Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

PabloSandoval48 writes, "A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter. More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it." Reader mattnyc99 notes a related article in which the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless. "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this). Is the mainstream media making too big a deal out of the avalanche of World Cup tweets, or is the world literally flooding the zone?"

Comments

Breakfast?

[Kelson]

If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.

Just like a telephone, its usefulness depends on who you have on the other end of the line.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to find some more interesting friends

These are engineers we're talking about. They're lucky they have friends at all.

On a more serious note, what percentage of people are "interesting" enough to have worthwhile tweets?

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL... True... I got the link to this through Twitter ^_^

Re:Breakfast?

[Kelson]

On a more serious note, what percentage of people are "interesting" enough to have worthwhile tweets?

For that matter, what percentage of pages on the web are "interesting?"

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an engineer, and my reason for avoiding Twatter is twofold:

1. SNR is way too low for me to bother with.
2. http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/06/10/is-allowing-your-child-to-study-while-on-facebook-morally-equivalent-to-drinking-while-pregnant/

Re:Breakfast?

[nine-times]

Yeah, I think the problem is that people on both sides, whether they love Twitter or hate it, are thinking that it's something more than it is. Its like a blog, but short. It's like an SMS message, but not necessarily directed at a particular person. It's like an IM status, but not tied to IM. It was a slightly interesting approach to dealing with Internet communication, but it's really not that unique or interesting. Some people use Twitter for inane information. Some people do the same thing with email. Some people post really inane blog entries. No big deal.

But somehow the media has bought into Twitter as some kind of technological marvel. "ZOMG! People are tweeting about the World Cup! Let's put those tweets on our show, so we can pretend to be technologically savvy and relevant!"'

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

no, that is the problem with twitt, everyone who participates in it seems to think that every mundane detail of their little ant life must be documented on some glorious wall

if nothing else to help them forget that they are an insignificant twitt telling the world about the eggs they had for breakfast, as if anyone cares

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

33%?

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/16/1722258/Over-a-Third-of-the-Internet-Is-Pornographic

Re:Breakfast?

[Nadaka]

33% is less than one third.

Re:Breakfast?

[onkelonkel]

Well played Sir!

Re:Breakfast?

[Monkeedude1212]

1. SNR is way too low for me to bother with.
2. long link snipped

1. The SNR is entirely dependant on who you follow... so, if you get a lot of N, it means you're following the wrong S, which is your fault.

2. You linked to an article asking about the MORAL integrity of using one of these sites while studying? I could post an article "Is allowing someone to post on slashdot morally equivalent to assisting with suicide?". It's such a Glenn Beck move.

Re:Breakfast?

[Monkeedude1212]

Isn't that kind of like complaining about a penthouse suite because the people who are frequently in there are highly paid escorts?

Or to put it in a car analogy, complaining about corvette because the driver doesn't know how to drive?

You can't complain about Twitter because of the people who use it, especially when it gives you the architecture necessary to ignore what you want and listen to what you do want.

Re:Breakfast?

[Shadow of Eternity]

#2 is the classic loaded question, just like asking "Is it true you no longer beat your wife" and trying to force a yes or no: there's no safe answer. No matter which you pick you're sticking your foot into a significant implication, the only safe answer is to subvert the entire question by directly addressing the fallacy itself: "That's a trick question, I have NEVER beaten my wife".

Re:Breakfast?

[symes]

If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.

Just like a telephone, its usefulness depends on who you have on the other end of the line.

Precisely - I love twitter because I get immediate and brief headlines that can be easily followed up from various sources, including Science, Nature, NASA, the Economist, the BBC, and various other sources that are not otherwise succinctly aggregated in one place. Oh, and some hot chick who is off exploring the depths of the ocean in a big boat. This is where twitter, I think, works well.

But this does, however, beg the very important question - what do people on Slashdot listen to for their tech tweets?

Re:Breakfast?

[hoggoth]

> Isn't that kind of like complaining about a penthouse suite because the people who are frequently in there are highly paid escorts?

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Breakfast?

[IANAAC]

I get immediate and brief headlines that can be easily followed up from various sources, including Science, Nature, NASA, the Economist, the BBC, and various other sources that are not otherwise succinctly aggregated in one place.

You mean like any bog-standard RSS reader?

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting observation you have there sir.

Engineers also believe that 1/3 of female engineers under-perform (Source: http://www.profeng.com/archive/2009/2208/22080022.htm)

It's a conspiracy!

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even READ TFL? The author clearly addresses your concern. And his issue with Twatter and other "constant interruption" sources is that they seem to be fundamentally rewiring our brains so that we have difficulty concentrating on hard problems for long periods of time.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineers have plenty of friends, they're just more discriminating and don't bother to talk about pointless crap.

CAPTCHA = "vacuous". How fitting.

Re:Breakfast?

[Darinbob]

Wait, I have interesting friends. They're just not on twitter. Now finding interesting people who are also on twitter would be the real challenge.

Re:Breakfast?

[markov_chain]

I like to think of Twitter as IRC with a fancy message distribution graph. The intellectual level of the content is roughly similar to IRC.

Re:Breakfast?

[broknstrngz]

If breakfast is such a hot topic for you, then your friends should find some more interesting friends as well.

Re:Breakfast?

[bobcat7677]

OK, lets get right down to the meat of the matter. What I'm not seeing so far in this thread is the root of the problem: the format of Twitter is such that not much of any real value can be published through it. The limit on how much a "tweet" can contain is simply too small. If the same limit was imposed on Slashdot stories nobody would be on here because none of us are stupid enough to click blind links and there wouldn't be enough space to put a decent description. This really sums up my first thought when I tried Twitter for 15 minutes "back in the day": "140 characters should be enough for everyone? What the *ell are we supposed to do with that?".

Re:Breakfast?

[Shark]

On a more serious note, what percentage of people are "interesting" enough to have worthwhile tweets?

They don't always drink beer, but when they do, they prefer Dos Equis.

Re:Breakfast?

[Runaway1956]

Hmmm. Maybe. But, you do realize that some IRC channels are actually collaborative support channels, and development tools? Does twitter offer anything like that?

Re:Breakfast?

[TheRaven64]

No, a standard RSS reader typically truncates the first paragraph or so of the article, but may also include entire features. Twitter just about has space for the headlines. It's more like an RSS reader specifically modified for someone with ADD.

Re:Breakfast?

[icebraining]

But they're rewiring brains because people actually want to be interrupted. In my case, even before Twitter, I've always hated real time systems like IMs, because they keep interrupting me, and people actually expect a swift answer. I prefer forums and RSS where I read all the messages in a row, reply to them and then go off do something else without being expect to answer right away.

Re:Breakfast?

[GumphMaster]

Watch it! I resemble that comment!

Re:Breakfast?

[Runaway1956]

My thoughts exactly. I've never even installed an RSS reader onto my desktop. I have RSS going to my iGoogle page. News from around the world, covering geek stuff, general news, science, nature, the military - all the important stuff. And, I don't have to wade through posts about some silly chick's least favorite color of lipstick, or who is doing some celebrity bimbo this week.

Re:Breakfast?

[theshowmecanuck]

If all your friends do all day is twitter, are they interesting?

Re:Breakfast?

[Stormy Dragon]

Anyone who had time to find more interesting friends flunked out of engineering in college.

Re:Breakfast?

[Hatta]

Its like a blog, but short.

So it's like a blog, but without the opportunity for in depth information.

It's like an SMS message, but not necessarily directed at a particular person.

So it's like an SMS, but with nothing I personally need to know.

It's like an IM status, but not tied to IM.

So it's like an IM, but... aw hell, IM sucks too.

Re:Breakfast?

[rainmouse]

I have to agree with this, not liking a technology purely because the majority of people using it are idiots, can be an argument to scratch off using just about any form of technology.

Re:Breakfast?

[Hatta]

In the case of twitter, it's more like a swamp.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The SNR is entirely dependant on who you follow... so, if you get a lot of N, it means you're following the wrong S, which is your fault.

There's very little signal that can be unambiguously packed into 140 characters.

There's even less if you're trying to clarify something that was unambiguous. In the case of the World Cup, the only "S" would be "Team X scored", maybe "Player X Yellow/Red card", or "Game over, final score X:Y".

Explaining why something was a bad call would often take more than 140 characters.

And in explaining a simple S:N filter in the context of something as simple as a soccer game, I'm already into the kilobyte range.

Now try to do that with something technical. No fargin' way. It just doesn't scale for anything other than impulsive "OMGWTFBBQ" reactions. A million people going OMGWTFBBQ is a signal - but the signal there is in the number of tweets, not the actual content of the tweets themselves. Twitter metadata is interesting, but actually following tweets is crap.

Re:Breakfast?

[StikyPad]

Not if your hundreds have depreciated to 99 you insensitive clod.

Re:Breakfast?

[nine-times]

So it's like a blog, but without the opportunity for in depth information.

Yeah. The point of blogs isn't always depth of information. Sometimes you just want to share a brief thought, share a link, or let your friends and family know what you're up to.

So it's like an SMS, but with nothing I personally need to know.

Yes, probably not something you need to know, but perhaps something you'd like to know.

Re:Breakfast?

[porges]

If you all agree on some hashtag, you can get the effect of an ad-hoc chat room.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it does. You can use #hashtags to find people looking for help, and help them. It's potentially a lot more powerful and effective than asking questions on irc.

Re:Breakfast?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

You can find his newsletter at the following link:
http://www.penthouse.com/

Re:Breakfast?

[war4peace]

You take one sparrow. It tweets and at times it might sound soothing, even if you don't understand what's it saying.
Take two sparrows. They might sound even nicer if their tweets match to form music.
Take a thousand sparrows. They make such a horrible sound, you'd wish not being there at all.
Take a hundred thousand sparrows. You'll start to prefer vuvuzelas!
...And there are a few more iterations until you reach Twitter's real flock size.

Re:Breakfast?

[indifferenthues]

I'm always surprised when people who I would think should have at least a modicum of technical know-how show their ignorance of how things are actually meant to be used in addition to the "if the people you are following are only typing in stupid stuff, then why are you following them" part of this story, they are showing a basic lack of understanding about the how the entire "world cup on-line" thing is supposed to work, what is supposed to be happening is it is like sitting in the stadium with all the other people around you who are cheering, commenting and jumping up and down, and generally being excited, involved and having a good time, you know the kind of thing that happens when you are out and about and interacting in a social setting with real, live, unpredictable, other people

Re:Breakfast?

[Bing Tsher E]

The English Department wouldn't admit them, either.

So they went to Journalism School.

Re:Breakfast?

[Knara]

Exactly. It's like screen+IRC for folks who never had screen+IRC.

Re:Breakfast?

[lennier]

I hear Vuvuzela is going to be the next Twitter...

Re:Breakfast?

[nine-times]

But you don't have to listen to any of it. Or you could just listen to the two you want. What's the problem?

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't that 140 characters is too short, but that it requires more thought than most people are able, or prepared, to provide.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for sufficiently small values of 0.3

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Ashton Kutcher has never returned my phone calls.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not going to find any interesting people who actually tweet.

Re:Breakfast?

[BitZtream]

I have to say that if you're idea of a useful tweet is that someone tells you what they had for breakfast ... you are the one who needs more interesting friends.

Re:Breakfast?

[BitZtream]

No.

There are people who know how to drive, that own and drive Corvettes.
There are people who stay in the penthouse suite and never have a whore.

There has never been and never will be an intelligent 'tweet' or 'user of twitter'. You can tell me I'm wrong all you want, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. Show me 160 characters that can prove you're or someone is intelligent. I know 160 can show the stupidity and ignorance of a person, but you can't say the opposite.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but there isn't a single person in the world who is interesting or exciting enough to read about on a daily basis. If you think that there is, then you should probably go get a life or a hobby and stop trying to live vicariously through someone else.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better phrased would be, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

what is supposed to be happening is it is like sitting in the stadium with all the other people around you who are cheering, commenting and jumping up and down, and generally being excited, involved and having a good time

Except that it's not like that at all.

Re:Breakfast?

[gardendawn]

And a year is 365.25 days. Get over it. Close enough.

Re:Breakfast?

[BrokenHalo]

Engineers have plenty of friends

I would until now have agreed with you. But if 85% of engineers don't use twitter, that leaves 15% that do. Enough said.

Re:Breakfast?

[vux984]

If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.

Exactly. Its like saying email is useless because "I dont really need a constant stream of Viagra offers".

Except email has a lot of real uses, so one doesn't generally say that. Twitter, unlike email, doesn't. People have to really stretch and contort to find use cases for twitter that actually make it worth filtering out the crap to get that worth.

After all, even if I knew "interesting people", i still don't need 120 character updates on what they are doing. What does twitter do that's useful that isn't already covered by email and rss feeds?

The point is, email is mostly spam, but its still very useful. Most of us use it and find ways to limit our exposure to spam. With twitter, for most of us, in most cases, its just not worth the effort, even if we could just see interesting twitter messages, it would still generally be a waste of our time.

Re:Breakfast?

[couchslug]

English, motherfuckers, do you speak it?

Twitter is literally for "twittering", not engineering communication.

The name wasn't an accident. It's for mood-setting housewife babble.

There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with expecting more than that.

Re:Breakfast?

[MadUndergrad]

It could be more than one third. Remember your significant figures!

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Percentages don't matter.

One word: Wikileaks.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing you ate for breakfast will ever be that exciting.

Re:Breakfast?

[Cassius Corodes]

I think the article would have been more shocking if they turned the focus around. 15% of engineers use twitter. 16% of tweets actually useful news, and 7.6% actual conversations. I'm quite surprised it's that successful.

Re:Breakfast?

[EdIII]

Trust me, if 33% of the Internet is really porn (I tend to believe in a much higher number), that fact alone would not guarantee it to be 100% interesting.

Not all porn is meant to be seen by all people.

Re:Breakfast?

[lonecrow]

Agreed. My server finds twitter a fine way to provide me with updates about its health.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

example of a fake, useless tweet:

I ate lots of thai food, now i go to do a 2 like a 1

and it has nothing to do with the previous comment

Re:Breakfast?

[ewertz]

Stop making sense. N ur msg iz2long.

Re:Breakfast?

[jimmydigital]

My take on 'Twitter' - I have no idea what this is. [raises eyebrow] Stay thirsty my friends.

Re:Breakfast?

[MrCrassic]

Right. It's another classic case of completely missing the point. Sure, there are tons of folks that use Twitter for pointless crap, but there is a plethora of great information underneath that superficiality, with a super-fast distribution method to boot. I knew about the iPhone unlock for today's release the SECOND it was released by Twitter through Tweetdeck. Other than Facebook (which doesn't offer as much anonymity as the former, and would be rejected by most of this sample even if it did), there is nothing quicker than that.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not love or hate, it's love or really don't care.

Re:Breakfast?

[gullevek]

Well none of my twitter friends posts what they had for breakfast or when they take a dump. So yes, it's the choice of friends.

Re:Breakfast?

[the_womble]

What proportion can write interesting blogs, or books, or newspaper columns, or even hold and interesting conversation.

As you can follow anyone you like on Twitter, the question becomes merely one of finding the interesting people.

Re:Breakfast?

[Captain Hook]

I think, therefore I am?

Re:Breakfast?

[X0563511]

But with none of the response, simplicity (and complexity, should it be wanted) of a fuckin' IRC client.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you've never seen non-interesting porn? I bet there's even someone here with a folder of porn labeled boring... not interesting enough to look at, but too OCD to delete it.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. That's why we have leap years.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all pr0n is interesting :P

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

ORLY?

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because typing a quote that was thought up by another person requires a massive amount of intelligence.

Re:Breakfast?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Listen when you're next watching a World Cup match. The note of the vuvuzela has amazingly been matched to the exact same pitch as the very first note of Guns 'n' Roses "Welcome to the Jungle."

Re:Breakfast?

[Zebedeu]

Yes.

The author of a project I'm currently following closely posts his updates on twitter. Since I don't visit the twitter webpage all that much, or have any clients for it, I simply subscribed his feed with my RSS reader.

I like Twitter. It's a nice way to follow people/projects/things in which you're interested, and you can even reply easily, turning the platform from a "bog-standard RSS reader" into a quick-and-dirty IM/email service for a quick chat.

Re:Breakfast?

[rastos1]

33% is less than one third.

But they did not count in *your* collection, did they?

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

100% agree. Twitter: just like rss, but worse!

Re:Breakfast?

[blackicye]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

You can find his newsletter at the following link:

http://www.penthouse.com/

You insensitive clod! You didn't mark your newsletter NSFW. I clicked that link thinking it was showcasing available high rise housing options, and now I'm going to get fired!

Re:Breakfast?

[profplump]

Those who fail to understand SMTP are doomed to re-implement it. Poorly.

Re:Breakfast?

[AliasMarlowe]

And a year is 365.25 days.

Wow, we have a liberal arts major among us!
At least, you left out the "approximately" from your assertion. A Julian year is 365.25 days, which led to a multi-day error after several centuries. The simple Gregorian year is 365.2425 days, and it's still wrong by almost half a minute. A year measured from the Earth's orbit around the Sun relative to the most distant visible stars is approximately 365.2422 days long. The adjusted Gregorian year is 365.24225 days (FYI, the centuries rule for leap years is inverted for millenial years: year 4000 and 8000 will not be leap years, but year 3000 and 5000 will be), which is only wrong by approximately 4 seconds.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1511/why-do-we-have-leap-years

Re:Breakfast?

[hitmark]

i would say its more like a supplement to a full on blog.

would you be annoyed if you found a wordpress blog that had entries that where all in the 140 characters zone?

would not the overhead of the page be more then the content itself?

Re:Breakfast?

[hitmark]

and i think thats the main point here. The people behind twitter have mutated the system over time, as they see how people use it.

@nick replies? written into the system after it became a common use. same with #tags. So far the biggest "blunder" was their mangling of retweets (repreating some other persons tweet) as many used leftover space to add a short comment alongside the copied message. With the official retweet, you instead get the full entry complete with avatar of the original user.

in a way, twitter have become word of mouth with a backlog. Or as you said, a RSS reader with a reply function. I guess this is why google decided to add buzz into their mix of gmail and reader.

in the end, twitter is many things to many people, and can be used in various ways. The ecosystem around it have exploded, tho now there have been some pruning as the twitter devs have been folding some third party services into the core.

Re:Breakfast?

[brufleth]

As an engineer I agree with this message. I made a twitter account because my phone really seemed to want one and I thought a few entertainers I like might have good tweets. So far they don't and twitter still seems stupid.

Re:Breakfast?

[wzzzzrd]

woosh

Re:Breakfast?

[war4peace]

The problem with Twitter is that you don't get to choose. You're forced to eat goodies and crap alike.

Re:Breakfast?

[arth1]

I would until now have agreed with you. But if 85% of engineers don't use twitter, that leaves 15% that do. Enough said.

And that's why there's been an increase in train accidents.

As an engineer, I value precise and unambiguous communication, but even more, I value not having my train of thought derailed by mindless crap. And face it, the fecal ratio is higher for Twitter than for other OTM communication fora. Except, perhaps, 4chan, but at least you can find interesting diagrams there.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is... the least interesting messaging system in the world.

Re:Breakfast?

[skrolle2]

Twitter is an online chat with a single chatroom, and filtering tools. Think of it like that and it all starts making sense.

Re:Breakfast?

[CodingHero]

If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.

Or that he's interesting enough that he doesn't need to live vicariously through other people.

Re:Breakfast?

[somersault]

The point is not that engineers can't use it for "engineering communication" (whatever that is). It's that engineers don't want to use it at all. I created an account but I really just don't see the point in it. I think I posted 3 times and then got bored. According to my degree I'm a scientist and not an engineer, but I do reside in the engineering department at my workplace.

Having said that, one of my engineering friends on is always doing whiny little Facebook updates about wanting beer, wanting holidays, his car breaking, etc.. he'd probably love Twitter, if he isn't already on it.

Re:Breakfast?

[mdwh2]

You're missing the point. It's not intended to be that. Or is your view that IRC is also completely useless for everyone, except for collaborative support and development tools?

How much of your everyday conversations result in receiving news? And how much of the conversation would a random stranger decide is "legitimate"?

Re:Breakfast?

[hoggoth]

Wow, who would have thought a freshman at a small mid-western college who never gets any action would find love in the dorm laundromat? These true stories are fascinating.
 

Re:Breakfast?

[Coren22]

But I don't have a wife you insensitive clod.

Re:Breakfast?

[Quirkz]

I've always thought it made a lot more sense as a business tool than as a means of personal expression.

I use Twitter as a news feed for the online game I run. It's an excellent way to let casual players know something has changed. Basically free advertising, delivered to where (some of) my players are already looking. This is good, because updates are irregular, and they don't have to go out of their way to check every day.

Of course I also use other means to appeal to players who of the "Twitter is only good for sharing breakfast stories" crowd.

Re:Breakfast?

[The Archon V2.0]

> 33% is less than one third.

Yeah, but a few of those sites are devoted to celebrity sex tapes like Paris Hilton's. Not very interesting.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

RSS readers store pages and pages of "unread" feeds. Twitter only gives you the latest few from each source.

Re:Breakfast?

[Chowderbags]

It's more like complaining about a subway because the riders piss on the trains.

Re:Breakfast?

[hkmwbz]

No, Twitter gives you access to stuff that isn't posted by people to blogs or other places with an actual RSS feed. More like an aggregated RSS feed of all the people you want to hear more from.

Re:Breakfast?

[hkmwbz]

If everyone you are following on Twitter thinks that every mundane detail belongs in Twitter, you are the problem. Instead of complaining, follow people who actually have something interesting to say.

Re:Breakfast?

[RedShoeRider]

Informative?

Seriously? Mods.....it's a joke. Moderate it as such.
If it's not a joke, then the OP is either living under a rock, or perhaps, living under a larger rock. I doubt there are many people who can operate a computer that have never heard of Playboy and Penthouse (irrespective of nationality; both are global magazines, and pretty tame by those standards, too).

Re:Breakfast?

[Unequivocal]

Yes, there's really no info that can be shrunk into 140 chars. You could learn calculus that way but what's the point? http://bit.ly/9tE4fa

Re:Breakfast?

[motorhead]

Nice commas.

Re:Breakfast?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Well maybe if you didn't beat her she wouldn't have left you, you insensitive clod!

Re:Breakfast?

[johnnywalker1000]

I know some sites such as TwitGrids are running realtime Twitter spam filters. Check them out, they've done the best job I've seen so far of eliminating Twitter spam. http://www.twitgrids.com/

Re:Breakfast?

[dasqua]

...you take one sparrow, pluck it. Then you add another... after about 1000 THEN you have a meal. End of story.

Re:Breakfast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idiot that says "I love twitter" should immediately hand-in their geek card.

Re:Breakfast?

[tehcyder]

On a more serious note, what percentage of people are "interesting" enough to have worthwhile tweets?

And what percentage of people have interesting breakfasts?

Re:Breakfast?

[tehcyder]

I could post an article "Is allowing someone to post on slashdot morally equivalent to assisting with suicide?".

It is if the post is anti-Apple.

Re:Breakfast?

[PastaLover]

Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. A lot of the commenters here seem to want it to be something it's not. It is not a replacement for e-mail or rss feeds, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have merit. You clearly don't use it, and it may well be a waste of time _for you_. Clearly many people did find a use for it though, if only for entertainment. A year or so ago you might have gotten away with declaring it a mere fad. Right now, actually claiming with a straight face that Twitter doesn't have any use case whatsoever is akin to claiming NNTP is all anyone will ever need.

So?

[thetoadwarrior]

The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.

Re:So?

[Kenoli]

The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.

I didn't see anything about porn tweets.

Re:So?

[Mashiki]

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook. Both can die in a blaze of their own fiery doom for all I care.

Re:So?

[RobertB-DC]

The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.

Can be? More like *has* been said, and *continues* to be said. It started with personal web pages -- my first Geocities page proclaimed "I love my wife and kids!", as though that were something unique in the world. But I also had a page of cool background wallpapers that I'd found, back when that was a novel concept... and a little outfit called Yahoo! found my "Wallpaper Heaven" page and suddenly it was getting hundreds of hits a day.

Blogs, too -- 90% useless, but the remaining 10% are either essential to my job in IT, or just interesting. Fortunately, Google does a pretty good job of figuring out which ones are worth reading, just by looking at who's linking to them.

I have to agree with the other posters... if Twitter is achieving anywhere near 20% signal-to-noise, it's a resounding success. And as the search tools mature, it'll only get better. Or, to misquote Douglas Adams, it coul eventually disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Re:So?

[Just Some Guy]

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.

Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.

I'm serious. I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day. If you don't, then that's because of the people generating the content you're reading.

Re:So?

[InlawBiker]

It's the Internet in microcosm. Engineers first used the Internet to pass technical information. Noise was kept to a minimum so work could get done. Then the engineers were surprised to find that the general public had an intense interest in fluff and chatter.

So it's the same thing with Twitter. We mostly ignore it, unless we're using it for geek thing we find important.

Re:So?

[e2d2]

You must not follow Wil Wheaton.

Ba dum ching

Re:So?

[e2d2]

Yeah, follow Lexie Belle on twitter and tell me it's useless. I get good use out of it thank you very much.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find plenty of worthwhile content from my friends on Facebook every week. Facebook is just one method of keeping in touch with people you know. I use it to coordinate group trips or gatherings, post pictures of said outings after they happen, and read about my friends when they do the same. Yes, all of this could be done over email or other technology, it just so happens that Facebook is one relatively user-friendly way of doing it.

Just like Twitter, don't take it to be more than it is.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe he actually hangs out with his friends and talks with them in person. What a geek.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't actually ever (intentionally) used Twitter before. But one way Twitter is used, that I have constantly run into, is for project development and news/release updates. I have to admit, it's quite clever. Aggregating all headline news snippet updates into one service is quite valuable.

RSS accomplishes the same thing, but it's only good for articles IMO. The problems RSS has with these types of updates are: (1) it relies on external web services, (2) it's overkill for the short "new update version 2.2 test 7" type posts, and (3) it doesn't support inline comments/status updates from the author.

An example of #3 might be a developer posting a message like: "Workaround for random crash on build #33453. Delete file /usr/share/xyz." It isn't important enough to warrant a news/blog post, but some smaller subset of users will appreciate the tip.

Essentially, it seems that Twitter (and RSS) relegates the role of forums and mailing lists back to detailed discussion, and not as news announcement services.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was someone looking for @domainews? /me ducks

Re:So?

[DerekLyons]

It's the Internet in microcosm. Engineers first used the Internet to pass technical information. Noise was kept to a minimum so work could get done. Then the engineers were surprised to find that the general public had an intense interest in fluff and chatter.

Fluff, chatter, and noise were on the internet long before the general public got a hold of it.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a tired argument. Maybe we should stop using email and phone as well. After all, meeting people in real life is so much better.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day

That's a pretty shitty SN ratio.

Re:So?

[smellsofbikes]

I have a group of friends that post on an old BBS-like system, LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. Same people, posting to all four places. I put them in that order because that's the order that shows their relative value to me. On the old BBS they post long, interesting discussions of their lives, a dozen paragraphs about the troubles one woman is going through having her mom involuntarily committed to an institution because of Alzheimer's and her conflicts with her relatives over the process, another dozen paragraphs about another friend's decision-making process about buying a TIG welder and why he chose the one he did. On Facebook, those same two people post things like "hey baby pics!", and on twitter they post "I like cheese!"

There isn't room on FB or Twitter to say stuff that has depth, and so many people are on them that you can't say anything controversial without offending someone. I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy. I suppose I could spend the time to figure out how to build a filter that lets only a few people see it, or make another private FB account that prospective employers can't see, but why bother? I've got a bunch of friends on a BBS that nobody in the rest of the world will ever see and I can say anything I want there, with a 2 kilobyte post that lets me say *exactly* what I want to say.

The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.

Re:So?

[bynary]

I would take your argument further and say that 76% of all conversations on and offline might be considered worthless chatter if the intended audience is not taken into account (as another poster already pointed out). If you're my doctor and are monitoring my diet, you do care about what I had for breakfast. Re-tweets are useful if they serve to spread a worthwhile tweet beyond its initial audience, making the re-tweet inherently valuable to its receiving audience. That's exactly why word-of-mouth advertising is so effective.

Also, I didn't notice any list of what the article's authors used as criteria to determine if a tweet was junk or not.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then its not your friends that are interesting, its just that you are boring enough to be entertained by minutiae.

Re:So?

[Tikkun]

Then your friends are boring.

Yes, yes they are.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your friends are really that interesting? More likely you are very easily amused. Oh look, shiney!!!!

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting from inside your own anus is truly a feat. Perhaps that's why its limited to 160 characters.
Nothing wrong with twitter or Miley Ctrus all these things are great for pre-pubescent girls. But normal people require something a little textier.

Re:So?

[Mashiki]

Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.

Cops, lawyers, a nuclear physicist, doctors(one being a neurosurgeon), a couple of veterinarians, a smattering of people who work for RIM and MS here in Canada, 2 retired soldiers and a dyed in the wool lumberjack. Yeah we're pretty boring people, you know simple like most Canucks.

Actually, we save "fun" for when we see each other in real life and get away from anything connected. But no you don't hang out with interesting people, you hang out with people who are so lonely they crave attention. And that attention comes from putting their lives up for you to see as "interesting".

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is. I only ever use email or phone to communicate with my friends if I need to tell them where to meet me in person.

I guess it's because when I refer to "friends" I mean real, live friends, not the dozens of faceless throwaways from Twitter/Facebook whom you have never met, nor will ever meet, that you call "friends".

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe it's because you think lame stuff is funny.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you are such a precious special snowflake. Honestly, we get it but why are you here then?
Surely your super special, awesome, interesting, exceptional friends are doing something amazing right now and are just dying to tell you all about it!

Hey know what would be even better? Meet up AFK and do all those amazing things with those amazing people in real life. What a thought!

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you're just too easily amused.

Re:So?

[icebraining]

*Lexi

Re:So?

[icebraining]

It must be annoying spelling youtube urls.

People can hang out in person *and* use social networking software - they don't cancel each other.

Re:So?

[nobodyknowsimageek]

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.

Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.

...or you're easily amused. Just sayin'

Re:So?

[Just Some Guy]

Actually, we save "fun" for when we see each other in real life and get away from anything connected.

Truly? You never send each other a funny email or call to tell them something interesting that happened? I'm glad that you have offline fun with your friends. I had a great time hanging out at a softball tournament all weekend, and appreciate how nice it is to spend good times over beer and a grill full of hamburgers and hotdogs. Still, sometimes while we're all stuck at our respective offices, I'll think of something to tell one of my real-life friends. When that happens, I'll usually email them or direct-message them on Twitter.

I just don't get why some people - seemingly including you - think that it has to be either/or; that you can't have fun offline and online. Again, maybe I'm so incredibly lucky that my friends are the only people in the world capable of writing interesting things and sending them to me. Somehow I doubt that.

Re:So?

[ZmeiGorynych]

Well, also I'm one of those people to whom 'having fun online' is impossible or meaningless. A conversation without hearing the actual voice to me loses so much substance that it's basically not worth having unless it's purely for information exchange, and phone calls are better but still a mile behind being there. Sure, exchanging a ping-like sms or email with friends on different continents, like once a year, is OK - but 'fun online' to me is such a weak substitute for actually seeing the person that I'd rather focus on the situation I'm physically in at the moment.

Maybe your friends are so incredibly interesting, or maybe your standard for interesting things in your inbox is low - sure, I get sent stuff as well, but 95% of that I'd just as well do without.

Re:So?

[bloodhawk]

No offense but I think it is far more likely you simply have a far lower standard as to what is funny or interesting if you can find enough on twitter and facebook to keep you interested every day. I am also willing to bet that my friends have far more interesting jobs and hobbies than yours, most are engineers and scientists with a few in IT like me and NONE of us find anything interesting enough to use Twitter or facebook for.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day. If you don't, then that's because of the people generating the content you're reading.

There's bound to be some wheat in the chaff, but what's the ratio? How many dozens of worthless posts and retweets do you have to read for each interesting thing?

Re:So?

[Just Some Guy]

I am also willing to bet that my friends have far more interesting jobs and hobbies than yours,

No offense, but not likely. My wife's a surgeon so a lot of our friends are other doctors, and they usually have cool things to talk about. A good friend restores classic Mustangs for a living and always has a funny story. I have a couple of pals at startups and I like seeing what that's like. An old high school classmate just moved to Hawaii to study marine biology. A few others are college professors now (including one who's updating his Facebook status as he's getting halfway through a tour of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia). My cousin just got her degree in mine engineering. My wife's cousin just got her doctorate in aerospace engineering. These are all personal friends - some nearby, and some flung to the far corners of the world.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe I have a lower standard of "interesting" and "funny" than you do. Or perhaps I can see the interesting and funny in the words of my real-life friends on Facebook and Twitter, and I have real-life friends that make it easy by saying interesting and funny things.

Re:So?

[Scroatzilla]

I don't think Twitter will have the longevity of the Internet, though. Twitter is a fad, and all of today's self-important tweeters will eventually get sick of it and it will simply turn into another outlet for advertisers to blast us with sales pitches.

Re:So?

[hkmwbz]

Is it Twitter's fault that the people you are surrounding yourself with provide no actual information?

Re:So?

[martyros]

I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy.

The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.

While I agree about twitter, with your FB example it's more like, "The community is the message." If your only friends on FB were the friends you had on BBS, you could post about the orgy. If your conservative aunt frequented your BBS networks, you'd be in the same bind.

Honestly, the simplest way to deal with it? Don't friend her. You don't have to. FB is a new technology, and as such the social conventions need to change because of it. In real life, you have plenty of time and space boundaries with people, so that you can easily spend some time with your conservative aunt while isolating her from your not-so-conservative lifestyle. On FB, you don't have those boundaries (or, they're trickier to implement). So if you really want to express your lifestyle on FB, don't friend people who would be offended by it. I probably refuse one or two friend requests a month from people that I know, but whom I don't really care to share my life with.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the Internet in microcosm. Why? Because engineers never used it for anything--more to the point, neither did scientists or in fact anybody with anything serious (or really funny) to say at all.

There's a story of technology advancing hand in hand with the marketplace--the romance of the entrepreneur--that's been partly a lie ever since the U. S. Government landed on the moon and invented the Internet. Invented the "Costner" oil-water centrifuge too.

Pure Entrepreneurs yield Twitter.

Someone/something else yields Internet and other truly major advances.

Our social paradigms haven't caught up with it yet.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually sounds pathetically sad.

It looks like those are doing stuff while you do nothing and try to live through them. Here is a thought. Get off of your computer and go out somewhere. Doesn't matter where. Just pack your bags and go on a trip somewhere.

Re:So?

[bloodhawk]

I could not think of a more boring and uninteresting set of things to be reading about lol. As I said earlier, it seems you just have a much lower standard when it comes to interesting/funny compared to what others consider an incredible waste of time.

simplistic view....

[gandhi_2]

i know the most common use is that simplistic model: someone types something like a micro-blog entry....took fluffy for a walk. but it's more useful as a glue. using modules and apis, a small business (martial arts school, for example) can update their website, facebook fans, twitter followers, and SMS recipients with info (class tonight will be no-gi).

sure, you could have coded a quick text-bounce on your own server, but twitter makes it pretty easy.

Re:simplistic view....

[CCarrot]

(class tonight will be no-gi).

No-gi, hmmm? You have some mighty interesting classes there...;o)

(btw, what exactly do you get a grip on, then?)

cc

Re:simplistic view....

[Anonymous Coward]

in short, arms, wrists, necks, legs, ankles. You could always go for the oil check though.

not that i cared, but i dont think i ever rolled with a non-straight dude

Re:simplistic view....

[CCarrot]

Oh, I just assumed the classes were co-ed...fun for everyone!

Re:simplistic view....

[MachineShedFred]

Actually, the best use for twitter I've seen yet, is in rally racing. People all along the route can 'tweet' when a car goes by, giving a semi-realtime look at where every participant is on the course, if you know the position of the tweeter.

This, is of course, a single valid use in a massive cargo container ship of waste.

Re:simplistic view....

[Anonymous Coward]

i know the most common use is that simplistic model: someone types something like a micro-blog entry....took fluffy for a walk. but it's more useful as a glue.

Engineers prefer duct tape.

Re:simplistic view....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't Google's track-me-and-tell-random-people-where-I-am thing (Latitude?) be at least as suitable?
Y'know, assuming the racers want to make their fans happy.

If not, I suppose DIY twitracking is your second-best option, after sneaking into the garage at night and planting a tracking device (i.e. cheap smartphone) in the car.

Re:simplistic view....

[TheJediGeek]

Oh, I just assumed the classes were co-ed...fun for everyone!

Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Tweeter

[Anonymous Coward]

I followed a tweet to this story

Twitter is useful?

[CrimsonAvenger]

"Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' -- which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation

I suspect very strongly that if you were to ask 1000 random people, you'd get a very similar opinion of the content of /.

In other words, "Surprise! People are different, and some aren't interested in the things you happen to be interested in. And that doesn't make them (or you) defective."

Re:Twitter is useful?

[pjt33]

Far more than 29% of /. posts are useless observation. This one included.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[mwvdlee]

Luckily, most of the useless posts on /. are quickly moderated into oblivion. On Twatter, there is nothing to protect the reader.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

cue the recursion joke... now!

Re:Twitter is useful?

[Kelson]

On Twitter, the reader is the moderator. If someone you don't follow posts a useless comment, you'll never see it unless someone you do follow decides to be sadistic about it.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[scatterfingers]

Thanks, I totally just tweeted that.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[improfane]

Wouldn't you have to do that a thousand times to get something remotely interesting?

What we need is something like AlterSlash which compiles lots of highly rated Slashdot posts into one place.

That I would use because there are people smarter than me who use twitter.

I already use Slashdot in RSS and it's pre-filtered for spam for me.

Re:Twitter is useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need Internet protection, against ourself.

Could [removed] please [removed] of the [removed]!

wow, which twitter is that?

[siddesu]

the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless

so, they found 24% useful comments? for what i've seen of twitter it seems like an excellent content ratio.

Re:wow, which twitter is that?

[coastwalker]

The only thing I find tweets useful for is status of projects or events the rest of it is Usenet spam. Heck, Usenet has been full of excrement for decades, Twitter is just the same, you need to filter it. Though it has to be said that the mejia loves the concept and therfore it gets far too much attention. yawn.

Re:wow, which twitter is that?

[siddesu]

well, the moderated and narrow interest groups on the usenet were quite useful most of the time, much more so than twitter.

to me, twitter is kinda like the rss of wsj - lots of headlines, no content.

if you're just looking at it seems like a lot, but if you dig in, you realize 70% is junk you don't want to know about, 29% is a repeat with a slightly changed headline, and the rest is so rare it almost doesn't pay to have it.

Really?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Tweets are uninformative, self-promoting and often useless? I could have told you that without a 'study'.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

*shrug*

The execution tweet was a good one

[pgmrdlm]

http://www.techiezine.com/execution-anounced-on-twitter/

But thats what I use twitter for, to follow the release of news stories.

Not the method, but the users

[LoudMusic]

Most of our modern information delivery and socializing methods are actually pretty inventive and useful, until they are populated with the masses of morons that inhabit our Earth. And the one tweet the submitter linked to is a good example. It did actually have good information in it - Portugal scored a goal. But it was also filled with a bunch of personalized exclamation, which most people don't want to see.

The great thing is, you're not forced to view that person's Twitter feed. The hard part is finding one you ARE interested in.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[godrik]

I only kind of agree. The users are definitivelly posting junk. But can you really post anything useful in the length limit of tweeter ?

Re:Not the method, but the users

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Your comment is 136 characters long, which is below the maximum tweet length. So either your comment is useless, or the answer is yes. Besides, a lot of tweets contain a link.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[Rennt]

:~$ echo "I only kind of agree. The users are definitivelly posting junk. But can you really post anything useful in the length limit of tweeter ?" | wc
137

But I'm still undecided ;)

Re:Not the method, but the users

[mccrew]

echo -n "I only kind of agree. The users are definitivelly posting junk. But can you really post anything useful in the length limit of tweeter ?" | wc -c

136

Re:Not the method, but the users

[TubeSteak]

Besides, a lot of tweets contain a link.

As far as I'm concerned, every url-shortened link goes directly to goatse.cx

http://bit.ly/10ZXS
There's a 50/50 chance I just linked to lemonparty.org
Feel free to roll the dice and find out.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[El_Muerte_TDS]

I don't have to find out, I the "Long URL please" extension for Firefox.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[psbrogna]

Agreed. I think the analysis of the meaningful content in a Tweet "stream" should be compared to a similar analysis on regular verbal communication. I think we'd find the results alarmingly similar. It's not Tweets that bore people to death, it's people that bore people to death.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[apoc.famine]

A link? Hardly. They contain a link shortener, with no clue as to where it leads. Gotta save as many characters as possible...

With the vast amount of garbage in the world, I'm at the point now where I do NOT click on link shorteners. If it's not goatse, it's a blog that copied a blog that copied a blog that twisted a summary of a blog that got misinformation from someone who couldn't understand an actual piece of news.

It's the same reason that half the time I look at links in a slashdot summary, and either do my own search, or just close the tab.

I'm not interested in wasting my time driving ad dollars to unfathomably shitty blogs.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[LoudMusic]

That's an even better rational than I was giving! Wish I could mod you up :(

Re:Not the method, but the users

[hkmwbz]

I don't get it. If you think people are posting junk, why don't you unfollow them, and follow people who post useful stuff? I've found a lot of people who post useful stuff. They can post interesting observations that don't merit a full blog post, or interesting links.

The problem isn't Twitter. The problem is people reading only what boring people have to say, and then whining about boring people on Twitter. Instead of whining, correct the problem. Only follow people who say something interesting.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[godrik]

I would go for useless. :)

Re:Not the method, but the users

[godrik]

that's why I am not using twitter :) If I want to talk with people I just call them, invite them for diner, write emails or post to forums.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[hkmwbz]

...or you can use Twitter. It isn't Twitter's fault that you are only reading tweets from twats.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[godrik]

I could also install a brainfuck interpreter on my machine. It could be useful someday, but it is likely not to be.

I agree there might be tweets that are worth reading. But I can not read everything and the signal to noise ratio is likely to be high on twitter. Therefore, I am not using it.

Or you could read all foreign country news. It is likely there will be something interestign out there. But the signal to noise ratio is bad. So you don't do it.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[hkmwbz]

Once again, the problem isn't Twitter. The problem is that you aren't filtering the content. Just like the whole web isn't useful, but there are a lot of useful sites you can keep an eye on, not all Twitter accounts are useful, but if you stick to following the ones that are, the problem is solved.

You keep blaming Twitter for your own lack of understanding of how the whole goddamn internet works!

Re:Not the method, but the users

[godrik]

You keep blaming Twitter for your own lack of understanding of how the whole goddamn internet works!

I understand how the internet works. Twitter is a website/service with a bad SNR therefore I don't use it.

Same thing with (the now dead) geocities. There were nice websites there. But in average it was pretty crappy. Therefore, when I saw a geocities address I used to skip it. Was geocities bad ? It was pretty average technically, but the content was usually bad.

Same thing with twitter.

I use filters on the internet. I just filter more things than you do.

Re:Not the method, but the users

[hkmwbz]

I understand how the internet works. Twitter is a website/service with a bad SNR therefore I don't use it.

The web as a whole has a bad SNR. Your comment shows that you do not understand how the internet works.

I use filters on the internet. I just filter more things than you do.

No, you read useless stuff, and then blame the medium rather than your own reading habits.

Unscientific survey says...

[Anonymous Coward]

..absolutely nothing you should care about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection

Signal to Noise

[Renegade Lisp]

My Twitter timeline is the most relevant information stream I have come across in all my online life. It really depends on who you are following (and what it is that you're interested in in the first place). I have never come across a tweet where somebody told what they had for breakfast (although I can think of circumstances in which I would find that information highly relevant).

Re:Signal to Noise

[John Hasler]

> It really depends on who you are following...

That depends on you being a follower.

Re:Signal to Noise

[snowraver1]

> (although I can think of circumstances in which I would find that information highly relevant).

Agreed. Sometimes when people twitter about the massive crap they are taking, I think that the content of their breakfast would *definately* be relevant.

Re:Signal to Noise

[acsinc]

this is twitter-worthy.

OR...OR...

[thelanranger]

It's because they're too short to provide any useful information. Also, it really bothers me that CNN does 1/2 of it's reporting by telling you what happened via twitter. d/c.

Social Self-outcasts

[blair1q]

If you want to go to a party, you have to accept being at a party.

Twitter is fine, if you follow people you find interesting, and if you are interesting yourself.

But if you just click on the Trending Topic links, then yes, you're going to discover that 90+% of the things people say from behind their cellphones is pointless blather. And that's the people, not the fake accounts that are using the TT to get undeserved attention. Those are half or more of any #1 topic.

Once they get how it works, engineers should love twitter. Not least because there's a finite probability that http://twitter.com/TheRealNimoy will respond to you. A thing like that can make your decade.

Re:Social Self-outcasts

[Rennt]

Not least because there's a finite probability that http://twitter.com/TheRealNimoy [twitter.com] will respond to you. A thing like that can make your decade.

Agreed, this is a big one. Twitter is a two-way medium. It allows you to casually exchange ideas with people you would never get a chance to meet in meatspace (William Gibson being one mine). If you think it's all about "breakfast tweeters" I have to wonder if you have a very good grasp of the role of technology in communication at all.

Re:Social Self-outcasts

[blair1q]

Ironically, I tweeted my breakfast this morning.

But it was meant ironically, and it worked in context.

Content versus medium

[LambdaWolf]

It seems a bit unfortunate that a medium can get so closely associated with the type of content that typically appears on it, and engineers in particular should probably be able to distinguish what's typical on the medium versus what it's actually capable of.

A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit. When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was an awesome idea—and I still think so, in the context of the problem it was trying to solve—a blog you could post to over SMS. A novel and useful idea. But now with Web-capable smartphones that can and do post arbitrarily long messages to Facebook and such, the character limit just serves to dictate that all posts be short, which in most cases also makes them vapid. The form now dictates the function and that's why Twitter should annoy engineers.

Re:Content versus medium

[vlm]

A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit

which in most cases also makes them vapid.

There is a large industry focused around making vapid two hour long movies.

The problem is not brevity.

Re:Content versus medium

[srussia]

A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit (...) the character limit just serves to dictate that all posts be short, which in most cases also makes them vapid.

Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno.. y si malo, no tan malo.

Re:Content versus medium

[LambdaWolf]

I never said that brevity was a necessary condition for vapidity, nor that it is usually a bad thing at all. But the format of Twitter (and Facebook as well) seems to encourage vapidity for average people (i.e., not professional writers) when they write about themselves. I like hearing from my friends about their lives, but I prefer longer letters and emails over spontaneous, one-sentence bursts of thought. Call me old-fashioned, I guess?

Only 76% Useless

[alvinrod]

That's actually a better signal to noise ratio than most forms of communication. Given that 90% of anything is crud, is is really surprising that Twitter isn't any different?

Re:Only 76% Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because a SF author said it, doesn't make it true.

Re:Only 76% Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

The 90% rule came at a time when there were barriers to becoming published. Now the barriers have disappeared now it should be 99.999% is crap, the other .0001% was written by me.

Re:Only 76% Useless

[91degrees]

Was going to post pretty much the same. A typical Slashdot article will have mostly knee jerk reactions, a couple of trolls with a fair number of responses to those trolls, a handful of tired memes and probably about 5% with some sort of analysis or counterpoint.

It's not like it takes long to filter out the crud. One insight every 583 characters isn't too bad for unedited raw data.

Re:Only 76% Useless

[lanner]

The quality of twitter posts are right there with Youtube replies. That's all that needs to be said.

like facebook et al

[Phantom of the Opera]

Engineers tend to think deeply with full focus, which has got to be the source of their troubles, and their gifts of design.

"MultiTasking" to me is a wrenching experience, where I have to refocus my mind onto something new.
It's not a pleasant experience.

Perhaps...

[tool462]

Perhaps MSM likes Twitter because it's the equivalent of 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters. There are so many people saying so many things, that they can likely find a quote that states whatever they want to state, but they then get to claim somebody else said it. Deniability is probably easier than fact checking.

Re:Perhaps...

[vlm]

Perhaps MSM likes Twitter because it's the equivalent of 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters. There are so many people saying so many things, that they can likely find a quote that states whatever they want to state, but they then get to claim somebody else said it.

I disagree. Look at the timeline for a story. Read about the shoutcast/VLC issue today on slashdot, it might hit mainstream in a week, then a day or two later someone I'm following tweets the "breaking news". Thanks dude. That's right up there with the guy who just noticed the Darth Vader is Lukes father, for those of us who don't know.

Well of course

[Monkeedude1212]

If you look at any of the content on the internet, you're going to get similar results. Even here on Slashdot, the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof, though we've luckily got a content rating system to keep most of them in check.

So you've got to objectively view Twitter in the same way you view any social media. For example, if a comment in slashdot is rated at -1, I'm usually not going to waste my time looking at it. Likewise, if there's hundreds of twitterers out there all tweeting, how do I know which ones to look at? Well, lucky for you, they've got their own ranking system. You can look for the people who are most followed, or you can search who you are interested in, and JUST follow them. It's surprisingly THAT easy.

I mean, how many of these engineers care for Youtube comments and 30 seconds Respond videos uploaded to youtube?

I could sit here all day and list things that engineers don't like about social sites, but that doesn't devalue the integrity of a social site.

Re:Well of course

[Anonymous Struct]

I guess the difference for me is that I use the internet to learn more about something I need to know about. If I want to know about current events, I go to a news site. If I want updates on the World Cup, they're really easy to find. Twitter is more like waiting for the world to tell me something I didn't know I needed to know. It's like how my wife shops - go to the store and look around until you find what it is you didn't know you wanted to buy, then buy it. To each his own, but Twitter kind of annoys the hell out of me personally.

Re:Well of course

[Monkeedude1212]

I think the main draw of twitter is that it pulls all the information to one central place.

I can go to Slashdot for my tech news but it'll be anywhere from an hour to a couple days behind. If I really want to be up to date on things, I find the relevant feeds on Twitter, and follow them. This way I don't have to wait for some game developer to tweet something, some user to read it, that user to post a story about it, some moderator to approve it, and then it making the front page.

So if I'm interested in 5 key game developers, situational updates with Oracle, and anything coming out of Microsoft, I've got it all in one place with an easy to read UI that also forces feeds to be concise.

It beats out the regular e-newsletter because I don't have to worry about sorting it away from my regular email inbox and they can't waste my time with 3 paragraphs of nothing to get to the juicy details.

But, then again, everyone is different, YMMV, and all that jazz.

Re:Well of course

[Just Some Guy]

Even here on Slashdot, the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof

Nokia? Netbook? Details, man!

Re:Well of course

[kindbud]

...our favourite N word ...

Neufchatel?

Re:Well of course

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that talking to people, who often provide you with information you did not request, annoys you as well.

Re:Well of course

[oodaloop]

Netcraft! They confirm it is in fact Netcraft.

Re:Well of course

[jewelises]

the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof

niggle?

Re:Well of course

[Darinbob]

Annoys me too. But really I think it's not Twitter itself that is annoying, but the users of Twitter (the twits). It exemplifies all the wrong stuff about the internet and amplifies all the personality traits that annoy me. Attention deficit society syndrome - needing to know what's happening now, and needing to respond instantly, and thinking that what was said or what you're saying back is in any way important. The short character length only encourages a sort of sound-byte culture, no time for in depth analysis, not even time for a fake wannabe analysis like a blog. This stuff isn't information really. And the people into this stuff seem to often have personalities that match.

Re:Well of course

[not-my-real-name]

our favourite N word

Netscape?

Re:Well of course

[Anonymous Coward]

depends. just yesterday, i got a -1 for pointing out that firefly sucked and the movie flopped too. if you're interested in a conversation, you load it in a tab and check out the -1 comments also.

Re:Well of course

[T Murphy]

Moderators on Slashdot will have a similar enough set of preferences that what they mod up and down is truly helpful for you to decide what to read. Twitter, on the other hand, will generally have the most popular tweets be completely unrelated to what you are interested in. Now, I've never used Twitter, but I expect there is some extent that you can better filter which most liked tweets might actually be of any use to you- overall though you probably still have a higher chance at missing useful tweets and reading useless ones than you do with posts on slashdot.

You also have to consider the self-selected populations: if a lot of engineers (me included) don't care for Twitter, but most stereotypical frat types do use Twitter, and you relate better to the engineer crowd, you will in general find Twitter far less insightful than slashdot.

Of course, Twitter can still have its use as a social networking tool- I'm just arguing about its use as an informational medium.

Old people?

[Facegarden]

I'd also like to know the age of these "engineers".

I'm a 25 year old engineer and I love twitter, because I like to know what my friends are doing.

Most people that don't like twitter just don't understand it, or are the kind of people that don't accept tech to begin with. Twitter really isn't supposed to be for "normal" people. At least not until techy becomes the norm, which is happening.
-taylor

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 33 and tech saavy ... yet have no interest in Twitter, as do many of my friends. 5 years from now, Twitter use will look like pimpin' your Myspace page.

Re:Old people?

[kindbud]

I'm a 25 year old engineer and I love twitter, because I like to know what my friends are doing.

That 3rd-to-last word - not sure I know what it means. Not sure it it's important.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 35 engineer and I don't like Twitter. If I want to know what my friends are doing, I could just pick up the phone or text them. So, it's not about age, actually, it's about how you do in social life. Technology is good, but it doesn't mean that you depend on the Net to alternate your social life. And why do I care if my friend had cereal for breakfast that taste like mucus?

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 25 year old engineer

Bwahahaha! Bags of experience then!

Twitter really isn't supposed to be for "normal" people. At least not until techy becomes the norm, which is happening.

Total BS. Almost all twitter is non-technical people these days, thanks to the celebrities moving in.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your field of engineering? What university did you receive your engineering degree from? Which professional organization(s) are you a member of?

Or are you just one of those network "engineers" or worse, web "engineers", who has no formal engineering training, and who performs nothing actually engineering-related as part of your job, yet still somehow feel compelled to call yourself an "engineer"?

This article is talking about real engineers, one of which you likely aren't.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

28 year old engineer and I'm not a peeping tom that needs to know what my friends are doing at all times when I'm not around.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 23 year old engineer and I think twitter is crap, because it's signal-to-noise ratio sucks.

Re:Old people?

[mcatrage]

As a 25 year old engineer, I don't see a point in ever using twitter.
Twitter is not new tech and I see it more for the new mtv generation and not the tech community.

Re:Old people?

[Lord Maud'Dib]

Software "Engineer" doesn't count.

Re:Old people?

[dward90]

Most people that don't like twitter just don't understand it, or are the kind of people that don't accept tech to begin with. Twitter really isn't supposed to be for "normal" people. At least not until techy becomes the norm, which is happening. -taylor

I disagree with this statement. I think a lot of tech savvy people understand twitter, but find that it simply adds no value to their lives. [Over-generalization warning] Most engineers are very pragmatic people, and twitter has very little functional value. It can have more subjective value if you want to keep up with your friends, or find interesting ideas or links. However, if you're looking for a method of communication that has tangible impact on your own functionality, twitter is not (and probably never will be) that platform.

Re:Old people?

[avandesande]

I am 39 years old and don't like twitter.

When I was a kid, sometimes I would go to my best friends house and sleep over a few days during summer break.
After hanging out a couple of days we would be ready to kill each other!

Part of what makes hanging out with friends pleasurable is the time not spent talking with them.
In this case 'catching up' actually means something.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me your engineering license please...

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 27 year old engineer, and I can't stand twitter. I've got mates and workmates in their early 20 and even teens who feel the same way. I also know people in their 30s-40s who love it and even use it in day-to-day activities at work. But for me, it just serves no purpose in my life. A disorganised and ad-hoc communication system doesn't really blow the wind up my skirt.

However, I do like Facebook and use it regularily. It's a nice tidy interface for photo albums and witty jibes at friends and colleagues.

Re:Old people?

[GumphMaster]

I am 43 and a tertiary qualified digital systems engineer and astronomer. I was 'techy' and using the nascent Internet before you were a twinkle in someone's eye. This is not about not understanding the technology, it is about being at different places in life and having different needs of information. My needs are mainly professional. There's no useful amount of engineering or astronomy information that can be imparted in 140 characters, so that channel is of limited use to me professionally. I also see the trend toward instant, fragmented communication in workplaces as having a negative impact on project management... it is very easy to lose important pieces of information in a morass of messages.

I understand the technology of SMS, Twitter etc. but I don't place much value on the social need to be incessantly connected with the inanity of everyone else's life (I have enough of that for myself). I understand that there are people of my decrepit vintage who do not understand the technology and also those who have a need to feel like they are valued through social interactions. I cannot pretend to speak for them all.

"Most people that don't like xxxxx just don't understand it" is a very typical viewpoint of the young, regardless of generation or century. It is also typical to believe that people with different priorities/ages/backgrounds are somehow inferior or qualify for instant dismissal as 'too old to understand'. In 2030 you might understand that you are, in fact, not special. You will also have seen more fads come and go than you can imagine: Twitter may well be one of them.

Re:Old people?

[Darinbob]

Twitter is "techy"?

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 35-year-old engineer, and I could care less what my friends are doing right now. If something worthwhile happens to them, they'll tell me! I don't give a shit if they just ran into someone they used to know in college, or just got a new dog, or their little girl lost her first tooth. If someone gets a new job, or moves cities, or gets married, I'd prefer to hear about it in person (in the flesh, on the phone, or even in email).

I don't think it has anything to do with being "techy" -- I've been "techy" for 25 years. I just don't have time in my life for everyone else's trivialities -- I've got enough of those on my own!

Re:Old people?

[xero314]

Software "Engineer" doesn't count.

Why the quotes, and why don't they count?

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

The title Engineer has traditionally meant a highly skilled person with certifications from profession bodies, many industries find IT peoples use of Engineer as offensive as there is no standards body to determine whether you are skilled enough to take that title.

Re:Old people?

[gullevek]

I am 32 and I like twitter. I am an engineer, but I do not have any engineer friends. At all. All my friends on twitter have some art connection so I always get news about shows, exhibitions, etc. None of them twitters "what they ate" or other useless things. It is more like RSS with a possibility to respond.

I know that 99.9% of twitter is useless distracting stuff. I just remove all people who just twitter boring stuff and that would just clutter my twitter client with useless messages.

Twitter is a tool, for some it is useful, for others there is no use at all.

Re:Old people?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 29 year-old engineer and I hate twitter. And facebook. The vast majority of things other people do, including my friends, doesn't interest me in the least, nor should it. I don't want them to know what I'm doing the vast majority of the time. For those things that are worth sharing, I tell them, and they tell me.

I know you'll argue that's exactly what they're doing by posting it on twitter. The difference is that we filter things based on who we tell it to. If they post their thoughts on the current college world series games, I don't give a shit, and reading it is wasting my time. If they post their thoughts on the world cup, I want to know about it. Since my friends know I like soccer and not baseball, they'll skip telling about baseball when they're talking to me.

More noise

[cjonslashdot]

The last thing I need is more noise. That's why I don't use twitter. Besides, 160 characters doesn't exactly lend itself to worthwhile discourse.

Re:More noise

[Facegarden]

The last thing I need is more noise. That's why I don't use twitter. Besides, 160 characters doesn't exactly lend itself to worthwhile discourse.

Haha, yet your comment is only 145 characters! Noise you say? Yeah, you have no need for that...
-Taylor

Re:More noise

[jav1231]

THAT was funny! And sort of dovetails into an observation I've made. Friends that say, "I just don't have time for that" and yet roll off countless hours playing WoW.

Re:More noise

[cjonslashdot]

Clever! Touche!

Re:More noise

[VisiX]

"I don't have time for that" is a nice way of saying "I choose not to spend my free time doing that because I find it pointless and boring". I often tell my friends that the reason I don't play MMOs is that I don't have time. Regardless of how much free time I have I will never find it acceptable to spend 6 hours a day playing a game that takes no meaningful level of skill.

Re:More noise

[selven]

Unfortunately, Twitter's limit is in fact 140 characters. Your 105-character post, however, fits in quite nicely.

Re:More noise

[tthomas48]

I find it actually leads to MORE succinct discourse. Minimalism leading towards conciseness.

Re:More noise

[DeadCatX2]

I agree wholeheartedly on having a major problem with the 160 character limitation, because I can think of several sentences that require more than 160 characters in order to construct a coherent statement...like this sentence right here.

Re:More noise

[Anonymous Coward]

Bazinga !

Re:More noise

[Kielistic]

His comment is a response to an article, well, a summary most likely. His post may be only 145 characters but is part of a larger discussion. If that was randomly posted to twitter then yes it would be nothing more than noise. But it was posted into the structure of a greater whole. It has relevance to the grouped information and opinions on this page.

Re:More noise

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter only allows 140...

Re:More noise

[Anonymous Coward]

He isn't saying that nothing can be expressed in 140, he is saying that limiting the number of characters really screws up the natural crap to Proust ratio.

Re:More noise

[SierraQ]

Nature shows us that the lower forms of life have an enforced limit in their ability to vocalize. Perhaps this explains the character limit?

Re:More noise

[identity0]

Actually, the limit on twitter is 140 characters, so what GP wrote would become

"The last thing I need is more noise. That's why I don't use twitter. Besides, 160 characters doesn't exactly lend itself to worthwhile disco"

Well, sign me right up!

It's simple jealousy in my case

[Man On Pink Corner]

Twitter is one those ideas that anyone could have thought up over a beer and implemented in a long weekend of hacking, and it could also have been done in 1995. Why didn't I get rich by doing just that? Because I'm apparently a fucking moron, who was too dumb to realize that apparently everybody else on the planet was dying for a one-to-many version of SMS with an artificial 140-character limitation.

I suspect that's why many developers dislike Twitter. It makes everyone who hears about it feel stupid and out of touch.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

But the value in the product is not in the tech, it's in the marketing. The fact is, without major support from other major media outlets, twitter never would have survived.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to do with jealousy. The reason this trivial system wasn't implemented a long time ago was down to the astronomical costs of millions of messages going through SMS gateways. Unless you have people with a lot of money to back up you, the telco's costs effectively killed online SMS systems. It certainly killed two systems I worked on. Small business cannot handle it scaling unless they get backing.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[men0s]

To me, Twitter just seems like a slower-paced version of IRC (which is just multiplayer Notepad, yeah, yeah..). However, IRC allows for more informational conversing than Twitter. For instance, take five lines of sentences in an IRC channel and convert that to Twitter posts. If a user was to post multiple messages in succession like that to another user, it would just seem like spam. Why not send an e-mail instead? Perhaps create a blog and write fully developed thoughts with no abbreviations or bit.ly links. Or use that new-fandangled telephone feature on your hand-held device to actually talk to them.

All in all, I guess we should be thankful that engineers probably helped develop these different modes of communication.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[Anonymous Coward]

Point being, it could have been implemented on the web 15 years ago. But nobody bothered.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[Tolkien]

Good laugh! The 140 character limitation isn't artificial however, I can't remember from where I read it, but there was an article somewhere talking specifically about this limitation and it said 140 characters was the most engineers could get for SMS messages because of technological limitations. 7-bit bytes was somewhere in the reasoning, something along the lines of:

Had they used 8-bit bytes, SMS would actually have a smaller limit, so they squeezed all the essential/printable characters that they could into the protocol using 7-bits.

Beyond that I can't remember though, something to do with cache/bus/bandwidth size maybe.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[GrumblyStuff]

If there's any reason to hate twitter, then it's for giving URL shorteners an audience. I want to see where the hell I'm going to, not a hash or redirection site.

Re:It's simple jealousy in my case

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter was kind of neat.

Back in the 90's when it was called ICQ.

Its a rehash of a very damm old idea.. That has died off several times since it was first created.

Some stupid shit just wont ever go away. Everything old is new again.

It's kind of telling that these kinds of things are driven by the 20 somethings who have not yet realized they are not special, important or intresting.

It'll come around again too. After seeing it 3 or 4 times it just gets annoying.

Engineers make the world go around . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

They don't give a shit about Lindsay Lohan SCRAM (although the technology is interesting). They don't really care who killed Michael Jackson. And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.

But they do seem to keep everything that civilization needs running . . .

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[Thelasko]

And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.

No, Jesse James used to build stuff. We know who he is.

Who was that woman he was married to?

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[vlm]

And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.

Jesse Jane? Oh we know her. Oh, you said Jesse James. My mistake.

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[IANAAC]

Engineers make the world go around . . .

If you asked a trucker, s/he'd tell you that it's actually truckers that make the world go 'round.

It's all about perception from where you're sitting.

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't give a shit about Lindsay Lohan SCRAM (although the technology is interesting). They don't really care who killed Michael Jackson. And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.

But they do seem to keep everything that civilization needs running . . .

First thought:
Uhh.. was he not? Such a familiar name, how could I have misplaced its meaning?

After googling: :o

After realizing that there are people who live in quite a different world in which the meaning is that much different: :O

You after reading the above and realizing there are actually people who communicate via emoticons:
d:D_\o_|

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[shish]

Engineers make the world go around . . .

If you asked a trucker, s/he'd tell you that it's actually truckers that make the world go 'round.

Given Newton's third law of motion, and the respective size of a truck compared to an engineer, I suspect that they do contribute a larger effect upon the earth's rotational velocity...

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all the engineers cruise around on pimped out rides and fancy motorcycles.
I'm a pretty regions watcher of all the Discovery related channels; but I avoid crap like that.
And yes I am an engineer.

Re:Engineers make the world go around . . .

[The_mad_linguist]

Wasn't he that guy from pokemon?

Nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds don't give a rat's ass about inane crap generated by the masses?! Go figure

as an engineer

[nimbius]

i feel i speak for the community when i say, I will refuse to support twitter until they
support curl on atari. i may, may consider lynx in the future.

it's like micro-blogs

[Tom]

By now, we should be familiar with the issue at hand.

It happened when people started making "personal webpages". Then came blogs. Then Facebook et al. Now Twitter.

Basically, most of the world lives in the misguided assumption that at least a tiny fraction of the rest of the world is interested in them. Statistically speaking, that's not true. But we have this old tribal desire to "express ourselves", to communicate with the rest of the tribe.

There's a few billion people on the Internet today. How many of them may even theoretically care about your dog, your house, your opinion of last nights local television program, or, in fact, you? A high mark of a thousand, for most of us. 10,000 at most for everyone who's not at least a minor celebrity. Even those 10k are less than 0.0005% of the Internet population. ppm is a better measure than percent here. It's a single-digit ppm. For the majority of us, not even 1 ppm.

Or, in short, nobody(*) fucking cares. Not what the name of your dog is and not what you think about soccer.

Twitter is Geocities, only shorter, and with even less content.

(*) where "nobody" is equal, but not identical, to zero, for all practical purposes.

Re:it's like micro-blogs

[greyhueofdoubt]

You sound very bitter.

Maybe you misunderstand why most people use facebook. It is not to glorify themselves to a global internet audience; if that were the case, facebook wouldn't have 'friends' or privacy settings. Facebook for global consumption would basically just be myspace or geocities. Which it clearly is not.

My conversations on facebook are private among my friends. My pictures that- according to people like you- I apparently take only to make myself more interesting to the world at large are in fact quite private, with access limited to only my friends.

Here's an analogy to your complaint: You are walking down the street and see a party happening in a fenced-off yard. You angrily walk up to the gate and yell, "No one gives a damn about your party! No one cares about what you have to say! You'll die alone!"

The party guests, puzzled, returned to their friendly conversations while you stomp off, alone and angry.

I think that when you discuss 'insignificance', you might be projecting a little bit. That, or you don't have any friends on FB or twitter that are interesting or entertaining. Which is really just kind of sad for you.

What's especially ironic is that your post- which focused on the infinitesimal fraction of the world that cares what you think- was posted on a public forum, _modded up_, and then someone who you've probably never met (me) took the time to write a response.

-b

Re:it's like micro-blogs

[Internalist]

Or, in short, nobody(*) fucking cares. Not what the name of your dog is and not what you think about soccer.
Twitter is Geocities, only shorter, and with even less content.
(*) where "nobody" is equal, but not identical, to zero, for all practical purposes.

I think what you're shooting for is a set of measure zero, although IANAM.
 

Re:it's like micro-blogs

[Tom]

True and false.

You are right in some assumptions, but not in the projection. All these social things are "open" by default. You have to explicitly lock down your profile. It's not a garden party, it's a street party. And it's not even a party, because people do all kinds of stuff. It's a busy main street - some people are shopping, some are playing music, some are enjoying an ice cream, and so on. And Twitter users are the crazy street preachers. :-)

There is a difference to forums. This is where we go for specific topics that we want to discuss with likeminded people. Especially on /. - I mean, nobody here RTFA, we're all here for the comments, are we not?

That is more like the local chess club - people of similar interests meeting to pursue their similar interests.

Re:it's like micro-blogs

[garyebickford]

Following the path of decreasing message length, I think I'll start a new service - call it TW or something. Maximum length will be one, maybe two words plus a bit of punctuation and a list of predefined symbols (emoticons etc.)

"Whew! Missed!"
    "Missed What?"
"A car"
    "Missed you?"
    "Wow cool"
    "Dude!"
    "Where?"
"Missed it"
    "With yours?"
"Yup :)" ... etc.

It could actually get interesting, trying to communicate any actual content.

The next step would be to limit messages to two characters...

Spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam averages 78% of all e-mail sent. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1933796,00.html

Article loaded via Twitter

[Mean Variance]

I'm going through the stages of Twitter: it's stupid, it's funny, it's useful, it's too much information. This Slashdot page was loaded via a Twitter link. The thing is, I do get useful nuggets of information from Twitter: breaking news, tech links, sports scores. And while most of the time I don't care where you are are what you're doing, once in awhile I have hooked up with folks having a beer who posted on Twitter.

Until it gets easier to parse the feeds (sorry, lists just aren't working for me), I've had to get past that feeling that I'm missing out on something if I don't check the feed, or I go through a long history. So at this point I've learned to let missed items just go and move on with my life.

-- MV, a software engineer

Compare the same exchange with other media

[staeiou]

An avid football fan calls their equally fanatic friend after their team scores the winning goal and yells, "GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!" The friend yells the same thing back, everyone is excited, and both they shout about how much they love their country. After no more than fifteen seconds of conversation, they both hang up.

Sure, some people might not be able to understand why these two people are so football crazy, but everyone can identify that something rich and emotional just happened. But when the exact same thing happens on twitter, it gets denounced it as 'useless observation.' Why?

Re:Compare the same exchange with other media

[gullevek]

Because suddenly all the nerdy geeky people in the basements realize they have 0 life and no friends. So they do what they can do best. Troll.

I thought it was just me...

[gregrah]

I was actually starting to worry that maybe I'm not keeping up with the times by not participating in Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and the like...

What it really comes down to I think is that most engineers have moved onto much more interesting uses for computers than sending around 160 character text messages to all of our "friends" (something that we were able to do a long time ago).

That being said, I would very much like to capitalize on the market for these apps - but it's not easy to think up ideas for products that I would never personally want to use...

what does it matter?

[theheadlessrabbit]

what does it matter if only 16%, or 1.6%, or even 0.16% of all posts are any good?

The power of aggregates, filters, and search engines is that it doesn't matter what the signal to noise ratio is, you can quite easily cut through it all and find more of what you want.

Its a ratio thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The more intelligent one is, the less one Twitters.

Iranian Election Unrest

[ApharmdB]

I used to think Twitter was useless for the same reason. (I am an engineer.) But the Green Movement put it to such good use during the Iranian election unrest that it makes me willing to put up with all of the insipid news stories (effectively retweets) about what stupid people have put on Twitter.

Re:Iranian Election Unrest

[Quirkz]

Seconded. I thought Twitter was put to very good use during an important time of political unrest, and was glad people had it as an option.

Tweets are supposed to matter?

[ndogg]

No one told me tweets are supposed to matter. Since when are they supposed to be important?

I just like to tweet silly, fleeting thoughts.

80-20

[srussia]

Pareto strikes again!

Discarded RTs?

[egandalf]

I find it odd that the Retweets (RTs) are/were discarded with the spam in these statistics. RTs help the information spread, which is useful indeed. How many of those 1,000 actively monitor or follow any official World Cup reporting stream? Certainly not all. A RT may not be an original post, but it still can have value in the dissemination of data.

50M tweets? That is nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

50M tweets? That is nothing. How many phone calls do you think happened during the same period of time? How many conversations? Aren't those "social network tools" too?

I got a twitter account 2 weeks ago and quickly posted something about my belly button lint to be certain I'd fit in. Haven't bothered to go back there. Even the good posts aren't as good as RSS feeds.

I simply do not see the point of twitter. Clearly, I'm an engineer.

And only 285 engineers responded to the poll? How many were invited to the poll, 285,000? I'd say that is a more telling statistic.

Ok, see how little you cared about my writing here? Compared to most tweets that I've seen - I'm a genius and I didn't say anything useful here either.

My Fap Fu is better than you!

[rts008]

Get a grip on yourself, CCarrot...
You're gonna loose[sic] it if you aren't careful!!

Re:My Fap Fu is better than you!

[CCarrot]

Careful is as careful does...so I think I'll just keep my gi on, thanks!

cc

Same reason no facebook

[bobjr94]

For the most part I dont care what someone I hardly talk to is making for dinner, when they are going to take a shower or how the drive though got their order wrong.

robbIE goes full censorship full time

[Anonymous Coward]

what a surprise? what a fauxking suckup s(t)ock puppet you've become? we'd have sympathy but we don't because you sould out & we did not. gooed luck with all that. reminds us of the also failed gnu online dating debacle, that was really funny.

never a better time for some of us to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?

greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.

"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)

"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--

"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson

no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences for all.

consult with/trust in your creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." )one does not need to agree whois in charge to grasp the notion that there may be some assistance available to us(

boeing, boeing, gone.

I'm an Engineer and I Like Twitter

[juancnuno]

I'm an engineer and I like Twitter

Or, even people who aren't friends

[weston]

Twitter isn't just the status update part of Facebook. It's not a symmetric social media. You can follow someone who doesn't follow you, and vice versa. So you're not limited to your friends.

Some people use that to follow celebrities, but you can use it to follow John Resig or Guido Van Rossum. Or if you feel weird following geek celebrities, someone like CS professor Phil Windley.

Or if you still don't like Twitter, follow Linus, who feels the same way about Twitter that you do. ;)

Flood the zone?

[Myopic]

What does it mean for people to literally flood the zone?

Re:Flood the zone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hack the Gibson!

Literally.

Self Limiting

[decipher_saint]

I like Twitter because it's an easy way for me and my developer friends to share transient tidbits like new tools, quick questions and interesting links.

I don't follow people who use it as a journal and I don't really concern myself with those who follow me.

I don't see why more IT people use it this way. It beats sending e-mail or trying to maintain contacts via multiple IM networks (some of which are blocked by various employers).

Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[AnonymousClown]

"I don't really care what you had for breakfast,.."

Is really a quick way of saying that you don't want to bombarded by trivial details, irrelevant information or even relevant information. Just give me everything all at once and edit out the crap.

I don't care how interesting someone may be, getting updates about every little thing would be annoying; regardless of how relevant it may be.

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[Attila Dimedici]

I would put it this way, twits generally don't become engineers.

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[BitZtream]

I think that comment will be my sig from now on.

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[antdude]

I am picking my nose and reading /. right now. :)

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[fermion]

The thing is that twitter is not aural communication. It is written. Therefore it is pretty easy to ignore what you don't want to see. If you don't want to use it, don't.

What I find most interesting of this survey is the arrogance. The researchers a priori determine what is useful and relevant based on what they think is useful and relevant. I think that facebook is a waste of electrons, but I don't thing it should or is going to go away. I think the only real game and the only real athletes are ftbol players, but I am not going to do a survey and cite that 90% of professional athletes are drug addicted posers. I would say that the least interesting news of the day are sports scores, not because I am not interested in who won, but as technical type I am more interested in process than outcome.

I would say that we have been brainwashed by carefully packaged media mongrels(sic) into beleiving that they only news is what they say is news, and what the common person has to say is meaningless unless filtered through their proprietary channels.

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[Attila Dimedici]

Feel free. Just remember, twits tweet on Twitter.

Re:Quick way of saying I don't want to be ...

[Aceticon]

More generically:
- A film played in real-time (i.e. 1h film playing = 1h of time in what is being filmed) about pretty much anybody in the world would be extraordinarilly boring for almost anybody else.
- A tweets is equivalent to a small text description of an instant in such a film.

Useful

[fm6]

Anybody who thinks that the World Cup (or any other sports event) has anything to do with "useful" needs to get out more. I'm not even a sports fan, and even I know that people who follow sports do so for entertainment, excitement, and camaraderie. In that context, a tweet that says "GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL #POR Portugal I LOVE MY COUNTRY, I LOVE MY TEAM ♥ OMG, OMG OMG PORTUGAAAAAAAAAL" is as "useful" as anything else that comes out of game.

If you want to assess the relevance of twittering to engineers, look at tweets that have something to do with engineering. Of which there are quite a few.

Re:Useful

[JayJay.br]

I'm not even a sports fan, and even I know that people who follow sports do so for entertainment, excitement, and camaraderie.

Right on. I'm an engineer, and I don't use Twitter, but trying to make sense of things that are purely emotional is bullshit.

On a lighter note, that comment of yours has to be the most Sheldon-Cooper-esque comment on Slashdot right now.

Re:Useful

[fm6]

Not being a big fan of TV sitcoms, I had to google that. Sheldon Cooper is extremely geeky, right? So yeah, my comments are probably pretty Cooperesue, but it's hard to see how they could be more so than 90% of Slashdot comments.

Twitter is garbage.

[kuzb]

Why do people feel they need this trash? It is not even useful.

The code for the entire app could be coded in...

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

probably about 2 days by referencing www.w3schools.com

As A Young Engineer Myself...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

To be productive when doing design you need long periods of uninterrupted thought. Twitter by its nature is intrusive and interruptive.

Yes

I don’t need tweets popping up with trivial interruptions like ‘Walking the dog’ or ‘Baking cookies, and I’m out of vanilla extract!’ I have actual, real work to do.

Yes.

I think what turns engineers off is how pretentious Twitter seems.

A Thousand Times Yes!

Twitter makes the implicit assumption, by its very nature, that I care about all the little details of the lives of those that I chose to subscribe to. Frankly, I don't. Twitterers assume, for fuck only knows what reason, that everyone wants to know what it is they have to say, or what it is they are doing. Well guess what, engineers don't. Engineers spend their lives solving problems. We have to look at difficult situations and come up with fixes through limited resources. We have all had our best ideas shot full of holes by colleagues. We have seen our best designs shot down in flames by managers that don't have a friggin' clue. We, the engineers, learn very early in life what the word humility means. We understand that nobody cares what we have to say, what we are doing, or what our feelings are unless those things, by whatever device, provide some kind of practical solution.

Why do engineers hate Twitter? It's simple: Twitter provides fuel to the notion that you and your thoughts/ideas/actions matter. Engineers are forged from a cynical flame that tells us ours don't. So in our opinion, neither do yours.

film at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

water still wet
space still cold and empty
engineers don't get the point of being social.

something is news here?

Yeah it's a toy.

[tthomas48]

So let's see in the past week via Twitter I received notes live minutes from the Austin City Council, received crime and real estate stats for my zip code, registered my concerns about regional mobility with our Capital Metro, and notified my extended family of several cute things the kids said. That's just stuff off the top of my head.

Twitter's a really useful tool. Much like the web, if all you're getting is what someone ate for breakfast, you're doing it wrong.

At the same time, I'm completely ok with the majority engineers not "getting" social networking technologies. It makes it easier for me to find work.

Re:Yeah it's a toy.

[Choad Namath]

and notified my extended family of several cute things the kids said.

I'm pretty sure that falls into the "what I had for breakfast" category...

Re:Yeah it's a toy.

[tthomas48]

It only falls into the "what I had for breakfast" category if no one who is following me is interested in what my daughters are doing. I happen to know that all of my family members who follow me do so explicitly for this type of post. Therefore even if it's banal, it's exactly the type of banality my audience is looking for.

"Things you are not interested in" != "Things no one is interested in".

Re:Yeah it's a toy.

[Imazalil]

Curmudgeon reply. Apologies.

I hope that one day I invent something as great as this, and I'll remove any sort of character limit. I think I will call it 'email'.

For bonus points, I won't keep this all out for the world to see and clutter search results.

Re:Yeah it's a toy.

[tthomas48]

Do you think twitter users don't use email? Or RSS feeds? Or the web? Or read books?

Better than Average!

[rueger]

Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news

In a related story, out of 1000 books in the local book-mega-store, only 16% were worth reading, and out of 1000 TV programs only 16% were worth watching.

Frankly I would have thought that Sturgeon's Law applied to Twitter as well.

What's this box for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no! 15% of engineers like to twit! How long before it isn't safe to cross bridges?

Twitter users pretentious?

[jarrodlikesmath]

From TFA:

“I think what turns engineers off is how pretentious Twitter seems,”

I can't speak for everyone, but I use Twitter in a similar way I'd use an RSS reader, so most of my timeline is companies or organizations. I have some friends on there, but none of them ever seem pretentious to be on there.

However, this article sounded very pretentious. Again, TFA:

“It’s a time issue,” agrees BSEE Tim Schneider, a senior staff applications engineer. “Engineers generally don’t have a lot of it. Our work is very focused and requires a lot of brainpower to get the job done.”


disclaimer - I got to this article via a Slashdot tweet, and I am an engineer :)

Engineers' conversations are surely scintillating

[jfruhlinger]

Do you demand that every interaction you have with a fellow human being convey useful new information of some kind? Much of what goes on Twitter is either conversation between friends who know each other (i.e., what someone is doing on vacation may not be interesting to you, but might be interesting to their friends and family) or a sort of shared conversation about current events. In the World Cut example, the information about the sporting event might not be "useful" in the sense of replacing sports reporting, but is the online equivalent of people sitting at a bar watching a game saying "Oh, did you see that?"

#IEEE

[rueger]

Just sayin'... http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23IEEE

how about...

[the_hellspawn]

tweeter is worthless piece of garbage. only meaningful to tweens following their celebs. Moving on...

Isn't that just the internet?

[e2d2]

In their make believe land is all email is on subject, new and refreshing with a clean scent? What about web pages, are all of those deemed useful by "the analysis nozzle"? What about RSS feeds? Podcasts?

Like this post for instance. Maybe someone will read it, maybe not. Am I curing cancer over here by posting on slashdot? No. It's called useless conversation and sometimes great ideas emerge from it. But most of the time it just helps us feel human. If you think that's a bad thing, then I respectfully disagree.

In the Great Flood of information

[gringofrijolero]

What kind of ark do you build?

Seriously?

[Layth]

Twitter is SOCIAL, Engineers are ANTI-SOCIAL, and you wonder why the two aren't a match made in heaven?
Twitter lacks any sort of competitive appeal, sex appeal, or intellectual appeal.

It is used to disseminate socially relevant knowledge, and humor.
Sports. Celebrity Gossip. One-Liners.

These are the cornerstones of twitter.
Having said that, if you want the truly great tweets, you need a reliable third party to sift through the junk and gather them for you.

Unfortunately this process has become increasingly inefficient with the demise of Conan's Late Night Twitter Tracker.

Re:Seriously?

[Dogbertius]

Twitter is SOCIAL, Engineers are ANTI-SOCIAL, and you wonder why the two aren't a match made in heaven? Twitter lacks any sort of competitive appeal, sex appeal, or intellectual appeal.

It is used to disseminate socially relevant knowledge, and humor. Sports. Celebrity Gossip. One-Liners.

These are the cornerstones of twitter. Having said that, if you want the truly great tweets, you need a reliable third party to sift through the junk and gather them for you.

Unfortunately this process has become increasingly inefficient with the demise of Conan's Late Night Twitter Tracker.

Engineers being anti-social is a misguided stereotype at best. Those of us in intermediate to senior roles as professional engineers have to be the social and business-oriented type, in addition to having a few degrees and technical expertise.

I avoid Twitter as the majority of tweets that come my way, from people of all walks of life, are typically nothing more than inane rants and shameless self promotion. As for why I don't use twitter to advertise my every waking moment ala "The Trueman Show", as an engineer, I'm held to considerably higher standards than just about any other member of society in general. This applies both in my spare time and while taking part in my professional endeavors. A single complaint or gripe is easily misunderstood by the average schmuck who then manages to get the entire "issue" blown completely out of proportion and flung around all over the internet. Professionals should, and, for the most part, do know better than to waste their time on this.

So, aside of the majority of tweets being completely banal, yet still having the potential to cause severe career setbacks, it's also completely useless to me. I routinely catch up with my close friends in-person while I travel or on weekends, as opposed to using twitter to keep on top of day-to-day events.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're saying is that twitter is a popular means of conveying units of social information. I believe some people refer to these units as memes. I know another place that fulfills the same purpose but is augmented by multimedia and a default option of anonymity.

Re:Seriously?

[fabs64]

Twitter is used to distribute 160 characters at a time, what those characters represent is up to the grey matter.

I pretty much only follow software engineers; Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Robert Martin, Jeremy Miller, Michael Feathers, Eric Evans. I'd hardy call what these people say "socially relevant" but it is relevant to *me*. As well as being interesting. ... Well, mostly interesting, uncle bob's political tweet's aren't very interesting but they're very easy to skim ;-)

Re:Seriously?

[pthreadunixman]

You've got antisocial and asocial mixed up. They're not the same thing.

Re:Seriously?

[TheCrazyFinn]

Engineers are actually pretty damned social. But there's no beer on Twitter.

Re:Seriously?

[Stormie]

Twitter is SOCIAL, Engineers are ANTI-SOCIAL

Twitter is not social. Twitter is a medium explicitly designed for people who don't give a shit whether or not anyone is interested in the crap they're saying, because they're going to say it anyway. That's not social.

Re:Seriously?

[Splintax]

as an engineer, I'm held to considerably higher standards than just about any other member of society in general. This applies both in my spare time and while taking part in my professional endeavors. A single complaint or gripe is easily misunderstood by the average schmuck who then manages to get the entire "issue" blown completely out of proportion and flung around all over the internet.

You sound pretty obnoxious. I don't think the "average schmuck" would treat an engineer any differently to any other professional (doctor, lawyer, accountant...) -- especially given that engineers have significantly less contact with the general public than other professions.

Re:Seriously?

[Dogbertius]

I think there's a bit of confusion here. I'm not referring to a layperson or "average Joe" as a schmuck, but rather the pseudo internet paparazzi type that take one tiny quote, and spam it everywhere, completely out of context. Kinda like the people who take screen caps of people's facebook profiles and then advertise them on Digg.

Also, other posters have drawn attention to this point: in most jobs, provided you don't insult your boss or the company, if you post something about a rough day at the office, it usually is of no consequence. If you're in a senior role and you do the same, a seemingly innocuous statement is interpreted a dozen different ways, usually for the worst.

World what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this World Cup thing anyway? Is it anything like that youtube video with the 2 girls?

[Sent by the Twitter->Slashdot realtime feed]

Dot-plan?

[wrencherd]

It's like an SMS message, but not necessarily directed at a particular person. It's like an IM status, but not tied to IM.

It actually reminds me the most of the old unix "plan" file which popped up when users were "fingered".

But this plan is constantly being re-edited over and over and over and over and over . . . you get the idea.

Re:Dot-plan?

[ZzzzSleep]

Ah, .plan files. I remember back in uni where people would create 10,000 line plan files to surprise anyone that "fingered" them.

Re:Dot-plan?

[styrotech]

It actually reminds me the most of the old unix "plan" file which popped up when users were "fingered".

That would be this instead...

http://hueniverse.com/webfinger/

Now you know web 2.0 really has come full circle :)

Re:Dot-plan?

[Chris Mattern]

That would be this instead...

http://hueniverse.com/webfinger/

I swear, I read that and the brass section in the back of my head immediately started up:

WebFINGER!! (Dah DAAAH daah!)
He's the man, the man with the browser touch...

Re:Dot-plan?

[PastaLover]

ln -s /boot/vmlinuz ~/.plan

98% said "It's teh gayzorz"

[SlappyBastard]

EOM

Easy to Search, Summarize, & Aggregate...

[weston]

But somehow the media has bought into Twitter as some kind of technological marvel. "ZOMG! People are tweeting about the World Cup! Let's put those tweets on our show, so we can pretend to be technologically savvy and relevant!"'

I think there's more too it than a desperate attempt to appear relevant -- the features of Twitter tend to fall in a certain sweet spot of interest for traditional broadcasters. For one thing, tweets are just about the right length for soundbite-driven short-cycle media. For another, it's really easy to search and in theory at least get a feel for zeitgeist by looking at trending topics in aggregate -- and profit-driven broadcast media is all about "eyeballs," so they're naturally interested in what people are (in theory) interested in.

Re:Easy to Search, Summarize, & Aggregate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but in the rare occasion I do tune into some sort of news, I want to hear REAL news, not what fluffyfanboi2002 had to say about a topic. If I want that shit, I'll go join twitter myself.

Re:Easy to Search, Summarize, & Aggregate...

[Whatanut]

I think today's xkcd is fairly relevant...

http://www.xkcd.org/756/

hmmm

[Hognoxious]

Apparently subsistence farmers and nomadic goat herders like it even less.

Re:hmmm

[vgbndkng]

Nomadic Goat Herder here. I don't bother tweeting. Well, unless I'm covered in warm butter with the soothing sounds of Richard Marx floating through my personal space, but that's for neither here nor there.

I use twitter because ...

[n5yat]

I follow primarily websites that provide news, such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNet, PBS, IBM, Time, New Scientist, Scientific American. I also follow a few people that I find interesting and informative. Twitter is the internet equivalent of the crawler across the bottom of a TV newscast or sportscast, except it's hyperlinked and I can click to get details. P.S. I qualify for senior discounts...

twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

It just seems like a huge waste of time to me. I spend enough time keeping up with the news already.

"I don't care what you had for breakfast" sums it up pretty well.

I already get enough work-related alert messages.

[Richard Steiner]

Why add messages I care even less about to the mix? :-)

Okay, some work messages I do care about, since they mean I actually have to take some action, but I would rather keep my phone free from non-work-related traffic.

The only person whose text messages really interest me is my wife. She made me say that, too. :-)

it could be worse

[ILuvRamen]

At least nobody figured out how to tweet that obnoxious African buzzing horn thing

Re:it could be worse

[YooHoo2U2]

Uhhhh.....I wouldn't be so sure about that: http://twitter.com/the_vuvuzela/

Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

...because they're not teenage girls?

I get interesting content daily

[weston]

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.

Then you're not trying. It's that simple.

I'm not even following 20 people and I see interesting technical stuff come through on average at least once a day. Sometimes a lot of interesting stuff. For instance, recently I found out about pandoc via Twitter. Maybe you already knew about it. Maybe I would have found out soon about it anyway. Maybe not.

(Facebook's different -- it really is a near-pure "social" media, unlike Twitter, which is really more of a massively distributed broadcast medium than it is social per se. What is see there is sometimes "interesting" from an intellectual or professional or creative standpoint, but most of the time it's just bog standard personal news which isn't particularly special. Good for keeping track of people you care about.)

Re:I get interesting content daily

[icebraining]

For instance, recently I found out about pandoc

Interesting tool, thanks.

You could make the same arguments...

[nilbog]

You could make the same arguments about the printing press, the internet, or speech in general. With any medium open to everyone you're going to have 10-20% quality stuff and 80-90% garbage. That doesn't change the fact that Twitter has given a face to faceless corporations, given us insight into the mind of geniuses, and even helped fuel a revolution in Iran.

Sifting through the cruft might be the next big challenge for twitter, but let's not throw it away because there is so much noise on there. That's like throwing away speech because it could be used to tell you about how I'm taking a dump.

Re:You could make the same arguments...

[glwtta]

and even helped fuel a revolution in Iran.

So, it seems a lot of people consider the whole Iran thing to be Twitter's finest hour. I think the case is overstated somewhat.

Twitter helped get information out of Iran, and contributed to the protests being widely publicized around the world, but the only evidence for it being used by the protesters themselves seems to be "a) Twitter is awesome and b) wouldn't it be awesome if it was used by the Iranian protesters? Let's assume it was." The Wikipedia page about the incident is a good example of this attitude: claiming things like "Twitter in particular has been a key central gathering site during the protests." based solely on wishful thinking and without any actual evidence.

The English-language side of it was kind of a mixed bag, too. It was certainly gripping reading the first-hand accounts (along with the photos and videos), and news of any actual developments would tend to show up on Twitter first, but those reports would usually be either confirmed or discredited by professional news organizations (I know, the evil, and totally lame professional news organizations) within a few hours, at about a 50/50 rate. So while it helped provide an unprecedented level of exposure, it's naive to think that Twitter alone allowed anyone to form a credible picture of what was going on.

Oh yeah, and there wasn't an actual revolution. That seems kind of an important distinction.

Re:You could make the same arguments...

[Xyrus]

...That's like throwing away speech because it could be used to tell you about how I'm taking a dump.

I believe that's known as Too Much Information.

Besides, that would never be a tweet. First of all, you know how to spell. Second, you have some basic understanding of grammar. And third, you didn't add something like "I hope it looks like Miley Cyrus!".

Re:You could make the same arguments...

[nilbog]

"So while it helped provide an unprecedented level of exposure, it's naive to think that Twitter alone allowed anyone to form a credible picture of what was going on. "

Which is why I used the word "helped" and I was careful to say it that way. Whether it helped more inside Iran by providing a communications platform for Iranians or outside by providing increased attention to the world, I don't know.

"(I know, the evil, and totally lame professional news organizations)"

I don't know if you're assuming my attitude towards professional news organizations or assuming everyone else's. My point was only that twitter is the latest in a never ending evolution in communication and media. I couldn't very well applaud communications evolution while simultaneously hating previous developments like our current news networks.

Re:You could make the same arguments...

[glwtta]

Which is why I used the word "helped" and I was careful to say it that way. Whether it helped more inside Iran by providing a communications platform for Iranians or outside by providing increased attention to the world, I don't know.

I took "helped fuel" as actually helping the protests themselves, not just reporting on them; perhaps in this case that was overly pedantic, but many Twitter enthusiasts do seem to show a certain lack of skepticism in that area.

I don't know if you're assuming my attitude towards professional news organizations or assuming everyone else's.

The latter. Well, not everyone's, just the aforementioned group.

My point was only that twitter is the latest in a never ending evolution in communication and media. I couldn't very well applaud communications evolution while simultaneously hating previous developments like our current news networks.

Fair enough.

Twitter is for the not so tech savvy.

[TheNarrator]

FYI, cell phone ringtones were a multi-hundred million dollar industry. Farmville sells millions worth of virtual manure. Some technology is for people who don't have a nuanced or particularly intellectual view of the world and just want to yell "OMG! Ponies!" all day. Yes my nerdly friends, there are lots and lots and lots of people like this, that you haven't had the pleasure of meeting nor would you find them particularly interesting if you did. I remember hanging out with "The Cool Kids" in high school for a bit, just to see what it was like. I found them exceptionally boring. There are billions of em though' and there's plenty of money in letting them yell "OMG! Ponies!" to all their friends.

I used to think Twitter was worthless

[macemoneta]

But after observing it for a while, I've come to some conclusions as well.

Watching an individual tweeting is like watching a neuron firing; it doesn't appear to be doing anything useful. Stand back a little, and you can see that neurons (or those that tweet) are parts of functional groups. Step back further and you have a conscious brain.

This is the way I started to look at Twitter, and the analogy seems to work. The first place you find out about major events now? Twitter. First some tweets ("Hey, did anyone near xxx feel something?"). Then comes the higher level analysis ("Did the paint factory explode? No, it was an earthquake!"). Then comes the sensory input (twipics, twitvids). Then the emotional response ("OMG, so many people injured!").

If you look at Twitter this way, it's almost like looking into the hive-mind. It's very interesting to observe, whether you participate or not. There are multiple search and aggregation engines, though they can lag realtime significantly during major events. It's better to have 'probes' (follows) into various areas of interest.

Re:I used to think Twitter was worthless

[greyhueofdoubt]

Your example of tweeting an earthquake immediately brought to mind this xkcd:

http://www.xkcd.com/723/

Re:I used to think Twitter was worthless

[lennier]

So Twitter is basically the All Thing from Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels?

Re:I used to think Twitter was worthless

[Xyrus]

Watching an individual tweeting is like watching a neuron firing; it doesn't appear to be doing anything useful.

Yup, that about sums it up. Twitter: Proof that people have a neuron that fires.

Re:I used to think Twitter was worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if your analogy was valid, with which I won't argue either way, do you think that your understanding of [insert paradigmatic "great" idea here] would be enhanced by a detailed account of the neural firing of the brain that produced such idea?

Even if it was enhanced, against which I would certainly argue, would that somehow allow you to control your own firing so that you could further develop the idea?

There's a reason why levels of abstraction matter. Twitter might be enough to contain "E = m * c^2", but it's hopeless in trying to convey why that's relevant --i.e., it isn't rich enough to support the construction of new, meaningful levels of abstraction. Absent that, it's condemned to decay to, essentially "OMG OMG OMG!!!" ... Do you really think it's worth analyzing the neuron firing pattern of an endless succession of "OMGs" ??

Twitter published good software

[Anonymous Coward]

As short as they may be, almost all messages will be useless to me. But the Twitter Engineering page is quite a good read about Twitter's actual engineering problems and approaches to solutions. That's the type of thing which I think many engineers will like to read.

how about that..

[playcat]

most of earth's population is stupid and/or unintelligent.
what can someone expect from site that gathers collective 'thoughts' from large amount of people?
i guess that answer would be 'something like commenting system on slashdot' ;)
no, really... this kind of matter isn't worth the time to post... i just wanted to make me a opportunity to say whoever moderates this comment is an ass :)
live long and prosper!

Just like...

[MacGyver2210]

"Just like a telephone..."

I have a telephone. I don't need something 'just like' it.

85% of everybody aren't Twats.

[Mike Buddha]

I don't have any hard evidence, but I'm pretty sure at least 85% of everybody don't use Twitter, probably more. Of those people, at least half don't use it because the things people say on it are worthless.

Statistical Breakdown

[jcwayne]

Trimmed down from TFS:

16% legitimate news
7.6% 'legitimate conversation'
6% spam
24% self-promotion
17% [re-published content]
29% useless observation

Tell me again how twitter is so different from the mainstream media.

Marketing outlet

[hobb0001]

I think mainstream media has an irrational exuberance over twitter because it sees it as a cheap and effective marketing channel. It's like the mid-90's where having a .com web page was seen as hip and got you some extra attention. Likewise, the twitter subscribers will eventually become numb and bored with the novelty, and corporate tweets will become nothing more than shouting in the wind.

ENGINEERS ARE WHAT?

[BIGJIM389]

First of all, let me say this, NOT ALL ENGINEERS ARE NERDS. We all do not like star trek or start wars, we are not all misers, we are not all good at math, WE ARE ALL VERY DIFFERENT. I am a Mechanical Engineer and I have a large group of friends many of whom go all the way back to grade school. I am very sociable ( i also can not spell) and enjoy going out and getting wasted with my friends. The point is that as an engineer and as a normal person I see absolutely no value to Twitter. The only people that need to know what everyone is doing at all times are people that provide no value to society. And for those that need to Tweet everything about your exsistence, GET A LIFE AND FIND SOMETHING MORE VALUABLE TO DO WITH ALL YOUR FREE TIME> THANK YOU.

Inanities Inc.

[Runaway1956]

"'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' "

Let me go on.

I don't give a rip what color shoes you're wearing - or even if you're wearing shoes today.

I don't give a rat's ass that your dog escaped, and that you tore your panty hose while chasing him down.

I never care whether you put make up on, let alone whether it matches your clothes.

NO ONE cares how much you like your inlaws - not even your inlaws.

Only six or eight people in the whole wide world cares that your special other made you feel good last night, and if you're not married, five of those six or eight wants to punch you in the face.

I give less than a rat's ass which team is your favorite.

I think your choice of automobile is a sign of latent homosexuality.

I think your girlfreind/boyfreind is a dyke/flaming queer.

Your BOSS uses your tweets as jokes to prove how stupid you are.

Yo MAMA uses your tweets as jokes to prove how stupid you are!

Why in hell do you think your dog was trying to escape, anyway? He's sick of your inane tweets!

I'm sure that others can add to this list. And, no, I'm not looking for freinds, so don't add me to your twitter/facebook/myspace/MSN/etc/etc/etc account.

Re:Inanities Inc.

[JWSmythe]

    The most useful thing I've found twitter to be good for is posting disinformation, or implausible scenarios.

    Want people to not know where you are? Post messages about the city/cities that you're visiting. How about announcing the alien/zombie invasion.

    Really, I know some people keep up with their twits. I only ever question "why?"

Re:Inanities Inc.

[xaxa]

I don't have a Twitter account, and the only reason I can think to get one is because several of my friends have one. It seems convenient for them to send one message to the group (or however it works) like "who wants to come to XYZ this evening?" than any of the other ways of sending a similar message (text, email, Facebook). Usually someone remembers to ask me, but sometimes they don't, and then everyone tells me I should get Twitter.

Re:Inanities Inc.

[friguron]

Probably a classic for some people, but I just discovered this wonderful gem last week. Title says it all:

http://tweetingtoohard.com/

It gives you all these kind of tweets that we, "tweeter indiferents", like sooo much :)

Greetings

--
Learn more about Dropbox, and Get 250 extra MB sync space, going here: http://bit.ly/cMU9Mt

Re:Inanities Inc.

[zizzo]

I think your choice of automobile is a sign of latent homosexuality.

I think your girlfreind/boyfreind is a dyke/flaming queer.

I might care what you thought if you weren't a homophobic nitwit.

Re:Inanities Inc.

[Runaway1956]

What a revealing commment.

You should meet some REAL homophobes. These people give meaning to the silly term you throw around.
http://www.godhatesfags.com/

Re:Inanities Inc.

[PastaLover]

See the thing is, when it comes to my friends, I do care about a lot of those things. So do a lot of other people. If you're an asocial asshole so be it, just don't assume the rest of the world will follow suit.

I even care about what ignorant homophobes like you say on /. so, I guess some people care more than others.

Marked as redundant

[BagOBones]

- Unlike SMS/MMS it is not available on all cell phones, unless you integrate it will SMS/MMS... IE redundant
- Forces you use use dangerous 3rd party URL obfuscation providers because the character limit is tiny.
- Most blog content is one way, IE it would be better consumed via RSS, with links to the full content.. To be more redundant you can follow a sites twitter feed via RSS...
- Most RSS clients have better UIs for consuming content.
- Do people really have that much info that they want to share publicly out side their circle of friends in the first place?

That seems pretty generous

[sonciwind]

My own analysis only counted about 1% as being valid, and less than that worth reading.

My Brain is a computer.

[trout007]

I explained this to my boss once to try to teach him not to bother me. I said my Brain is a computer and when I am working on something that requires a lot of thought my RAM is full of information related to the task at hand. Any interruption like email, telephone, or you coming to my desk to chat cause a core dump of my RAM to my tape backup system. So even though you may only bother me for "a sec" it takes me 15 minutes to load everything back off the tape to get back where I was. So unless it's important enough to waste 15 minutes of my time please put it in an e-mail which I will get to after lunch and before the end of the day.

Twitter Fad

[Sheik Yerbouti]

The thing is I use twitter regularly just to try and understand what all the fuss is about. Near as I can tell it's about two things self promotion and idle vapid chatter. So if your in to that sort of thing then goody for you. FYI most engineer types are not so deal. If you think they should be your prolly hanging out on the wrong site try 4chan.

I can not fathom or begin to understand what causes people to need to constantly be socializing to the point that some will tweet or text while they drive. I can't even understand what causes people to drone on the phone while driving. My working hypothesis is that they are deeply disturbed and are horribly afraid of being alone with their own thoughts for five minutes.

What twitter is good for.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm antisocial. And I don't care what you had for breakfast. But I use twitter all the time.

I have scripts on all my servers that can alert me via twitter to problems, downloads finishing, and other conditions.
Through direct messages, I can use is as free SMS from my computer to my friends.
I use it for group text messaging my friends, as a way to keep in touch. Like "Hey, I'm bored. Anyone wanna go for coffee?"

My account is private. I only let real life friends follow me. I only follow them, and a few tech oriented twitter feeds. I love the newegg one, alerting me each day to their deal of the day.

Twitter is an awesome tool - I just don't use it the way most people do.

The real problem

[schnablebg]

I'd be more interested in the Twitter "conversation" if they implemented threading and a sane form of tagging. How anyone can find it useful without these features, except by watching it all day long, is beyond me. (I'm an engineer.)

Re:The real problem

[hitmark]

while their main page do not provide this, they provide all the data for this to be implemented in various clients or replacement pages.

that is, each tweet have a database number, and if a compliant client/page is used to make a reply, that number is attached to the reply message, so that at a later data one can hit a button or link and see the thread of conversation recreated. That is, if one have access to all the parties involved.

for a heavy user, a client like tweetdeck or gwibber is a must, as they not only allow threading of conversations, but also independent lists for search terms, hashtags or similar. seemic provides a ajax client with these features, iirc.

What’s happening?

[PmanAce]

PmanAce is reading Slashdot.

Waste of time.....

[TimeOut42]

Because twitter is a waste of time? >

Twitter is more than Twitter

[jdupin]

Twitter is now an ecosystem. There are so many applications around twitter, its not anymore about pushing some crappy update.

You can have IM chat share pictures or monitor you plants :)

Twitter is now a very large scale social network hub.

Re:Twitter is more than Twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Its still shit with lipstick

attention span

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is primarily for those with the attention span and depth of a gnat. Narcissists, the shallow, and the uneducated are drawn to it. The shorter your attention span, the more you will like twitter. Hence, all the famous people who think its great. Engineers are generally interested in the larger picture of how things are put together, how they interact, and are capable of extended periods of intense focus. The exact opposite of the qualities a twitterer.

I'm sure there will be tons of people saying "yeah, but...".
"I have a long attention span." Long is relative my friend.
"I'm not shallow." Depth of BS doesn't count.
"I'm highly educated." Math and science my friend. Those who don't comprehend the fundamentals of math and science aren't truly educated.
"I'm not a narcissist." Why do you assume this post was about you then?

If you are a twitterer, and don't fall into the description above, you are an extremely rare individual. So rare in fact, that you should probably go tweet all about how educated, and not shallow, and how long your attention span is. Good luck my friend.

STOP THE PRESSES

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in, if you follow idiots on twitter, you'll get a stream of meaningless shit. the problem is not the medium, but who you follow. anyone who things twitter is only boring shit about what people had for breakfast is either a: following morons, or more likely b: has never even tried to use the medium properly. if you analyse phone calls made by teenagers you'd come to the conclusion that phones are useless tools used by idiots to blab meaningless shit to one another. of course, nobody's making that claim because they realise THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO USE THE TOOL. fucking slashdot cliches piss me off. ffs, /. itself is a social news site... (the whole fucking reason anyone comes here is for the comments) but "social media" is soooooo dirty so nobody here would admit to that

Given the text within the summary's tweet..

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wonder how anyone can rebuke the necessity of a casté system.

Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm serious. I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day."

Your expectations may also be set far too low.

Not an Internet Standard -- Oh Wait it is!

[castadream]

I don't like it, because it is not a standard like email (SMTP, POP, etc). If there were a Twitter RFC... Oh wait, there is! And it's been around since the 70's. Finger!

Everybody is boring for most of the day

[dbIII]

I don't even want to know what interesting people have for breakfast. Twitter is almost all noise with very little signal.

Breakfasts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought twitter was a cloud based news feed aggregator. I actually came upon this article via twitter as I follow Slashdot on twitter. That being said, The biggest problem with twitter is the larger majority of it's user base is just barely tech savvy enough to be able to use computers to organize photos, Google porn, and use Facebook ineptly.

Wait, you mean somebody takes Twatter seriously?

[turbotroll]

I've never considered Twitter as anything more than a platform for deployment of retarded haiku. No matter how much I frowned upon Facebook, for instance, I can still clearly see its reason for existence. Not Twitter's though.

you spent a lot of time to write about twitter

[circletimessquare]

and i don't care

This just in...

[Knara]

... engineers set in their ways find new tool not all that useful for themselves.

Later, we explain why 8-core CPUs are stupid because you can't use them as protection against ballistas.

140C

[SQL Error]

If you can express your opinion in 140 characters, it's almost certainly something I don't need to know, don't want to know, or already know.

Twitter and Facebook are self-reinforcing noise distribution networks.

To stay relevant...

[pleasegetreal]

Please limit comments to no more than 140 characters.

And most of them

[Joe Tie.]

Are aging geeks. Nobody hates new trends in technology, especially if it involves the average person sneaking into their playground, like aging geeks.

Re: signal vs noise and custom trust models

[Anonymous Coward]

You can look for the people who are most followed, or you can search who you are interested in, and JUST follow them. It's surprisingly THAT easy.

Parent seems to make the flawed assumption that any egg layed by the golden goose is made of gold. History has proven that if you subscribe to the golden goose's honks, then one day that goose is inevitably going to start honking more noise than signal. However, Twitter provides no mechanism to filter out the noise from an individual goose because it's an all or nothing trust model.

Slashdot aggregates all of the geese honking about a specific topic X, and applies moderation in bulk, so that by "subscribing" to Slashdot feed X, you can usually expect more signal than noise even if an individual goose starts honking runny goose crap everywhere.

Unfortunately, Slashdot's biggest failing here is that you can't register agreement or disagreement with individual moderators within a given topic, so it's possible that the mods are on crack at any given time, and you'll end up with crap labeled as gold, and there's no way to go back and say "never again trust the idiot who said this was gold." (Yeah, yeah, metamoderation is supposed to address that, but it doesn't work very well in the timeline of an actual discussion.)

Slashdot, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, etc could all greatly benefit from a rating system where you register trust in a given source (e.g. I trust X to rate things as funny, and I trust Y to rate things as newsworthy), and then create your own channels based on custom filters such as "labeled 'funny' by at least 5 trusted sources, and not labeled 'Dup' by any trusted sources", or "labeled 'Newsworthy' by at least 2 major news outlets or by 5 minor news outlets".

SNR Is Not The Problem

[Revotron]

It's that these "engineers" aren't focusing in on the right frequency.

Sure, if you're using Twitter on the index page where EVERYBODY'S public tweets show up, you're going to have a lot of shit you don't care about popping up.

However, I use Twitter on my own personalized home page. I see only posts from people I care about. My boss posts his current location on Twitter, it's immensely useful for tracking him down (he's all over the place). I subscribe to local people I know, from LUGs and so on. They occasionally post links to interesting articles or reminders about the next meeting. I subscribe to my web host's twitter feeds for network status updates.

If you don't know what the hell you're doing on Twitter and you just go around following EVERYONE like it's MySpace 2.0, of course you're going to find shit you could care less about. That's why you SUBSCRIBE to people, because you only want to hear what THEY have to say.

For engineers, they sure are dumb.

USGS

[Akardam]

The first place you should ever check if you feel a quake (or something like) is the USGS quake page. After that, if you want to delve into the high sig-to-noise ratio of twitter, go right ahead.

one side of a conversation

[ferret4]

I find twitter unusable - seemingly every account I'm interested in reading - say for service announcements from my hosting provider - is filled with replies to other users, conversations I'm not a part of. Every single line is

@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context
@ someuser - Some text totally out of context

It's like being in a room with someone whose supposed to be making an announcement but are actually on their mobile phone - not interesting and terribly annoying.
Maybe I'm missing some option to turn that irrelevant waste off, but they've already lost me because of it.

Re:one side of a conversation

[rjiy]

Those @replies don't show up in your feed when you subscribe. You get only original posts. The poster has to do something like ".@xyz" to force a reply to show up in all subscriber feeds.

Re:one side of a conversation

[Late Adopter]

More specifically, you see at-replies for people you're also subscribed to. There are corner cases that bug me, where A at-replies to B about something B at-replied to C, when I only follow A and B. But you can't really do anything about that, and most of the time I can derive most of the context anyway.

Re:one side of a conversation

[jpkunst]

Maybe I'm missing some option to turn that irrelevant waste off

Yes. If you follow someone, you don't see their replies to other users (unless you go look for them).

Ironically

[asv108]

I found this post by following slashdot's Twitter feed. Twitter is completely misunderstood technology. I like to think of it as RSS + SMS. People have been dismissing Twitter for years, but yet it keeps on growing.

But this seems important.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://twitter.com/208j98

Never had the masses been given a voice

[zlel]

in all history until our time. Now we know why.

Holy crap

[Windwraith]

'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' as statement shows bigotry and ignorance that can't be measured in numbers.
Those engineers must be of the not-that-smart type, or the rotten elitist type.

Push vs Pull

[Wolfling1]

Apart from the whole 'I don't want to hear your stream of consciousness' argument, I think the fundamental problem with Twitter is that it is a push of information. Engineers are familiar with pushing information, but are (by nature) inclined to only push information that has been carefully scrutinized, distilled and reviewed. Doesn't sound like a tweet to me.

The greatest advance of the Internet is that it allows people to pull information. It creates a more capitalist supply/demand environment. If you don't like it, don't surf there.

I don't buy McDonalds food, but you won't catch me bagging them or giving them a hard time. I don't like what they have on offer, so I shall go elsewhere. Same goes for Twitter. If I ever hear of a tweet worth hearing, I'll reconsider.

introverts

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: Engineers are introverts.

TFS makes engineers sound fairly pro-Tweet

[Colonel Korn]

A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter.

That sounds like a much lower number than the percentage of randomly selected people who don't use Twitter. 15% of engineers use Twitter?! That sounds insanely high to me. What percentage use Blogspot? What percentage use IRC?

Twitter is living proof...

[Anonymous Coward]

of truth in the old saying: "Tis better to keep your mouth closed and thought a fool than to open it and prove it."

That said, I do think Twitter does have some usefulness. I use it as a RSS feed, and a marketing tool for my consulting business. Yeah, shameless--but well thought out prior to posting--self-promotion, but it's 'free'.

LOL

[oogoliegoogolie]

Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.

If you really hung out with interesting people, then what the fxck are you doing spending so much time on twitter and facebook? Yeesh!

Re:LOL

[imakemusic]

Yes, because either they don't use them at all or they spend all their time on them. No room between those two at all. It's just one or the other, right?

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily, though it's a bit like having a girlfriend but using a blow-up doll for sex.

That's funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenver I feel an earthquake, I go to usgs.gov to check the maps and file a "did I feel it" report, just like I did the last time a 9.3 magnitude quake woke me up, on Boxing Day 2004. Where twitter would have been useful is posting, "don't worry, not in harms way" so that friends and family would know without worrying from half a world away. Instead, I replied to several emails and then sent a preemptive reply with a large Bcc list.

Engineers have better things to do...

[Mat Chop]

than reading nonsense tweets..

Let's face it, that 4G network wont build itself.. Didnt they proved that tweeting makes you dumber and Facebooking makes you smarter? No, was not kidding..

http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/facebook-smarter-twitter-dumber/

Twitware... First adware, then malware now this

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't be the first one to think of this...Twitware - the spamming of ones followers with a constant barrage of self-idolizing, self-promoting flagelistic, meaningless crap.

I have been calling anyone who uses twitter "twits" for a long time now. I guess it's been proven out.

Great post..

[lmnfrs]

What's this silvery orb by your name do?

Twitter can be very useful.

[Kingrames]

With Guild Wars 2 on the horizon, I find myself extremely hyped up because GW 1 was way better than my first expectations were of it and has always been one of my favorite games. At work I found myself having trouble concentrating what with my allergies, pollen season, the very cold office (It's summer in Texas, I shouldn't have to have a coat!), and other problems, this just made it really hard to get work done.

Twitter gave me the option of getting instant text messages as soon as new information was released about the game, so I could scratch that off my list of worries.

Like any other tool it has its uses and shouldn't be used as a tool for everything.
fyi, I skipped breakfast this morning.

Just a reminder...

[Anonymous Coward]

You computer tech turds are NOT engineers.

and why is that?

[luis_a_espinal]

Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook. Both can die in a blaze of their own fiery doom for all I care.

That says more about your tweet/follow choices than the medium. I pretty much use my twitter through my linkedin account. I strictly follow co-workers, ex co-workers, ex classmates and certain individuals in the software industry that work on subjects I care about (.i.e. Cassandra, Software Engineering.) That is, I get a pulse (sort of) on people whose areas of academic and professional interests match mine.

The advantage is that it's a filtered pulse. Not quite an RSS feed, but something a bit more taylored, filtered, brief and which somewhat reflects industrial/interest changes as seen by them. They don't (usually) tweet something unless they have briefly evaluated it as something of value to others, and I do the same. Better and far more concise than a RSS feed and with the potential of having as much depth as a blog worth reading.

If someone that works on technology cannot find one single person, just one, just a single one whose tweets might have technical value (and it doesn't have to be Grady Booch or Don Syme, just a colleage or someone heading an interesting FOSS project), then shit man, you gotta start asking why is that. If all you see in the sea of tweets is "ZOMG, a turd hangs off my ass, I look like a kangaroo, LOLCATS!", then that's you, not the medium.

Like the internet and just about any other form of communication technology, you get what you put in. There is a difference between not preferring the medium vs being predisposed at not finding anything of value in it.

LOTR

[RJFerret]

Pfft, I fit all of LOTR in 125 characters for a short story collection.

Ironically you aren't even limited to 140, you can send infinite messages, or a link to longer writings if you prefer.

However in daily use, most messages I send and receive are shorter than that. A wonderful benefit is it's faster to read/digest when people condense their thought, instead of rambling emails that say little to nothing.

Re:LOTR

[hitmark]

yep. Iirc, the 140 limit comes from it originally being a kind of sms broadcast service, so you didnt need to create some list on your own phone and pay for all the copies of a message. SMS itself is 160 characters, thanks to some guy sitting down and finding that most short written messages was around that size, with a bit of padding. And it could also fit inside the space of a single GSM control channel frame.

still, for some twitter have become quite complicated. So much that they claim you cant really use it without a large screen client and full computer any more, as most tweets seen are urls to link shortening services or images pages.

Twitter == RSS--

[jeroen94704]

Why I don't like Twitter, apart from the reasons outlined in TFA, is that it is nothing more than a less capable, centralized RSS.

With RSS, I can subscribe to pretty much any type of content: blogs, search-results, news, you name it (the list is almost endless). The major thing here is that I can subscribe to any type of content using an RSS-reader of my choice, and RSS providers can use any tooling they choose. With Twitter, the type of content I can subscribe to is incredibly limited, and both myself and the authors are tied into a specific vendor (to boot: Twitter).

So I'm completely at a loss as to what the big deal with Twitter is.

Yeah it's a toy earthquake.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the USGS uses Twitter as part of it's earthquake monitoring program?

Same with it's use as part of the Haiti aid program.

I'm an engineer, I use Twitter.

[l3v1]

For what?

For checking airlines tweets, for deals and stuff - also, used it a lot after the Icelandic ash clouds started popping.

Other than that? Nope, thanks.

Twitter itself is neutral to me. What things like Twitter make people do - report everything from pissing habits to frogs' farts -, that's what I couldn't care less to follow. So I don't.

In summary ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's a tweet!

Sturgeon's Law

[sfsp]

Why is this a surprise? As a first estimate, 80% of everything is crud!

OK, so I'm conflating Pareto and Sturgeon, but the principle...

Couldn't agree more...

[nit-witter]

...and we "wrote an app for that": www.nit-witter.com

Re:Engineers' conversations are surely scintillati

[Anonymous Coward]

In the World Cut example, the information about the sporting event might not be "useful" in the sense of replacing sports reporting, but is the online equivalent of people sitting at a bar watching a game saying "Oh, did you see that?"

You can't have an online equivalent of something that only makes sense to do in person. That's why people watching sports events physically together, they don't call one another on the phone and watch it alone on their homes.

Nobody likes twitter!

[swordgeek]

Twitter is, at its most basic level, anti-internet.

The internet is fundamentally about communication. Every forum that has arisen has been a combination of technical limitations and social constraints, applied differently in each case. The technical limitations have disappeared as technology has evolved, to the point that live audio and video can be used as a means of communication.

Twitter, on the other hand, imposes a completely arbitrary technical constraint for no purpose other than to limit communication. It's not clever, it doesn't force people to be concise, it doesn't create wit, it just annoys and restricts.

Yeah, there are some useful tweets. It doesn't mean that the idea isn't fatally flawed and arbitrarily stupid. Twitter deserves to die a horrible death.

Pay me to tweet me

[whitroth]

Twits, er, tweets, are 140 chars so as to fit ON A PAGER.

In the mid-nineties, I worked for a couple of years for Ameritech, a Baby Bell (since swallowed by SBC/AT&T). For 80% of those years, I wore a pager 24x7, except for the month or two when I wore *TWO* pagers 24x7.

When some moron is willing to pay me time and a half, based on my full, loaded rate, they can tweet me. If you're not paying *me* real money, I am *NOT* available 24x7 for your idiotic 140 chars, when you're not capable of sending me an email that I can deal with at my convenience, or you're afraid to pick up a phone - you know, that piece of louse reception that you have with you at all times? - and call me, to talk to an actual person.

It really ought to be twits, because that's who uses it. They can't speak in sentences, nor hold an actual thought in their (alleged) minds.

              mark "or would you like me to tell you what I *really* think of twits?"

Twitter Can be Useful

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

There are sites like that. http://www.twitgrids.com/ sorts tweets into topics and filters out the crap (spam, self promotion, fake blogs, linkbait, etc.)

Fuddy Duddies.

[rplst8]

EE's don't tweet cause they are all old.

Needs better features

[The_mad_linguist]

The main issues I have with twitter are that

A) people use it for conversations, but I haven't found an easy way to interleave two people's twitter feeds and get a meaningful sense of the conversation

B) It's always in reverse chronological order

C) There's no way provided to go to an arbitrary point of someone's twitter feed

Does anyone have any tools that would address any of these issues?