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."
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.
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.
Being a teenager once was quite enough, thank you.
And I'll take that pony now.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
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."
Back in my day, we called it netiquette. Damn kids. *Swipes at them with his Newton*.
'tis but a scratch.
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. And we will call this new technology, Electronic Mail!
Too long. How about...
EMAIL!
SAILING MISHAP
..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...
OMG Ponies!!!!11
:P)
(sorry, just couldn't help it
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.
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 get a faster P4 computer. It will compile you program in no time flat while boiling your tomato sauce. Just turn the case on it's side, take the heat sink off and put the pot right on the processor. I just love it when convergence works.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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.
Even if it wasn't a new service & the etiquette was still sortof working itself out.... I believe it might fall victim to the Eternal September which plagued Usenet.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Here's a simple test: provide us with a pointer to a couple aesthetically pleasing pages at myspace.
I'm open to the possibility that they exist.
Show me.
If you can't, then the "silly over-generalization and stereotype" is just simply the plain truth.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.