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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 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.
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!
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
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
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
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.
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
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...