Spinoff of Help an Old Fart Understand Texting, natch.
I like message boards (duh.) I Facebook, I text, I email. I can’t seem to grok Twitter. I mean, I know what it is and what it does, what I can’t figure out is what it does that email/text/Facebook doesn’t, or why it’s better for some forms of communication.
I know these threads rarely go real well, but can we try? Dope Tweeters, what do you like about Twitter?
I like it because I can find out information that isn’t available anywhere else because of the instant factor. When we had a freak earthquake here last year, no news sites reported it at first, but it was on twitter.
I can group my “real friends” together to get their silly updates. I have a “local restaurant” group to see what specials/deals are going on. I follow my favorite venues so I know what shows are coming up I might want to attend. I follow a great deal of artists and comic illustrators that post their work or let me know about events. I follow comedians because they are sound bites of funny.
Last summer, I was following a band that I was really into - they were playing a festival about two hours from my house that I didn’t have transportation for. I tweeted about it (not even at them, just in general), and they sent me a message asking if I needed a ride.
It’s all in one place and easy to check in on. I can interact with them, and if needed take it to email or wherever to find out more.
The biggest problem I have with Twitter is that it seems to be designed for people who want to/are able to read tweets several times an hour. There are so many things that take my attention – TV, web surfing, podcasts, radio, books, Facebook, E-mail, SDMB, online gaming – not to mention actual work and chores! I have no interest in looking at Twitter every 5 seconds. And it seems like if you don’t do that then you don’t really get the benefit of instant information.
And I find that there are some people who tweet so much that even if there are a few tweets that I would want to see, they’re way too buried or pushed down to the bottom by all the ones I don’t want to see. I tried subscribing to Marc Maron’s Twitter feed, and I had to unsubscribe because I just found it exhausting.
This sounds a lot like what my uncle was telling me about Google+, I think it was, on his Android phone. “Circles” instead of Groups, but same sort of idea. He was super jazzed about it, but I was rather meh. I suppose if I tried to hide my hippieness from my coworkers, or my sciencey conversations from my woo friends, it might be useful…but I’m a pretty “this is me” kinda gal, and don’t really censor myself from one social group to another.
The rest of it sounds like Facebook for your phone. Do you need a web-enabled smartphone for Twitter, or does it use text/SMS technology?
You can just use regular SMS texting for it, but I don’t recommend it. Like Acsenray said, it is a LOT of information.
Google+ is basically Google’s version of Facebook, and Facebook took a lot of it’s status update model from Twitter. They are all kind of the same thing (well, G+ and FB have more functionality as photo albums, events, etc.). It really just depends on which one you want to use. Twitter has the advantage of being anonymous if you choose. In my experience, most businesses have both a Facebook and a Twitter account and post the same info on both.
Like the rest of the internet it’s a great waste of time. I liken it to a real-time conversation with a smattering of micro-blogging. Most blogs only repost stuff from other blogs so it makes sense to cut out the chaff, short comment then the link. Unlike messageboards though twitter only really works if you’re a part of the conversation. It’s very hard to follow one after it has happened. One of the things that amazes me about twitter, despite its popularity it’s still buggy as fuck.
Twitter can be a lot more “train of thought” than Facebook and the rest. Which makes for some interesting reading sometimes. Patton Oswalt is noted for this.
The thing with Twitter is that it takes a fair bit of effort to figure out who to follow. Or, in another way, it takes a long time to tailor your own personal feed to be continually interesting.
I’ve had a Twitter account for a few years now, and I like it fine. I don’t check it all the time; I check it about once every two weeks or so to see what entertaining things people have said.
That said, I don’t really know how to use Twitter very well - I’ve posted a few tweets of my own, and responded to a few things I’ve read, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. My husband, on the other hand, joined Twitter last week, and is already having conversations with Charisma Carpenter. He seems to have jumped hip-deep into it. 
Who do people follow on Twitter? Celebrities? What’s the point?
I know you can follow weather reporters, and I guess sports scores and breaking news alerts, but don’t you get those from conventional means anyway?
Are people hanging on every tweet from, I don’t know, Leonardo DiCaprio, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber?
I think most people start off by following big celebrities, but to be honest very few of them ever post anything interesting. The thing with twitter is that you can tailor your feed into whatever, and whoever, interests you.
Mostly personal friends, or “small time” celebs. (Mine has a lot of web comics artists-- they wouldn’t normally be considered “celebrities”.
My personal pet theory is that a lot of Twitter users use it because they never figured out (or heard of) RSS. There’s actually a ton of duplication between RSS and Twitter.
Probably. Not me, but I’m sure someone is. Why? Does that offend you?
To see what they have to say. This is not really that difficult, people read magazine like People and US etc. for much the same reason.
I have NY times, cnn and a few others that I follow. It is nice to get the headlines and then there is a link to the story if you are interested.
Sure why not?
No, it doesn’t offend me. I just don’t see the point.
It’s almost as if some people value different things than you-- but no, that can’t be right!
Seriously, though, your post sounded very negative and judgmental. If people want to follow celebs, let them follow celebs-- it’s not skin off your nose.
Yep. And they can watch Entertainment Tonight and read the National Inquirer too.
They often don’t write their own tweets. A few of them hire good writers, if you like pithy quotes.
They tweet their opinions, their location, their photos, links to things that interest them.
I only recently started using it, but I find myself mostly putting in people/places, then soon after removing them.
The level of mundane, incredibly pointlests tweets drive me crazy.
For example, I have a few favorite game reviewers who usually post some insider info on twitter (like how a game they are reviewing is holding up, etc), but there’s maybe a few tweets a week that I care about, and the rest are all about how hungry they are at that particular moment, that Doritos are the best thing evah, that their cat just did something funny, that they’re not sure if their next bowel movement will be pleasant due to the chimichanga they had last night…
I mean, who the F cares??
So I end up unsubscribing to something potentially interesting, because of all the inanity that comes along with it.
There should a twitter rule that narrows the scope of people’s tweets.
Maybe something like: Would you care if Wil Wheaton tweeted what you are about to tweet?
If the answer is no, don’t tweet about it, damn it!
Or maybe have two types of Twitter postings? Ones that go out to the wide world, and others that only target the people who care about your toe fungus? (this category will be devoid of followers, naturally).
Everyone seems to be missing the point that one of the most powerful applications of Twitter is to see what people are talking about, what is getting a buzz, how people feel about something. It’s not scientific as Twitter is a self-selected sample of users but it really can be fascinating to watch what is trending.
It’s also a great addition to certain television programmes. I find it entertaining and humorous to read when I’m watching a political debate or an awards ceremony etc (well, users in Britain at least tend to make jokes and witty insights which I find very good fun to follow) and you can find these usually using hashtags which are searchable terms that people talking about a topic tag onto the end of their tweets. On a big news day such a thing can be fascinating. During the London riots Twitter was a much faster source of information than any news broadcaster was. During the Japanese earthquake, the first images I saw were via Twitter.
It’s also a great way to explore the internet. I follow a wide range of people who share my interests, such as physics, astronomy, wine, football, photography, music, history etc etc. Every day those people share interesting articles, images or videos they’ve found.
Furthermore it’s a fantastic tool for getting information from the street into the media. If a county’s rules try to silence dissenters by blocking certain social networking sites during civil unrest it won’t do them much good. Tweets can be posted in such a variety of ways it’s almost impossible to stop (short of shutting everything down) and those Tweets can be seen by anyone in the world searching for them. Twitter is the single largest factor in the way that power is spreading vertically down from government to people IMO.
You can also read what celebrities have had for breakfast. You may be less bothered by that.