I don't want to comment on the premise of his post (which is not to say I don't agree or disagree with it), but I liked what Steve Hall had to say about Twitter:
It's pretty much guaranteed you'll interpret this as idiotic puffery but until you use Twitter, really use it for a while, you won't really understand what you're missing and you don't really have the right to comment. Seriously. Give it a try.
As the only user of Twitter at work, I get asked about the merits of it all the time. I love Twitter and find it a valuable resource for everything Steve mentions: "IM, email, mobile app, chat room, focus group, news source, a wall on which to bounce ideas, a research resource, presence indicator," but I have a hard time getting that across to people. I get told by people that Twitter pointless and a huge waste of time, but without having tried it, they really don't have a right to comment. Next time Twitter comes up in conversation, I'll respond simply with, "just give it a try."
Thanks for the advice, Steve.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, IM, chat, communication, social networks
43Folders had a post about re-evaluating one's online commitments, something I've been trying to work on for a few months now, ever since the Media Fast Experiment I did back in September.
Google Reader is perhaps my most time consuming "commitment" and so it's the one I'm scrutinizing the most. Since starting over yesterday, I've read close to 300 items, have 60 unread, of which I'll read 20 or so. Over 10% of the content that comes passes through my brain is content I don't want. I've become especially adverse to the big group blogs that put out 10+ posts a day of things I'm only tangentially interested in. I'd much rather follow 5x more personal blogs and have more varied and more authentic posts, even at the same volume.
I also want to eliminate Digg from my life. Most of the stories I read on Digg are mildly entertaining but ultimately mindless. The community is fairly bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of intelligent conversation and the comment system itself doesn't help any even there was good conversation.
On the flip side, I'd like to spend more time on Flickr. My Flickr usage pattern has me posting a ton of photos over a concentrated period of time. Part of the reason is that most of my photography has been from vacations and I'm too OCD to leave gaps or upload them out of order. Now that that's slowed down a bit (I have <100 photos from South Africa left to post), I can go through my backlog of random shots and start uploading those in less quantity but far more often. Hopefully with more frequent posting I'll be more likely to participate in the great community that exists on Flickr.
As I said yesterday, I'd also like to spend more time blogging. With this post, I'm 2 for 2 which puts me on pace for 366 this year :-) Along with more blogging, comes more participation. I hope to do a bit more connecting with my audience via posts and connecting with other bloggers via comments and link love. The same goes for Twitter. I don't want just more tweets, I also want more conversation.
To reiterate what I mentioned yesterday, it's all about producing (and participating) more and consuming less. Just a warning: posts here might be a bit repetitive over the next week while I force this stuff to stick.
Technorati Tags: blogging, commitments, producing, participating, conversation, community, consuming
A new version of Twitterrific, the popular Twitter client for Mac OS X, was released today. The changelog details new features and improvements.
The most glaring change, however, has to be the monetization scheme: either you pay $15 for it or you get an ad in your tweet list every hour. If there ever was a desktop application that could function as well on an ad-supported model as websites can, Twitterrific is it. The ads fit in so seamlessly and they're so not bothersome that it feels like Iconfactory could have gotten away with more ads. But I'll stop before I give them any more ideas.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitterrific, The Deck, ads, ad-supported, Iconfactory, software, OS X
For the sake of this blog, I'm in dire need of an interface to this blog that is far more lightweight than the standard WordPress web interface. It's relatively easy to feed my tweets into my blog, but that's not what I'm looking for here. Tweets are far too casual to warrant a standard blog post, but blog posts are too cumbersome for some fleeting, yet not-so-informal thoughts. My goal is to find something like John Gruber's Linked List or Justin Blanton's Bits. Any thoughts?
Technorati Tags: Twitter, blog, casual, , John Gruber, Daring Fireball, linked list, Justin Blanton, bits
Twitter may be dying, but not for the reason you might think. It's not a matter of it not being monetized, or the servers crashing under popularity, or people losing interest. The reason is its name.
Last night, Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT, announced he was leaving Twitter to avoid confusion between it and the TWiT (This Week In Tech) network, especially in light of mashups like Twit Box, Twit This, etc. The now deleted Tweet said: "I've asked Ev to delete my Twitter account. I'm concerned about confusion with TWiT. I'm moving to Jaiku: account is ChiefTWiT. CU there!"
Robert Scoble thinks Leo is setting up for a trademark suit, since Leo does own the TWiT trademark. He's not doing it to be evil, but to simply protect his trademark. Trademark law states that if you don't protect a trademark, it enters the public domain.
Leo moved to Jaiku and I noticed right away it was down, no doubt due to Leo's switch. Leo is the most popular Twitter user according to Twitterholic, and his move also prompted Scoble (#3) and Paul Terry Walhus (#10) to jump onto Jaiku. That's three of the top 10 Twitter users that have moved to a competing service. And it's not just in the short head: there's been a lot of buzz on Jaiku, as a Twittersearch reported 210 tweets in the past 9 hours mentioned the competing service.
I don't see Twitter disappearing tomorrow, but Evan Williams (founder of Obvious, the company behind Twitter) needs to change the name of the service yesterday if he wants to keep Twitter's 1999-like growth going. The sooner Twitter becomes something else, the less time people have to rally behind Leo on Jaiku. For the sake of TWiT/Twitter fans, this needs to get resolved right away.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, TWiT, Jaiku, This Week In Tech, Leo Laporte, Twitterholic, trademark
Intel geek extraordinaire Josh Bancroft notes that Twitter has "sucked the life out of [his] blog". I posted the following as a comment, but in an effort to give any semblance of life to this blog I'm gonna repost it here:
Updating Twitter is much easier than updating my blog; it seems like "what my cat ate today" posts are encouraged on Twitter whereas posting something like that on an old-fashioned blog practically relegates you to a Live Journal/MySpace-only crowd.
The bar has been lowered (at least for now) and so writing anything on Twitter is much easier than having to come up with a whole blog post. You know, the kind that require thought and *gasp* maybe even research? Maybe it's just easier to swallow "what my cat ate today" tweets since they're limited to 140 characters, and blog posts can drag on, and on, and on…
In other news, I'm still waiting on a Wordpress plugin that automatically adds "Add me on Twitter" links to every post so I don't have to.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, blogging, tweets, Web 2.0, Live Journal, MySpace
