others with whom I may be doing business with or will be doing business with. I also find myself reading non-twitter blogs less. (And I recently helped a government client use Twitter to communicate with constituents on city issues, road closures, crime and the recent hurricanes.)

Is it worth adding another intrusive social media past-time into your already packed day? Only you can answer that question.

It inches us towards more reciprocal relationships with our sources of information. It is another step away from the “publish and push” model, and closer towards the “engage and collaborate” model. The collaboration may be a bit raw at the moment, but so were its predecessors. Too many are using Twitter as an IRC or chatroom, but that is evolving as the adults catch on. It's nowhere close to perfect but watch closely for our old friend "emergence" and her clever surprises as the adoption rate accelerates. Not too long ago much of the web was viewed as overblown hype. Now its decided an American Presidential election.

One other item for

One other item for thought:

Some time back, we implemented an SKMS for a client's external facing service desk. If you own a popular portable music player/phone or laptop with a support contract, your configuration and contract info are probably embedded in their system.

We subsequently added an enhancement via Twitter and some custom software. The enhancement adds several capabilities to the service desk; communication channels, monitoring platforms, incident escalation/response, knowledge management, and a few others I can't mention without giving too much info away.

Who knows what ideas will emerge once the more creative types get warmed up.

Oh, and yeah, the new captcha is a POS.

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