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?

[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?

[Nadaka]

33% is less than one third.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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!

So?

[thetoadwarrior]

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

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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

[El_Muerte_TDS]

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 . . .

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.

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: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.

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.

hmmm

[Hognoxious]

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

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.

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.

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: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...