I actually considered using it.
But I thought I would come across as a poseur.
Not when you add in the quotes. If I understand what Sage Rat is saying, you can link your tweet to an embedded file, right? (Or am I misunderstanding what a zip file is?).
But then the person you’re talking to has to open that file. To me, that hampers the flow of the conversation. One of the features I most enjoy about the SDMB is the ability to multi-quote, and break quotes up to respond to separate points - I think it fosters a more coherent conversation.
Making multiple tweets also sounds awkward - I use a lot of ellipses, dashes and semicolons when I post, specifically to imitate the rhythm of speech. Having posts broken up by character limit throws a monkey wrench in that.
I’m not get-off-my-lawn-you-whippersnappers!-ing here, or saying “I don’t like it, therefore it sucks”. I don’t doubt that Twitter serves its users well. Hell, it’s the only social media an old college friend uses, and I perforce have a Twitter account just to keep in touch with her. But I myself find it to be, as I said, confusing and hard to use. Maybe the interface triggers my ADD; or maybe I’m not just very good at adapting to new media. There’s a reason I chose the SDMB username I did.
- Perhaps I should have said “too unhip to have heard of him”. I assumed he was a rapper. (Although now I think about it, “Mike Epps” isn’t really a hip-hop name…)
I followed it fine, too. But backwards, and in Sanskrit.
I followed it, but I completely missed that his wife joined the conversation. I just assumed that the “news” agency was reading into things.
I guess I’ll have to look again.
I do follow some people on twitter. Mostly authors whose works I want to keep abreast off.
I think I’ve tweeted once and managed to gain a sympathy following of 3. No idea why. Good manners I think. Some people follow you if you follow them.
I don’t think anyone needs twitter to stay current. It’s extremely hard to pull information out of it, unless you’re using it for specific things like I am.
No need to worry about being old. although why they’re remaking Uncle Buck…? :dubious:
There are no zip files involved. Sage Rat was joking. You can quote a 140 character tweet (this is called a retweet, or an RT) and add a 140 character response of your own.
Twitter is like if you took the top journalists, experts, and stars in all these areas and made them join the SDMB. They tend to get into discussions with each other that are interesting in their own right, but you can also reply and they (as long as they are not truly a mega-celebrity) may very well converse back with you!
As an example, I will often see a New York Times op-ed that gets hundreds or thousands of comments on the NYT site, and view those commenters as kind of being suckers who are directing their energy in a much less efficient manner than they could on Twitter. If I find such a piece thought-provoking, I will look up the writer on Twitter and reply to the tweet in which they linked to that op-ed. Very often (as in, a majority of the time, I’d say) the author replies back and we engage on the topic.
So anyone who enjoys chewing the fat here, I just don’t understand why they would turn their nose up at this opportunity, which never existed in the past. (That said, I do also like being able to hold forth at more extended length, which is why I still like the SDMB, and IMDB message boards, Previously TV, etc.)
Great points, but on the last one there is a lot you can do that is much more fine-tuned than follow/unfollow. My main feed is a completely unreadable mess. But I have a bunch of lists like “Favorite political pundits”, “TV critics”, “VIPs”, “Close Friends”, etc. When I click one of those, I get a finely tuned stream of the good stuff that I am seeking at that moment. (And if anyone starts to present more signal than noise, they will get dumped from the list, similar to your point about unfollowing.)
You don’t need apps, just a regular browser. I’m going to post a couple links and offer the friendly suggestion you try clicking them. They won’t break your computer, and there won’t be any of those annoying pop-up ads. I enjoy listing my favorite movies on Twitter, and reviewing them. The latter is an especially interesting challenge, as I do the entire review (including the title) in 140 characters.
So here, as a recent example, is a pair of tweets on the movie Office Space. The first link is to a tweet that includes an image of the movie’s poster and two other stills from the film, plus information on the top-billed cast, director, etc.:
The second is my review, text only:
I would really suggest to anyone that even if you don’t care to say things on Twitter yourself or even make an account there, it is an open site where you can find really good content (including, for those scoffing at the 140-character limit, many links to great articles) just by searching for it.
I would add that I kind of think you are being unfair to your friend to ask them to take the time to summarize and quote when you could just click the links they send. I have a good friend who refuses to use Facebook and will sometimes email to say “haven’t heard from you lately…what have you been up to, send me pics of the kids” etc. I find it frustrating, because if he just used Facebook he could stay connected to me there. He is taking his anti-Facebook attitude and making it my problem by asking me essentially to do a bunch of separate status updates just for him.
Apparently! I had no idea there was so much “get off my lawn” around here.
The term “DM” is what threw me also. I’ve always said “PM” (private message). I understand the Twitter format, just not that term.
“hey”
laughing my ass off: “hello”
Getting back to the original subject, I think this is my favorite picture meme in response (click on the woman’s face to see the whole image). I know, this is not of earth-shattering importance, but it is funny and allows people to show their creativity in a way I can only tip my hat to. Those who don’t use Twitter may not know what “mentions” are; Twitter has a handy definition to help out.
CNN has a more conventionally journalistic account of the “scandal”, with the additional information that supposedly it was all a mixup: it was Epps’s *nephew *doing the flirting! (Okay…sure.)
The International Business Times is also on it, with some background on Mechelle Epps as well as some context about other celebrities who have run into similar trouble.
Is it cute or funny to have your wife shut down your communications like you are a wayward two year old?
Maybe.
Shutting down me? No. Some other wife shutting down her celebrity hound dog husband? Yep!
“A man who can’t control his woman is funny.” - Moonstruck
Zorro snap!!!
Yes. It’s absolutely hilarious. Like the guys standing around the barbecue talking trash and suddenly one of their wives says through the open screen window “I HEARD that!”
It’s falling down funny! 
Yes, this, exactly.
Part of my amusement is that I don’t believe humans are hardwired for monogamy, but we have such a strong cultural norm around it that our biology and culture are constantly at war, and the chaos that ensues amuses me. (My wife and I have a “don’t ask, don’t tell, be safe and discreet” agreement, so I’m observing all this from a place of detachment in a sense.)
Well, John Candy was a pretty funny guy, so if that’s what Uncle Buck was about…maybe?
Seriously, who is Mike Epps? Is he a baseball player or something?
That was the moment I knew Danny Aiello was not the right guy for Cher. I hated that line.
It’s been mentioned in this thread already. He is a stand up comic and actor. He’s been in movies for about 20 years. He first became known for the Friday movies with Ice Cube but he’s been in a lot of other things including all of the Hangover movies. He’s not a huge star but pretty well known and been around a while. If the Richard Pryor biopic happens that he is cast in he may become a big star because the people attached to it make it look like potential Oscar bait.
ETA: Uncle Buck is a reboot of the movie that is apparently going to be a series on ABC this fall and he is the lead.
The only graphic things we get to see are smilies unless we click on a link, which is too inconvenient and usually not worth doing.
Google the abbreviations? Let’s see… for AW, I get
[ul]
[li]an ad for AW, a manufacturer of automatic transmissions[/li][li]the wiktionary definition, as in “Aw, that’s too bad”[/li][li]same for three other dictionaries[/li][li]a link for a video titled “COD:AW Hacker goes 98-0. I start following him at the 4 …” I have no idea what this means.[/li][li]ad for A&W restaurants[/li][li]Urban Dictionary says it means “Attention Whore”[/li][li]link to American Whitewater[/li][/ul]
and that’s just the first page. None of these seem to be relevant or helpful to understanding that twitter crapola.
I hate the Twitter culture because of this and will never take it up.
I hope this is a whoosh.
You might want to go back to the post and read it again. I abbreviated attractive woman as AW because I didn’t know her real name and I didn’t feel like typing “attractive woman” over and over. It’s not a Twitter thing. I did it in that post and explained it the way abbreviations often are by first typing out the full term with the abbreviation in parentheses.
The “attention whore” result fits here, too. (For clarity, in reference to her, not you.)