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."
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....
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!
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
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.
Thank you for proving that the stereotype of the antisocial geek is spot on. Now I have even less chance of getting laid.
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!"
And here you are posting in community forum. How very social of you.
Every story even remotely connected to Twitter gets the trolls crawling under their stones, mumbling how much they hate it.
Feeling the love, huh?
What you're referring to are are just parenthetical comments. The underlying question, and one that's yet to be answered, can be summed in a way that a Twitterer like yourself can appreciate:
What's the fucking point?
Absent one-off scenarios (the Obama campaign), I've yet to see any value in any of it. What I do see is a large number of people engaged in what could generously be described as trivia, and dragging down the quality of discourse for the rest of us to levels too embarassing to ponder.
I'll cite one example. Consider CNN, hardly known for its journalistic excellence, but an outlet with mass appeal. The guy that does the lunchtime shift (you know, the moron who tries to appear empassioned about news stories by shouting rhetorical but trollish questions at his audience and guests like a Tourette's sufferer). He spends much of his time actually reading tweets! And instead of brief headlines being appearing on the CNN scroller, we're now forced to read the contributions by every anonymous illiterate out there who has an opinion, an internet connection, and a fondness for extraneous ASCII characters.
Seriously, is this the kind of society we want to live in?
And here you are posting in community forum. How very social of you.
I'ts not social, it's slashdot
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
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.
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.
I explain twitter as "Push" RSS. Grandma totally got it when I put it like that.
There are several points to Twitter, but not all or none of them may apply to you. The one that has the most value to me is search. If there is an earthquake or some other breaking news story, you'll read about it online soonest via Twitter search.
Twitter content is like content on the web: some of it is valuable, but most of it is garbage. If you have a good search tool, you can more quickly get to the real value and out of the noise. Don't be distracted by the mindless chatter. And, if it turns out to be a fad, it will be gone soon enough.
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