Slashdot Mirror
Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration
WSJdpatton writes "The growth of services like Twitter and Dodgeball, which tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication, elicits mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
"higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner"
Pass. I'll stick with myspace once a day or every cpl days. Don't need anything new.
Wait... you get *charged* to receive an SMS message in the USA?
It sounds like the people interviewed in the article are all newbs: "I probably started removing people the first week," said Ryan Irelan, 31, a Web developer in Raleigh, N.C., who began using Twitter last year. "This constant dinging of updates," he added, "it really just became totally overwhelming. I don't see how anyone could get anything done." ICQ "Uh-oh!" Twitter now hosts more than 30,000 posts a day and has more than 50,000 users, according to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The service is appealing because of its simplicity, said the 30-year old, who formerly worked as a software engineer at a courier-dispatch service. "You find a lot of connection in just the simplest, most mundane updates from your friends," he said. IRC Twitter doesn't charge users for the service, though he said it may charge for additional features in the future. Get them hooked, then charge. It's like crack. "I'm a little annoyed by some of these newbies," said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco...She removed him (Mr. Scoble) from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. "He Twittered about Twitter," she said. That'll teach her to friend people who seem "neat" at first sight. Eric Meyer also had to rethink his online network after experiencing what he calls a "Twitter storm." He and friends found themselves receiving 30 to 40 posts a day from one person musing about what to have for dinner and commercials spotted on television Definitely a newb. "I've blocked people that, say, signed up and just added me because we were acquaintances," he said. "I guess they liked me more than I liked them, and I didn't care to hear about them that frequently." That's why I like the journals on Slashdot. They don't get force-fed to anyone. "We get some people who get very chatty," said Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley Tell me they didn't rely on that for the "we'll start charging you later" approach.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This sounds great for tweens and teens, they frequently love to be super up to date with every aspect of their friends lives, and they don't usually pay their own phone bills. For the rest of us, this may be "TMI 2.0"
We are all just people.
Just icq, msn, gtalk and skype are enough to know that there can be too much connectivity.
Actually you need to turn them off sometimes in order to feel you have some privacy in the midst of your living room.
Read radical news here
That sounds... not hygienic.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
That is why any "push" technology sucks: You get a lot of chaff and very little wheat.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I can't even imagine using these kind of services. It would drive me bananas. I avoided getting a cell phone for years because I didn't want to be always available. I don't instant message, and I use SMS only to receive appointment reminders.
And the fact that I have no social life or friends has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Best Windows Freeware
IRC is kinda nice to have at home. It allows for a relatively constant random stream of world consciousness and provides for ways (other than cigarette smoking) to burn that extra 5 or 10 extra minutes (or hours) while waiting for tomato sauce to cook down or glibc to compile.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Once upon a time, a post that would have been a troll, or maybe the Subject: line in a spam sent on behalf of a coprophagy fetish site.
But today, thanks to Shitter, (a new Web 2.0 mashup based on Twitter API), turds of a feather can flock together, for only $0.10 per SMS received.
Yes, now you too can always know what sorts of shit your friends are pumping out through the Intertubes. For the past three weeks, people have joined the crowds on Shitter.com, a site that invites everyone to answer the question: "What are you dumping?"
"I didn't get it at first," said the Goatse Guy. "How much information do I really need to let the world know about me?", but with the demise of ratemypoop.com (a Web 1.0 predecessor to the fecal networking ecosystem), "I've been getting dozen or more 'flushes' a day" - quick, as-they-happen updates to friends who had chosen to link to him through the service. Topics ranged from the effects of lunch (a bowl of corn chowder, a bowl of chili, or a bag of Olestra-based nachos) to work annoyances (a nearby co-worker in an adjacent stall who made the most annoying sounds while wiping his ass). Goatse sends flushes from his office and home computers, and uses his cellphone to send posts from the back woods or even the rank washrooms of a bar at happy hour. "It became addicting very quickly," he said...
Shitter's Mr. Horsey said his company is fine-tuning the service so that members can specify groups of friends whose flushes they receive, though he declined to say when the new features would be available. He defended the site's often scatalogical content. "Everyone says Shitter's completely useless, I don't want all this information," he said. "We check in later, and they're complete addicts."
Despite her gripe with Mr. Goatse's flushes, Helena Handbasket said she's only unsubscribed from a few other people's bowls. She doesn't even mind the occasional dinner Shittering, she said. "I'm actually kind of interested in what people have been eating."
What i would like is some kind of unified interface for communication.
I was thinking about this while in the shower the other day.
It would be pretty nice (probably not to privacy zealots who don't allow cookies and such) to have one account which routs all forms of communication to you.
For example, instead of giving each person or organization that needs to send you mail your current address you just give them a meta-address and the mail gets routed to you whenever you change your physical address.
And you could have nifty features like aliases that are opaque to the sender, blacklisting, setting up certain media to trigger other media..
That's all i can think of at the moment.
Though it's a bit gargantuan to configure: a good smtpd (sendmail) and a mailing list daemon (mailman) coupled with a PBX (asterisk) and a couple of hacked scripts to retrieve web content (eg. this one for Slashdot) would do the trick nicely.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Moderator obviously didn't RTFA, of which this was a parody.
..I often turn my ICQ/Skype off, and frequently have my status as "invisible". And quite a few of my friends do the same thing. So either we are sociopaths, or you need to be a special kind of 'teen' (thir-teen?) to actually like being constantly told about who's doing what useless thing (that's why people didn't like Facebook Feeds). Anyway, as far as live communication pwns everything else, all those services are doomed, just take a look at MySpace. Oh wait...
At this rate, when we're all in our 80s, our colons will be sending instant messages to our brains reminding us not to shit all over ourselves.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Hahahaha! Congrats on your hellish technological nightmare, you deserve it!
with apologies to Fark, I'm sure:
i tter-buttocks-in-dark-sans-flashlight/
"WSJ Discovers Twitter, Buttocks in Dark Sans Flashlight"
link: http://crunchgear.com/2007/03/16/wsj-discovers-tw
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Twitter lets you turn off phone notification completely, or just between certain hours of the day. I personally just check the updates online, or through IM.
Also, Red Hat's Mugshot service lets you aggregate disparate social networking services and get them from a single interface. Makes it much less of a hassle to keep track of friends in various networks.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Just icq, msn, gtalk and skype are enough to know that there can be too much connectivity.
Indeed. Which is why I am not one of those campaigning for video connectivity for the Linux Skype client. The last thing I need is to provide a view of myself and my study at any time of day or night. Some things are just better left to the imagination.
Actually, I got tired of ICQ within a couple of weeks of it coming out. Every time I needed to get anything done, I would be interrupted by that infernal "Uh Oh!". Eventually decided email was as connected as I needed to be.
Sure, I like VOIP, but I'm just using that as a cheaper version of Alexander Graham Bell's invention.
I only have a passing familiarity with the good old DSM-IV, but it seems we're delving into the mental health realm when someone is habitually pushing their constant doings on their friends, family, co-workers, classmates, acquaintances, enemies and casual strangers.
Okay, they don't cover attention whoring in the DSM.
Not to mention what kind of insecurity do you have that you don't feel any kind of connection to your friends unless you're know exactly what they're doing at every moment.
I had a stalker like that in college. Tried applying a restraining order, but even that didn't work.
Zadaz - Fucking Supermodels. Again. less than five seconds ago from txt
I'll be back in 5 minutes. But feel free to leave a message.
;-D lol1!111
P.S. Mary, I love you.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
There's always some "L33T" dude on here that scoffs that ANYONE with ANY SENSE would EVER use myspace.
You're just announcing your ignorance to the world.
For better or worse, Myspace is incredibly huge. It's used by tens of millions of people every day. Teenagers? Yes. But also professionals. Adults like you and I that find a lot of value in the way it lets them keep connected with their friends and acquaintances.
Yes, there are ignorant people on MySpace. But there's ignorant people on Slashdot. And even if MySpace is only for the immature and childish, watching you spread a moronic stereotype makes me think that you would fit right in.
I'm having ponies for dinner!
Yeah that's just nonsense. There's no call for others to scoff at people with ANY sense using Myspace. Only for others to scoff at people with a sense of AESTHETICS using Myspace.
May I suggest the "Old Yeller" method?
http://twitter.com/johnedwards?page=1
Of course, it's most likely an aide, but is he the only one actively campaigning on the internet?
No sig
Once again, another silly over-generalization and stereotype. This is just as ridiculous as the OPs comment about myspace being only for the young or immature. It just makes no sense. Tens of millions of pages and you just lump them all together. Puh-leese.
What the hell is with this social networking crap? I haven't even talked to my best friend in 3 days. I've gone months without talking to him, for no particular reason than I just didn't have anything of substance to say. People don't need to be updated on what's going on from a moment to moment basis. If my life was that fucking exciting, Discovery would make a documentary about me.
I think this whole period of the internet will be remembered in a decade as another stupid idea up there with refreshing web page chat room/message boards, web pages embedded with ICQ contact panels and GOTO.com search boxes, and web rings. Useless chaff.
in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters
Am I the only one who seems to notice that carrying around a lot of expensive electronic bling is not at all a sign of someone being tech savvy? People who actually work with computers and electronics have, A) seen enough products come and go that they know that this year's status symbol is next year's copper bearing material B)have enough endless scanning of data at work to not make it their hobby in their off hours.
Most people with actual technology experience that I know laugh at people who buy a 1500 dollar laptop so they can look cool in coffee shops.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I was interviewed by the WSJ Online tech writer Andrew LaVallee for this article. Mr. Lavellee was interested in my take on the entire MSN issue because I listed myself as an "Ex-Dodgeball Junkie" during this discussion on a local blog.
Dodgeball doesn't work (its Friend of a Friend function hasn't worked in nearly a year and a half) and there are SO many fucking douchebags that are trying to use Dodgeball as if it is Twitter instead of using Twitter.
I'm half glad that I wasn't quoted as the questions the writer asked weren't really pertaining to MSNs but more to the drama that was occurring on Dodgeball locally here in the Twin Cities based on the Metroblogging post I linked above.
Dodgeball was great two years ago when I started using it but after Google bought it out it has remained in nearly the same state while other services have exploded. Google obviously cares only about the database of venues and the visit frequency of its users and not so much about anything else. We'll see if they do anything with it now that MSNs have really taken off in the media.
Gaim unites your IM world. Email forwarding, such as provided by the free software foundation, routes your email to whatever friendly name your ISP gave you. Or you could just give them a gmail address.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That is all.
The FSF provides email forwarding? What?
Dude, I'm really not interested about your live feed to ratemypoo.com.
Frankly, I fail to see what the fundamental problem is. Those people just chose to communicate with people they have nothing in common with, or whose personality they don't match. The same would have happened IRL or on IRC or whatever.
E.g., I've had a RL friend who is, sad to say, an OCPD case. His world has no shades between perfect and crap. E.g., he was proud for example of saving and reloading before _each_ _move_ in turn based strategy game, until he got the perfect result. Not because he actually needed that to win, but because his victory simply _had_ to be perfect. Anyone playing otherwise was doing a crap job in his book. E.g., he quit games just because they were too large to be sure he fully explored, and he never knew if he had found every single chest. That was a requirement in his mind.
It went ok in person, but it went downhill _fast_ when I moved away and we switched to emails. His view of the world had no shades of grey between answering every single point (including filler or rhetorical question) in an email, and basically ignoring it. If I said something like "you know how it goes", he actually had to answer that in detail, and make it clear whether he knew how it goes or not, and how much. Unfortunately he expected the same from me. If he said that his new job pays well and isn't too far from home, and I only commented about the pay, that was for him a major faux pas: he actually expected a whole treatise about the pros and cons of travelling a longer distance. So he grew discontent very fast over my not answering half the sentences in his email in detail, and that was the end of it.
E.g., I had a co-worker who was a gamer, and liked to talk about games. It looks like the perfect match, since I'm a gamer too, and I like to talk about games too. Unfortunately, in his case "games" meant exclusively "CounterStrike" and most of the time the same map, and doing the same things over and over again, because that's what got him the most points. So every day he'd tell me how he cleverly climbed the same bloody ladder, dropped down the same bloody vent, crawled through the same bloody tunnel, and 50% of the times shot some guy crouching in the same bloody corner. Oh, it was interesting to hear it the first time. But after a month it was quite literally less fun than root canal or watching paint dry. But by now, since I had already made the mistake of being the only one who listened to him, he was coming to me like a lost puppy every day, and resisted any diplomatic hints that I'm not interested. (And trust me, my "diplomacy" isn't very subtle.) I had to pretty much flip out at him to get him to stop, and that was the end of that.
E.g., "chatty". Heh. You'll have to meet grandma IRL some day. In her view of the world, shutting up ranks up there as the greatest callamity that could befall anyone. If two people are in the same room, or for that matter anywhere in the same neighbourhood, it's pretty much an axiom that they'll spend their time talking to each other. It doesn't matter about what topic, the purpose is to talk, topics or information are entirely irrelevant details there. I can just see her "twitting about twitter", or discussing dinner or commercials, if that was what it took to get a conversation. It has nothing to do with being a "newb". That's just her personality type. _Extreme_ extrovert.
So basically, heh, so why is this a technology or online issue anyway? People are people. The Internet may allow some extremely timid, but socially inept, people to make more conversation than IRL, but then again it won't be any different from befriending them IRL. I can't see how's it any different if the chat is over Twitter than in person or over ICQ.
In any case, just like IRL, you end up with people whose interests don't match yours, and whose personality doesn't match yours. And you have to prune the set a bit, and avoid or get rid of the people you're not interested in. I don't know what ever gave anyone the idea that they can just add lots of random people to their friends list, and expect it to work perfectly just like that. I mean, shouldn't it be common sense that it won't?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
PvP already went there
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Chastise it gently, then 2 nights later drive it out to a deserted bridge, place the dog in the drivers seat and push the car off the edge of the bridge.
Important, you must deny ever having seen the dog, or car.
I will calling my lawyers tomorrow, you pay me a big time loser you! ha ha ha ha ha