Since the Tina Fey account turend out to be an imposter, are you really sure that it was the real Rob Thomas? I’ve never been particularly fond of the dude in the first place so I really don’t care if he is a jerk or not, but it would be crappy if someone’s reputation was trashed based on what an imposter said.
I’ve been on Twitter just over two years now. For me, it’s been about professional connections - believe it or not, there’s a pretty strong contingent of librarians on there. We jumped on it early and we learned how to use it to connect and grow our networks.
When I moved to Tucson from Ohio, it kept me connected to the network I had built. I have had conference presentations and papers grow out of the connections I built there. I written about Twitter and other connections in the web 2.0 world and how we can use them for outreach, professional development and the like. It is a community - and it’s become a much more real community for me that most other online places, the SDMB included.
And yet: Not everyone wants to be on Twitter or Facebook or Friendfeed or any of the other networks out there, not everyone will get it - that’s ok. I don’t get stamp collecting, but you’re welcome to do that if you want to.
Not knocking it at all. I know a ton of people who Twiiter/Facebook/MySpace/whatever. But I have literally never known anyone who wasn’t intentionally (also) leveraging it as a marketing tool. Actors, photographers, bands, hell, even booth babes and podcasters – they all make most of their money from networking and “who you know” and word-of-mouth and friend-of-a-friend.
Hell, I’m considering joining up with Twitter and/or Facebook for the sole purpose of using it for free marketing.
On the other hand, I’ve tried a couple of different social networking sites with the intent of using them for social stuff – meeting people, making friends, maintaining connections with old friends – and every one I tried absolutely fell down flat for that purpose. Didn’t work at all.
Marketing isn’t a bad thing. No artist, musician, or small business owner can survive without it. And I say, use what works.
Not unless you’re posting here with the express purpose of keeping your name in front of people to remind them that you offer/sell XYZ product or service. I have to think it would be less effective on a message board even if you were, since it would get buried under the thousands of other messages and posters here. That doesn’t happen on a Twitter/RSS feed. Your feed contains only your “voice” so if people follow it, they’ll hear you. On a message board, not so much.
It’s not about banner ads… it’s not too terribly different from, say, sending out email newsletters. Businesses don’t write and offer up business articles and whitepapers out of the goodness of their heart – they’re trying to build warm fuzzies with their existing and potential customer base, and remind people that they exist and that they sell stuff. The one major difference is that newsletters, even if you’re super-anal about permission-based marketing, are still a “push” technology, while something like Twitter or some other RSS feed is a “pull” technology.
I’m the quintessential slacker, and don’t have *anything *to market, but I have accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, and Twitter. The first two I mostly ignore (though I do use MySpace to track favorite musicians), but I’m fairly active on the other two, and have made some of my best friends on these sites, as well as some romantic entanglements. It’s also allowed me to travel pretty extensively, and I have dozens of couches to crash on throughout the US, as well as a couple in Canada, Israel, the UK, and Australia.
Are all these friends BFFs? No, but a good number are as good of friends as I’ve ever made in person, and every single one of the women I met through these sites were more interesting and well-balanced than the single girlfriend I made through more conventional means.
Rob Thomas has been validated via Valebrity.com. (They require some meaningful independent confirmation, like a thumbs up from another validated celebrity, or a link from an official website to the Twitter account, or an e-mail from the celeb’s agent, etc.) It’s him. No question.
I joined Twitter the second month it existed. I have consistently used it primarily as a means of keeping up with friends and family. (I have a separate account with which I communicate with the celebrities, it’s public, my “real life” account is locked.) I have nothing to promote to the people who already know me, and I don’t use Twitter to promote my piddling little blog or my pictures on Flickr or anything else. And my work isn’t something that I can or would promote. And I’m entirely sure that I’m not alone. I don’t know any non-celebrities who are using Twitter promotionally.
Okay, so I checked out Twitter to see what the big deal was, looks like nothing more than an “instant message” type thingy, and some of the people listed in this thread are rather amusing…
Brent Spiner also seems to be pleasantly insane, using Twitter to spin a tale of going crazy and ending up in the Betty White Clinic;
Sorry to revive this old thread, but I just read a post by Rob Thomas on the Huffington Postwhere he seems anything but homophobic (comes out strongly for gay marriage) and remembered this post of yours. Just wanted to share.
Yes, it’s another form of communication but is it really social interacting? What is the point of sitting in a bar immersed in texting while completely unaware of one’s surroundings. What’s worse, I see people doing this while they are out with their friends. It has created a whole new level of rudeness. Wait, hold on, whatever you’re saying isn’t as important as this text-twitter-phone-o-gram announced to the world by an individually chosen ring tone for each twit. If I deem you worthy I’ll share it with you. If not, I’ll torture you with it.
It’s tough to teach the proper use of technology when it is moves through society from child to adult.
Depends on how its used , it originally started out as social media, so that if you had some kind of cause or you wanted attention directed to something, it was a way of getting college kids into it. You may have heard the term flashmob, which started out in Europe as a way of protesting the G20 meetings and what not, it got out of hand enough that cell service was shut down in some cell sectors.
Now its morphing to a more business like model. For everyone out there that wants to do some charity stuff, there is ten more that have blogs that use twitter, to direct as many people from twitter to the blog. That allows the blog owner to generate ad revenue as well as build a brand name. So , when people follow the celebs, they are pretty much getting glimpse into that particular celebs life, while being directed by said celeb , to what ever cause or brand that they are promoting.
There were a number of people on the dope that had some kind of affiliation with the obama campaign, they might be able to give you some insight as to how they ( the DNC) were able to leverage twitter in the presidential race.
Declan
Unless it finds some genuine purpose to hang its hat onto, I think it will be effectively dead within five years, maybe sooner. Not just Twitter itself (i.e. not just superceded by another social networking doohickey) but this whole microblogging concept.
Regular blogging has some public info-tainment merit, but Twitter-esque blather has none, as far as I can see.
But, like I said, it needs to find some publicly useful string to its bow, and it will evolve and remain.
I seriously don’t understand this crotchety false premise that everyone who microblogs or blogs only for personal reasons, about their own life, is somehow taking up valuable and rare “internet space” and thus must consider themselves a STAR ME!ME!ME!
This is false.
People blog for the same reason people talk: to share ideas, and to keep up with each other’s lives. Yes, there are great political and hobby blogs out there, but my LJ is only for me and my friends. Does the fact that most of my entries are public make me self-absorbed? Fuck no.
99% of the people on Twitter aren’t using it as a marketing tool or considering themselves extremely important in any way. Most of them are aware that piddly updates don’t contribute to the collective consciousness at all, but then they’re not really trying to break new ground. They’re just chatting with their friends. Heck, I started using it when I realized my LJ entries weren’t long enough to be worth posting by themselves. Opinions and questions are easier to share in short form.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that the site layout looks the same for the “I’m eating a sandwich” twitterers as it does for the White House and the CDC. I guess that confuses people who hear about Twitter’s potential for meaningful exchanges and then go randomly check it out.
Basically: no one has to justify their personal use of Twitter to anyone, because following someone’s updates is not mandatory to visiting the site. The news orgs and the opinionated microbloggers exist on the same site, but in totally different realms within it. It’s a medium, not a mandate for content. All this seems a bit like judging all message boards based on the CNN comments section.
No, it isn’t. I’m currently studying blogs as part of my Master’s degree and, from what I’ve found, most people are ultimately blogging for one of two reasons.
- To make money (or at least, trying to make money)
- To tell the world what they think about (issue/film/event/whatever).
The *I want to be a STAR! It’s all about ME!ME!ME!1!!Shift+One
- thing very much plays into a part of that.
It’s the broadcast nature of Twitter/Facebook/Blogs. You are basically projecting your thoughts, opinions, pics, etc on to the Internet. You might really only be thinking about your friends and your nephew in Canada when you’re posting stuff, but people still can find those comments and many blogs are designed to get lots of ATTENTION!eleventy1!, or elicit comments from readers, etc. You personally might only use your Blog to keep a handful of friends updated with whatever event has happened in your life, but you’re presuming that they actually care (presumably they do).
You’re right, no-one has to justify their personal Twitter use to anyone. But they’re also not allowed to object to being thought of as attention whores by people, because, let’s face it, telling people what you’re doing every 5 minutes is a form of attention-whoring.
Are they allowed to object to people who, despite being repeatedly told otherwise, continue to believe that Twitter is solely about “telling people what you’re doing every 5 minutes”?
Look, I’m not saying Twitter is completely valueless- it isn’t. (The media love it and it does have some use for what they’re doing).
But for most people, it’s purely used for ephemera such as “John is staring out the window and wishing it was 5.30 already” or “Jane likes her new jeans” or “Tom is out of milk again.” There’s no reason to share that sort of stuff with anyone. It’s like constantly blathering your inner monologue out loud, which used to be something that got people hauled off by Men In White Coats in the not too distant past.
It’s a medium like any other. Some people use it in inane ways, some people in good.
You seem to be making the assumption that if you’re on there, you’re on there to write stuff. For a lot people, this isn’t the case. Most people have far more followees than followers, because they’re on it to get exposure to people they find interesting, rather than, as you put it, blather their inner monologue out loud. It’s not a social network in the Facebook sense; relationships are asymmetric more often than not. Certainly there’s a lot of completely valueless tweeting going on; it may even form the majority of what is written. But it doesn’t form the majority of what is read.
Interesting thread. I, too, have been wondering just what Twitter was and why I heard so much of it.
But I love hearing all that stuff from my friends. You say there’s no reason to share that sort of stuff with anyone, but real life conversation is filled with that kind of mundane sharing. Okay, it’s not great when it’s that mundane and pointless, but I feel I’ve got some pretty interesting and funny friends, and I just love this constant stream of ephemera from their minds. I generally just follow a smallish group of friends, acquaintances and work colleagues - about 50 people, although there’s a couple of bands in there as well - and it’s great fun. We’re constantly tossing back and forth quips, links, random thoughts and all sorts of chatter that’s in no way essential but still really enjoyable to be part of. It’s not exactly the same as conversation, because for the most part you’re just throwing out these one liners with no expectation of it being responded to, but taken is a whole, it’s like the kind of varied, random chatter you might get when you’re walking through a party filled with people you know to varying levels. It ain’t exactly the deepest level of social interaction, but I do feel it keeps me in touch with lots of friends. And hugely entertained.
There is no emoticon to express how annoying I find Twitter.
It’s like Facebook but without the pictures of people’s kids, “look how fun we are!” bar photos, old 80s high school picks and douchey pictures of sports car belonging to kids I went to school with.
I don’t need to know that your “head hurts” or you are “sad it’s monday” or “GO YANKS!” in real time.
See, that’s the difference between you and me. You call 50 people “a smallish group of friends”. For me that would be huge. There are really only four people that I care what happens to on a regular basis, and I live with one of them.