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."

Comments

What's the target market?

[Original Replica]

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"

Swapping twitters??

[dedazo]

That sounds... not hygienic.

Re:What's for dinner?

[ColdWetDog]

I know you can "only be young once, but you can be immature forever", however why do people want to be 15 year old girls for the rest of their lives?

Being a teenager once was quite enough, thank you.

And I'll take that pony now.

Raises hand

[L. VeGas]

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.

Re:Raises hand

[Proofof. Chaos]

I'm always wondering WTF these people did 10 or 11 years ago when cellphones were strictly for businessmen and gadget nerds?
They had to put up with a horrible mental disorder called thinking. You younger people may not have heard of this, but many of us were afflicted with it in the past. For those of you unfamiliar, imagine being in a waiting room with no cell phone, not even a magazine to read, and no one but strangers around you. At first you try to occupy your mind by examining the pattern on the carpet, but slowly -and no matter how hard you try, you can't help it- your mind will start to wander. You will start to have the most unnerving thoughts. It starts with things that aren't too bad like "what am I going to have for dinner," but will escalate to things like "I wonder what it would be like to go out with that girl over there," or "why did we invade Iraq." These thoughts will leave you very uncomfortable because there is no way to know the answer to them for sure. Essentially, "thinking" leads to more thinking, and just pushes you closer to insanity. And if you think you can avoid the problem by talking to the person next to you, think again. Just imagine trying to talk to someone you don't know. You have no idea how they will react to what you say (unlike your friends and family, whose responses are very predictable). I, for one, am so glad I have a cell phone to help preent the onset of insanity.

Re:I JUST DUMPED A HUGE TURD

[Tackhead]

> iot waws smellky and brown.

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."

Re:What's for dinner?

[alamandrax]

Back in my day, we called it netiquette. Damn kids. *Swipes at them with his Newton*.

Re:Prior art

[HomelessInLaJolla]

I'm surprised that many web sites are given venture capital money and later, bought out. Just no good way to capitalize on a service that other people give away free You've just touched on the social psychology behind a pyramid scheme.

Everyone contributes, only a few profit. Lots of that venture capital came from tax money, lots more came from 401(k) investments where the people investing only knew their investments as conglomerate funds.

Pretty sad that it's allowed to continue this way.

Re:Charged for a text?

[omeomi]

With all the taxable profit that generates it's hard to believe the USA still has a federal debt [google.com], isn't it?

Yes, we were all surprised to learn that taxes from SMS messages profit didn't cover the cost of running the entire federal government, plus our elective wars. Who could have guessed...

Re:What's for dinner?

[Rodness]

OMG Ponies!!!!11

(sorry, just couldn't help it :P)

The future

[Joebert]

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.

Re:IRC

[ColdWetDog]

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.