Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
The same thing can pretty much be said about the whole internet to be fair.
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.
THL phish sticks
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."
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But thats what I use twitter for, to follow the release of news stories.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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?
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.
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.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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.
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.
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 . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
-I only code in BASIC.-
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. ;)
Tweet, tweet.
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).
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
Three Squirrels
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.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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.
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.
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.
Tweet, tweet.
Apparently subsistence farmers and nomadic goat herders like it even less.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
or else!
Uhhhh.....I wouldn't be so sure about that: http://twitter.com/the_vuvuzela/
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.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
"'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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
and i don't care
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.