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

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?

[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.