Slashdot Mirror
One-Tweet Wonders
theodp writes "TIME has seen-the-future-and-it-is-Twitter. Slate, on the other hand, is more fascinated with the phenomenon of orphaned tweets, the messages left by people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return (not unlike one-blog-post wonders). While some orphan tweets betray skepticism about microblogging ('I don't get it... what's the point of this thing?'), other one-and-done Twitterers demonstrate keen enthusiasm before disappearing ('I'm here!'), and some tweets hint that tragedy has cut a promising Twittering-life short ('it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital?'). Slate notes that studies of Twitter accounts by Harvard and Nielsen suggest the service has been better at signing up users than keeping them, including the one-tweet wonders."
Is basically Retarded. Enough said.
Krou's law: There is, on average, only one tweet per twit.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
It happens with everything, people try it then forget to go back and continue. Personally I end up tweeting about once a month or two, I really don't care that much about the smaller details in peoples lives. And I've got a few friends who've done the whole orphan tweet thing. Nothing notably funny though, Kinda funny if they start posting now because so many people have started to follow them through the press =)
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
It hurts to post, should I go to the hospital?
Tweeting seems like a great idea for people who want to start cults or for people who wish they had stalkers.
A great old sci-fi story by Margaret St. Clair "Prott" is a "boring" alien race, who did nothing but bore humans. They looked like gigantic space-going fried eggs. The story begins with a Prott discovering a human in a spaceship; the Prott enthusiastically begins telling the human about "--ing the --." However, the man can't make out what the noun and verb in the telepathically transmitted phrase mean, so the Prott explains some more... and more... and brings equally enthusiastic friends who want to do nothing but talk about "--ing the --" ad infinitum. Reminds me of Twitter.
I just don't see this lasting more than another year --- and I think I'm being generous. I honestly can't understand why anyone is fascinated with reading /shrug.
It might be different if the messages were more directed, or useful. But sending messages so "my fans" (subscribers) can read them is just....
Further proof as to why people should protect theirs: to prevent news agencies from analyzing them :-).
No, I have not RTFA, but - I use twitter every single day but have only posted one tweet. I only follow a few interesting people but I now find it invaluable as a way of keeping track of them. I have stopped using facebook - I realise that I now am more interested in seeing what other people say than publishing my own content, I guess a lot of people are like that.
In at least one instance, two orphan tweets appear to have been in conversation.
marcbresseel getting ready for cannes - printing latest briefing - I hate folding my shirts
8:36 AM Jun 14th, 2008
Kolcott @Marcbresseel You fold your shirts?
9:13 AM Jul 10th, 2008
A lone call followed by a lone response; a social network of two.
The best and worst of this new media, done and done. We can all move along now.
Help!
Jane, how do you stop this crazy thing!
For all the people who hate Twitter, don't get it, like to make remarks about using twitter to inform others of bowel movements, how trivial it is to build it, et cetera:
Please reply to this thread to contain the complaining
Every story even remotely connected to Twitter gets the trolls crawling under their stones, mumbling how much they hate it.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It is much like that apocryphal story about a shoeshine boy (or a taxi driver) telling JFK's Dad (Patrick Kennedy?) to get into the stock market and JKF's dad figuring, if these guys are in, it is time to get out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I use to twit now I twat.
the reason these people sign up in the first place is to follow tweets of others. be it someone famous and worthless like ashton kutcher, or to follow news tweets like cnn.com regardless, you can't subscribe to someone's tweet stream unless you have signed up. people probably sign up for that reason, post once just because they feel that urge to push the shiny red button. then they just dip back into the shadows to lurk and watch other people's lives unfold.
Can we just say that Twitter is public masturbation and be done with it?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Twitter (n):
1: A service design to indulge the sense of self importance by posting information that history will care little for.
2: A web site and infrastructure for passing small messages out to an open ended communication channel in which people what are extremely bored and track the likewise boring activities of others.
3: A simple text exchange in which creative people and some regular expressions can generate a swarm-like information network to gauge personal activity. For instance:
"by following a demographic of X a researcher can key in on how people feel about Y topic."
"An automatic event scheduler system can be generated by people tweeting possible event dates in which subscribers through a script can vector in and select an event date in which all or a certain threshold of particpants can agree to."
4: A method by which information is exchanged into a open ended channel. See Broadcast SMS 2.0
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I tried blogging, that fizzled out the night I started. I tried microblogging using facebook and twitter, that petered out after a month or so. I can only assume that once we have nanoblogging, I won't be into that either. Some people need a forum to sound off to the world. Others, like me, are indifferent.
One possible reason for people to have unused accounts is simple to reserve the name. That is to say, to ensure that nobody can go around tweeting "in their name".
"Good news, everyone!"
I feel like I'm just tweeting into the ether. And I have little or no interest in the various tweets floating around. Most regular blogs suck. So do streams of tweets.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
First!
[Intentionally left blank]
What a strange kind of bird!
Really its a tool. Something like a cross between IM, a mailing list and a personal RSS feed. It has its own niche. If its not useful to you, don't use it. I can only presume all the hate comes from its sudden popularity and the rather stupid name (both of which bring to mind obnoxious teenage fads). Oh well I would think people would be smarter than just hating on a tool b/c of two superficial reasons.
This existed pre-internet. How many bought a diary and wrote one entry? Went out for a run, swim or to the gym once? Read a few pages of War and Peace? Only went to one foreign language lesson? Only bothered with a couple of piano/guitar/trumpet lessons?
While twitter has many problems, the fact that the majority of people tend to play with a new thing and then stop isn't new, or news.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Okay maybe Obama or someone like that but really who needs to communicate every damn detail of their daily existence to the world? Is is worth the effort? No wonder the huge drop off rate for this service.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
I have a Twitter account that I used mainly to follow IT industry talking heads that I like to keep up with. I even managed to tweet every day or two myself.
I haven't been back to Twitter since the day Oprah sent her first Tweet.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Just because someone tweets, does that mean someone else sees it ?
cjacobs001
I'm finding a lot of resentment towards Twitter within my professional circle because of the notion, floated by the Marketing Suits, that one "simply must Twitter." A lot of these folks -- Olde Skool writers, comedians, entertainers -- feel they missed the boat when the MySpace wave hit, and don't want to make the mistake again. So they hold their noses and jump into every new social networking trend that the trendoids say they should be jumping into. Some days it's kind of like watching a platoon of Marines dressing in lemon chiffon gowns and working the room at a gay bachelor party because their intel has told them Al Quaeda just might be jumping out of the cake later, on other days it's like listening to the Pink Floyd disco album that was released in the late 70s/early 80s. Happily, I'm easily amused.
Twitter is the biggest piece of crap on the internet. Hooray for mass distribution of mind-numbingly mundane minutia.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
From the end of TFA:
Yes... (backs away slowly...) I'm sure a suspension bridge made of pebbles is just what society needs, now you drive over it while I stand there with the camcorder and a direct line to YouTube.
I recently discovered a very cool use for Twitter. I was at a state team wrestling meet, and there wasn't any live coverage of the event, but there was WiFi. So I fired up my iPod Touch and started tweeting match results & team scores. They started using my tweets to update a statewide wrestling site. It was actually quite a neat experience, I had followers from all over the state who were interested in finding out the results.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Ok so I haven't been on Twitter for about 6 weeks now, but have they fixed all their errors? I kept getting pop-ups asking me for my password even after I was logged in!
www.memorise.org
I explain twitter as "Push" RSS. Grandma totally got it when I put it like that.
I can't help the feeling that most twitters, tweets or whatever the hell they're called, are merely written to satisfy the writer (in the same way that some people write diaries) as a cathartic experience - never expecting, nor intending them to be read.I would venture further, and say that a large number of blogs are exactly the same - but written by people who can't organise their thoughts into SMS sized bytes (or, vice-versa: tweeterers haven't got the attention span to write blog articles).
Either way, once the initial ego-trip has been satisfied, and these people realise that no-one will ever bother to read their stuff, they come to terms with the obvious conclusion that nobody else cares what they think, as they never get any followers, or blog comments.
Maybe what we need is a website called /dev/null where people can vent, in the certain knowledge that everthing is guaranteed to disappear as soon as it's written - thus removing the threat that when they grow up (if?) it won't come back to bite them in the bum.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I heard so much about the service, I finally signed up for it to see what all the hullabaloo was about. I found a desert in which people were wholly absorbed in themselves (sad) or trying to bask in the reflected glory from other twitter users (sadder, if possible). There were some worthwhile pieces there, but the signal-to-noise ratio was quite poor - nothing even close to the "quality" of slashdot's content. What's really disturbing is seeing respected journalists tossing off references to twitter like it's some service the entire world is familiar with.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ya missed a trick there. FRIST! AND LAST!
Twitter democratizes feeds, just as blogs democratized websites.
I never did like the polling aspect of RSS. At least Twitter allows updates to be pushed to a central server.
But is Twitter then just like email from whitelisted, default-no-reply addresses, made low-latency with rapid server polling, where the message fits in the subject line, plus an easy way to join and leave personal mailing lists.
The no-reply feature does allow people to talk without listening, which I'm not sure is a good thing. But blogs are also often like that.
While you can't subscribe to a tweet stream, you can still access it without having to sign up.
See http://twitter.com/aplusk Or you can get the RSS feed: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/19058681.rss
The first time I heard about Twitter I thought, yeah, a public version of Slashdot sigs. It was only a matter of time...
I just don't see this lasting more than another year
Exactly. If the people that own Twitter are smart, they are seriously looking for s buyout right now, before the value drops to IP fire-sale prices.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
one twit wonders?
what kind of donuts are you offering?
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
My one and only twitter comment from months ago:
OMG twitter is like SOOO cool I will never use anything else EVER again It is now my home page I will log in every day and post everything
If I hear one more person on television say "We're tweeting at..." I'm going to go mad!
I do, however, believe that Twitter is the IRC of the Web 2.0 generation.
I created the AbrahamLincon user in response to a back-and-forth discussion on political rhetoric a friend and I were engaged in. (Yeah, in my haste I dropped the 'l' in the last name. Oops.) He was using the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of the high quality of political debate that our country once valued, and from which we had fallen into sound bites. He asked what possible message of political worth could be tweeted in 140 chars.
As an experiment, I created AbrahamLincon, reviewed the text of the Gettysburg address, and distilled it to 140 characters. I won't say it succeeded or failed, but it was a fun experiment in high-density verbiage.
I might do the same with other speeches. Or it might stay a one-tweet wonder. It was fun, though, and I hope Mr. Lincoln wouldn't mind.
At least there's a length limit on Twitter.
Yesterday, this article by Jon Caroll appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. This guy is a paid columnist. He wrote about forty column-inches about taking his car to a car wash. Nothing exciting happened; he just washed his car. This is how far down the print media have come.
The Chronicle is considering shutting down their print version. This guy may not have much of a career left.
GROUPS 10... A34T2 42Y89 LE53R GBN12 9054E L3L0B M788Z 963YK 31M11 F44BN
END TRANSMISSION
The problem is that 140 characters is not enough to write everything we are trying to convey n we all know that incomplete tweets may cause
Who aren't famous or interesting (I guess), it's a good way to 'follow' those people whom interest you.
I follow the twitter updates of Kevin Rose (Digg), Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), Paul Thurrott (WinSuperSite) and a handful of others. Often I'll get information that is kind of '0-day', rather than wait for the blogs or media to pick up on it, so it's nice to get that kind of realtime update.
That, and if you do tweet them something interesting, you actually can have a dialogue with them that would otherwise never exist.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
sis-in-law's first (and last) tweet: I'm such a beginner on Twitter! what are the cool things to do here?
If someone tweets in cyberspace, and noone is subscribed does it matter?
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I've successfully worked through the necessary stages of Twitter: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
Some tricks I've learned to consume and produce to Twitter effectively:
1. Find some people or businesses to follow that you "might" be interested in. Be aware your choices are not carved in stone. Change them around. Suggestions: @LeoLaporte, @dane (know in the bay area), your local newspaper.
2. Install one of the many clients that make it easy to follow tweets without opening a browser but will not annoy. I used to use TwitterFox, an add-on for Firefox. Now I use the Digsby Twitter client.
3. Follow some businesses you like. I follow a few restaurants who post specials and other notes.
4. My local newspaper, The Fresno Bee, has some good Twitter users who post interesting links to local news, cultural events, etc.
5. If something you're following is starting to annoy (especially when they tweet 5 times in a row to build a thought), stop following them. I'm talking to you: PTI, Buy.com, LebatardShow.
6. If some stranger says they're following you, there's no reason you have to reciprocate.
I've learned to use it to get a collective feed of real-time events. As long as it's non-intrusive and I can control what's relevant, I'm fine with it. If it disappeared tomorrow, so what. Some other novel idea is waiting to take its place.
I'd like to see some more constructive use of the #hashtag concept, maybe some form of registry. Just today while sitting in traffic, I was thinking there could be hashtags for drivers to communicate the real state of traffic. I find traffic reporting even with sensors to be of marginal value.
@joe1 #bay101s tied up at Lawrence Expressway
@jane2 #bay880n Sunol Grade was fast at 3p today
Also would like the skiers to give real time snow reports.
ahh, ohh, yess.
cjacobs001
http://twitter.com/sonicoliver
This belongs to idle not technology
Twitter is just like Facebook would be if it only had the status update. Its only other advantage is that you don't need to invent a real-sounding name to sign up.