Twitter

So far, four or five of you fuckers have added me and not posted in this thread. I hate you all.

<3

In that case, I better post before I add you :)
Actually I only signed up for Twitter today... god knows why, not like I am ever gonna use it extensively. My name on there is "stani"... or was, it's "lightbringer" now ^_^

As mentioned, I also have a twitter account.

http://twitter.com/paulecoyote. Rather predictably.

I update rather randomly (but not terribly often) with just about anything though.

http://twitter.com/trojanman9

Now all I have to do is figure out something useful to do and I'll update it. [lol]

Thankyou for pointing out twhirl, I now have no life.
http://twitter.com/diablo_tk

http://twitter.com/benryves

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Original post by diablo_tk Thankyou for pointing out twhirl, I now have no life. http://twitter.com/diablo_tk

I'm a fan of Witty as well. It's buggier and has less features but it's pretty. So it makes sense I'm using it in Vista.

I'm paranoid about being tracked down. (You thought I misbehave on GDnet? I actually LIKE it here) and therefore avoid any of these social networking things. Knowing that the smallest area I can be tracked down to is half a mile wide is reassuring.

Just joined fairly recently myself. http://twitter.com/aidan_walsh

Using Twitterific myself, found Twhirl to be kinda buggy on the Mac. That said, I'm not entirely convinced by Twitterific either, so thinking I might give writing my own client a go as an exercise in Objective C.

Well, I just joined. http://twitter.com/JoelBennett.

I wrote a Twitter library using libcurl that was intended to notify Twitter of achievements the player received.

I didn't use it because getting libcurl set up on Windows was more of a pain than it was worth and I was quite lazy. I should dust off the code and write some kind of client with it.

Am I the only one who finds all these social networking sites incredibly boring, annoying, and frankly, just plain dumb ? Especially Twitter (and clones). I just can't imagine a single situation where "micro blogging" would classify as anything else than an annoying pain in the ass...

Then again, looking at the global success of these services, it might just be me. Bah.

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Original post by Yann L Am I the only one who finds all these social networking sites incredibly boring, annoying, and frankly, just plain dumb ? Especially Twitter (and clones). I just can't imagine a single situation where "micro blogging" would classify as anything else than an annoying pain in the ass... Then again, looking at the global success of these services, it might just be me. Bah.

Nah, I'm with you. I think broadcasting your life to everyone is silly... almost boastful in a way. You're making the assumption people actually care.

Quote:

Original post by Yann L Am I the only one who finds all these social networking sites incredibly boring, annoying, and frankly, just plain dumb ? Especially Twitter (and clones). I just can't imagine a single situation where "micro blogging" would classify as anything else than an annoying pain in the ass...

I used to think the same. I started to use Twitter mainly as an experiment out of boredom.

For the most part, it depends on what/who you follow. The value you get out of it depends on what you are looking for in it. I don't use Facebook or MySpace or Bebo because they don't look like they have any value to me. Twitter is gaining value all the time.

A lot of people only follow people they know, others like to follow as many people as possible. I think I'm getting to be the latter, though it would have to be people who share similar interests. Sometimes its handy to have to vent, other times it can be handy to see peoples reactions to things and stories as they break. Sometimes you can see the formative thoughts of articles you see a few hours or days later popping up, other times its just trash Valleywag crap.

Some publications like Ars Technica use Twitter as an alternative to their RSS feeds. Some sites have come up using Twitter as a framework, bringing additional functionality to the service. Sites like Quotably which allow you to track Twitter conversations, or the search engine Tweetscan.

Twitter has proven itself to be relevant at times. The biggest example that sticks out in my mind was the storm that surrounded the California fires last summer, and how people and services started to use Twitter to follow and even mould the story. The LAFD still use the account they set up then to issue safety alerts to this day.

Quote:

Original post by Yann L Am I the only one who finds all these social networking sites incredibly boring, annoying, and frankly, just plain dumb ? Especially Twitter (and clones). I just can't imagine a single situation where "micro blogging" would classify as anything else than an annoying pain in the ass... Then again, looking at the global success of these services, it might just be me. Bah.

If everyone from my old highschool wasn't on Facebook (and some ppl from uni also), I doubt I'd be using it... even then, I barely do that. Sometimes it's convenient to keep in touch with friends and see who's where, doing what, but anyone I really care about is on my Messenger or Skype list anyway. That is to say, I can only accept a limited number of people as friends. :-)

Twitter is an interesting social phenomenon, but I don't really see much use in it at the moment. If I want my mom to know how I am, I call her. It might be useful for opinions on stuff that don't warrant a blog entry, or for sharing offbeat stuff you come across, provided that someone actually cares. It might just be a passing fad, but then again I bet that's what people were saying when blogging really took off.

Quote:

Original post by Yann L Am I the only one who finds all these social networking sites incredibly boring, annoying, and frankly, just plain dumb ? Especially Twitter (and clones). I just can't imagine a single situation where "micro blogging" would classify as anything else than an annoying pain in the ass... Then again, looking at the global success of these services, it might just be me. Bah.

I thought I would feel the same way. I was incredibly resistant about the concept when my friend tried day-after-day for weeks to get me to sign up. I thought the whole concept was completely silly when it was described to me and even when my friend showed me a few blog posts about Twitter which tried to explain its appeal. I still thought it was ridiculous even after I first signed up. Now I'm trying to get all of my contacts/friends to join so I can fill my network with people that I think I would enjoy reading updates from.

When Ravuya had me add him was when I saw the potential in it. If a bunch of developers and programmers started using it then the only things I'd read about from other people would be things I'm interested about reading. I have absolutely no interest in adding someone if 50-75% of what they discuss is some aspect of their life that I don't care about. That said, if someone primarily talks about development, pastes cool links, or shares intelligent ideas/thoughts, then I enjoy "following" them. When a majority of someone's post become about them brushing their teeth, turning on a television, or finding rashes in weird places, I'll stop following them.

So far, for interest, I have awesome stuff on my list from benryves, Ravuya, lightbringer, Gaiiden, Moe, and Mona Ibrahim (fellow GameDev.net'er, even though she didn't post here). These people have primarily interesting things to say and I enjoy reading their contributions. A majority of my posts today have been about games, industry news, stuff I found out while writing tomorrow's news post, and my current experiments with TorqueX.

Part of this is that I enjoy active/current mediums which require very little effort to contribute to. I love IRC, Instant Messengers, and forums where I don't feel bad about only writing a line or two (or more, if the situation fits) entries/posts.

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Original post by aidan_walsh Twitter has proven itself to be relevant at times. The biggest example that sticks out in my mind was the storm that surrounded the California fires last summer, and how people and services started to use Twitter to follow and even mould the story. The LAFD still use the account they set up then to issue safety alerts to this day.

That's something different. Used as an emergency alert dispatch, the system is certainly a good idea. I can also see the use for things like stock quote tickers, targeted news, etc. But I don't get the concept of "micro blogs". It just reminds me some of these pre-teens who spend the entire day sending dozens of SMS to their friends about every single little irrelevant thing that just happens to cross their minds. While Twitters technology is interesting, it looks like being an attention whoring tool more than anything else. Then again, I feel the same about social networking systems and blogs in general.

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Part of this is that I enjoy active/current mediums which require very little effort to contribute to. I love IRC, Instant Messengers, and forums where I don't feel bad about only writing a line or two (or more, if the situation fits) entries/posts.

I deeply despise realtime and/or short message chatting systems, from IM to SMS. I especially consider the latter to be a direct spawn of satan (and a genius marketing coup from the telco companies, making tons of money from what was essentially a transmission control / telemetry channel). Instant messaging is really bad too. I don't know how my GF can live with her PC constantly popping up some IM window of "so-and-so connected and/or wants to talk to you", and yadda yadda. I would consider this an unsollicited invasion of my private "zen-zone" ;)

That's probably why I don't fit into Twitters target profile :)

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Original post by Yann L ...yadda yadda. I would consider this an unsollicited invasion of my private "zen-zone" ;) That's probably why I don't fit into Twitters target profile :)

So that explains how you manage to get so much work done! I knew there had to be some trick to your amazing productivity... [grin]