Ok. Whos got it and is strangely addicted?

Scoffhistory = me.

Haha, following Newt? Spy!

I use it a lot, but I doubt anyone here would be interested in the boring development stuff I use it for.

I use it a lot, but I doubt anyone here would be interested in the boring development stuff I use it for.

- Sanchek is taking a dump.

- Sanchek is fingering the message board delete button.

- Sanchek is ...

Yeah, no thanks :)

I have never sent a text message. I have no plans to do so in the future.

Some want to push the idea that all of these new communication options are increasing social interaction; I actually see these as allowing folks to further isolate themselves from legitimate social interaction. /shrug

I have never sent a text message. I have no plans to do so in the future.

Some want to push the idea that all of these new communication options are increasing social interaction; I actually see these as allowing folks to further isolate themselves from legitimate social interaction. /shrug

Not trying to stir up too much trouble, but why are you the decider of what is legitimate social interaction and what isn't? I don't use twitter, but I wouldn't consider it or texting "illegitimate" - a lot of times its easier to write a text saying "hey honey" than to make a phone call and interrupt whatever my girlfriend is doing at work. No offense, of course, since the communications you've used all your life you are more comfortable with - but I'm also sure a lot of older people felt the telephone was isolating people from legitimate social interaction yet now you'd think they were off their rocker too. After all, we all communicate every day yet most of us haven't ever met face to face.

It depends what you use it for, of course. Some things lend themselves well to asynchronous communication, and some things don't.

Not trying to stir up too much trouble, but why are you the decider of what is legitimate social interaction and what isn't? I don't use twitter, but I wouldn't consider it or texting "illegitimate" - a lot of times its easier to write a text saying "hey honey" than to make a phone call and interrupt whatever my girlfriend is doing at work. No offense, of course, since the communications you've used all your life you are more comfortable with - but I'm also sure a lot of older people felt the telephone was isolating people from legitimate social interaction yet now you'd think they were off their rocker too. After all, we all communicate every day yet most of us haven't ever met face to face.


LOL, how does giving my opinion state that I am THE DECIDER!?! If you are not wanting to stir anything up, don't make such silly statements, Kel.
I will not preface each and every comment I make with a disclaimer that it is merely my opinion just to keep you or anyone else from spinning it to create something controversial.

And your last sentence is what I see as the potential effect of texting and such; why have any face to face if you can communicate remotely? Making a call at least involves talking and listening, and I think most of us have learned to pick up on inflections and tone when conversing with others; printed words contain no inflection or emotion other than what we assign to them, and often we do so incorrectly.

i.e. /GetOffMyLawn?

For what it's worth, Twitter has nothing to do with text messaging. It's just another website. If Twitter is "text messaging", then so are your posts here.

i.e. /GetOffMyLawn?

For what it's worth, Twitter has nothing to do with text messaging. It's just another website. If Twitter is "text messaging", then so are your posts here.

My understanding of Twitter is it is something folks do with their cell phones, much like text messaging. I could well be mistaken, as I am an old fossil with little grasp of today's new-fangled stuff.

Not really. Go to Twitter.com.


Also, I posted this from my phone. Does that make this post a text message?

I don't tweet or follow anyone but most of the folks I know do. It's more like blogging than txt messaging and really I think it's kind of neat and interesting. Really should check things out before making broad generalizations about it.

140 characters or less...

Brevity is the soul of wit ...

So says the dictionary and Willy S

'Also, I posted this from my phone. Does that make this post a text message?'

- Yes.

I hate blogging, and twittering, or whatever it's called. I hate myspace, facebook.
It is all, quite frankly, a load of sociopathic crap.

'Also, I posted this from my phone. Does that make this post a text message?'

- Yes.

I hate blogging, and twittering, or whatever it's called. I hate myspace, facebook.
It is all, quite frankly, a load of sociopathic crap.


The one advantage I do see in those two is the ability it offers to some talented young people to be heard without having to pay an agent and get a record deal first; indeed, it has led to more success for a few, from what I hear, than going the old formal route.

I hate blogging, and twittering, or whatever it's called. I hate myspace, facebook.
It is all, quite frankly, a load of sociopathic crap.

I got my first book deal as a direct result of my blog.

I got a free ride to a conference in Vegas through Twitter. Once there, I randomly sat beside a publisher that ended up offering to publish my second book if I want.

It's all what you make of it. Vapid people will be vapid regardless of medium. If they weren't blogging about their cats or twittering about their breakfast, they'd be yapping someone's ear off about the same lame topics.

Added Twitter (and GTalk) as an IM service in the user profile. You can set yours from here: http://ayonae.com/profile.php?do=editprofile

'

I hate blogging, and twittering, or whatever it's called. I hate myspace, facebook.
It is all, quite frankly, a load of sociopathic crap.

You have a bizarre definition of sociopathy.

What's the functional difference between my relatives sticking family pictures in a card every Christmas and mailing them versus posting them on Facebook? What's the functional difference between me telling my friends about a book on a blog versus at a book club?

The draw for these services is that they are asynchronous. One can lament the demise of long correspondence, but the fact of the matter is that most people weren't making use of it anyway. The democratisation of long-distance communication has been ongoing for centuries, and it's never been a surprise that most people don't have anything to talk about that is at all interesting to anyone but themselves.

The advertising angle attached to many of these services is a little creepy in some cases, but beyond that we really aren't doing anything much different than passing notes in math class -- they're going farther and in some cases are made public, but it's not as if they got dumber in proportion to distance. Guess what, teenage girls never had anything interesting to say, but that never stopped them from going on for hours.

I don't get much use out of Facebook or Twitter due to the high noise factor, but even I don't get off thinking I'm founding the Order of St Leibowitz.

Talk about lack of brevity...sheesh...you could have said that in 140 characters or less..EX: I pruned my trees

I feel extremely safe in saying that you and Halo would never be the target audience of any of my other correspondence, and thus you're comparing apples to fruitbats.

I think Bylimet has an valid point in that synchronous and asynchronous conversations are very different things, and that the 140 character limit makes it difficult even to include the necessary information to communicate inflection, mood, intent, etc, for most people - this makes it a very curiously static, and stilted, form of 'spontaneous' conversation. Dorothy Parker, I'm sure, would have handled it just fine; but there's no point in someone as long-winded as myself to even bother :).

I won't go so far as to state that Twitter is useless, but I did see some statistics this weekend on NYT that indicated that 60% of new Twitter users abandon the medium within 30 days of picking it up, which seems a pretty high percentage of people finding it either unsuitable or otherwise not worth their time once the novelty has worn off.

I think for individuals who are in certain fields where real-time networking is highly valued, or are simply highly social products of the digital age who like the online coffee klatch aspect or are comfortable with that form of digital extraversion, Twitter by its nature allows greater reach and flexibility than cell phones or forums like this one do. It's just not something that I'd have the energy for nor need to follow as activity in my field moves much more slowly (although I can see applications for field work) and I'm already too easily distracted as it is.

Regards,
Nydia

We use it as a cheap way to disburse text message alerts for systems notification. We have the account set to private, but since Twitter has access to a text messaging gateway, it would just be more economical to use theirs (as in FREE).

So we don't really microblog. In fact our tweets are private since they are sent to operations people if, say, a critical system went down.

Twitter will ultimately flash out as a "huge" thing. It gets old very fast...Rybit has found about the best use for it.

One huge thing with the advent of the Internet is that it is filled with a bunch of people all vying to be the next Bill Gates. It will be a while before we see that. One huge issue with the Twitters and Facebooks is the ability to successfully monetize them.

Most people have the view that things on the Internet should be free or at the least very cheap which kills the investors, much like newspapers are experiencing. That is one big reason these sites will fade into cyber space.

'I feel extremely safe in saying that you and Halo would never be the target audience of any of my other correspondence'

- And the world breathed a sigh of relief.

Well, the non-botany world, anywho.

Most people have the view that things on the Internet should be free or at the least very cheap which kills the investors, much like newspapers are experiencing. That is one big reason these sites will fade into cyber space.

Like those e-flops PlentyOfFish, Craigslist, Google, etc? There's nothing wrong with charging for a service, but it's a mistake to assume free/cheap isn't sustainable. Hence broadcast TV and radio.

The reason the newspapers are hurting is mainly because less and less people want to pay a premium to read yesterday's news, when they can read yesterminute's for free (and more conveniently).

Craigslist makes it's money off of Job posting ads at $75.00 a pop...hardly free. The regular classifieds are free there. Googles revenue stream is CPC and PoF is advertiser supported.

You are correct about the newspapers but it is their print that made them the money...The NY Times charged a token for a premium account and it failed...

And thank you for comparing marshmallows to scud missiles...good points otherwise.

I can't imagine many people are unaware how sites full of ads are monetized. Meanwhile, that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of those sites' users use them at no cost.

I picked those three sites for a reason. Twitter will probably end up monetizing one or more of those three ways. Pro accounts for companies, lots of semantically targeted ads, and/or contextual ads on search.twitter.com (which destroys Google for searching on current events).

Users use them at no cost and the ads that a twitter or paper will run don't bring in a huge revenue stream. The key will be to get people to pay for content solely available in that service...oh wait AOL used to have that...didn't work.

AOL's undoing was bad business decisions, more than a bad business model. They would've definitely been Yahoo or MSN if they hadn't been mired in that awful merger at the most crucial time. Even failing in the end, any one of us would be lucky to have a run like that.

Twitter can monetize its search, and/or inject ads into your timeline when you view it via web or API. That will easily make them profitable. They're just sandbagging right now because they have no need for revenue yet.

Twitter isn't about the content. It's not even about the quality of the service itself (which is average at best). It's value is its user base and social graph.

It has = Its, btw, It *is* = It's :) - and this pretty much sums up why I have no interest in Twitter and why I find its social use slightly creepy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w

I can see young groups of peers (high school or college, when your peers *are* your family and you're super involved with them (picture '50/'60s musical teens exclaiming 'Let's all go to the drive-in!')) using this to spontaneously arrange get-togethers, but this seems to be a new level of egocasting 'exhibitionism', to an even greater extent than Facebook et al. I think that it'll keep an audience via ads for that market, but I don't see it staying in use for, erm, adults except in ways such as Rybit described.

Regards,
Nydia

http://graphjam.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/song-chart-memes-things-twittered.jpg

Of course, if the lampooning on YouTube is accurate or authoritative, anyone who played EQ has bigger things to worry about than Twitter!

If you mean the timewasting aspect, sure, but at least EQ required cooperation and live social interaction (and one played for a limited time and logged out) as opposed to disconnected broadcasts to the ether, and in that respect there's a world of difference between it and things like Facebook/Myspace and Twitter. I think the disconnected egocasting aspect of Twitter in particular is something I personally find a bit disturbing and indicative of, hm, pathology and of the egocentric/narcissistic collapse of what used to pass for normal social interaction (you know, with give and take :) ) in our marketing-driven society. I recognize that both represent attempts to overcome our increasing social isolation and commodification, and maybe part of it is generational, but I just find it a little... odd.

Since you brought EQ up though, ironically, Twitter *would* probably be an effective way to let members of a guild know that a spawn was up and they should get their ass online :P - although I was never in a guild that competed for spawns regularly and am glad those days seem to be gone in MMORPGs :)...

Regards,
Nydia

'Of course, if the lampooning on YouTube is accurate or authoritative, anyone who played EQ has bigger things to worry about than Twitter!'

- I'm sure that's <140 characters. Anywho..

'I personally find a bit disturbing and indicative of, hm, pathology and of the egocentric/narcissistic collapse of what used to pass for normal social interaction'

- Too true. (that was definately less than 140!).

AOL's undoing was bad business decisions, more than a bad business model. They would've definitely been Yahoo or MSN if they hadn't been mired in that awful merger at the most crucial time. Even failing in the end, any one of us would be lucky to have a run like that.

Twitter can monetize its search, and/or inject ads into your timeline when you view it via web or API. That will easily make them profitable. They're just sandbagging right now because they have no need for revenue yet.

Twitter isn't about the content. It's not even about the quality of the service itself (which is average at best). It's value is its user base and social graph.

AOL's decision brought them hundreds of millions in capital...their model sucked. A run like that? One where you end up barely existing? There's good business sense.

I gotta say, you have all of the answers...hundreds if not thousands of people are trying to figure out how to monetize effectively and profitably and the guy with all the know how exists right here on Ayonae.com

without truly knowing whether what I am about to say is true or false I'm still going to say it anyway.... :p

it's amusing to me to see older folks complaining about twitter, facebook, myspace etc and the younger crowd supporting it. it's kind of cliche.
{previous section edited to save a few secrets!}

I gotta say, you have all of the answers...hundreds if not thousands of people are trying to figure out how to monetize effectively and profitably and the guy with all the know how exists right here on Ayonae.com

Huh? All you have to do is pay attention to 5% of the reports on ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch to know this. It doesn't take a genius to see they're right.

Just to reiterate, are you asserting that Twitter will fail because they can't monetize it?

Dear Fildien:

But Halo's only in his mid-'20s, are you suggesting that he's... prematurely curmudgeonly? ;)

I've gotten in touch with a couple of old friends from high school and Bi-Net using Facebook, so I'm not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater and say it doesn't have its uses; but I don't feel the need to update constantly on it either (it's sometimes months between my logins) and don't use it much for the 'egocasting' aspect that a lot of (mostly younger ;) ) people do.

I see the utility of Facebook as being almost like an online business card or storefront, in that it's another way for people to look you up quickly, although one needs to be careful what one puts in the windows, especially as a teacher...

Regards,
Nydia

it's amusing to me to see older folks complaining about twitter, facebook, myspace etc and the younger crowd supporting it. it's kind of cliche.

Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. I was reading an interesting paper a few weeks ago about why our perspectives unconsciously skew as we get older.

When we encounter new things, we rarely approach them with an open mind, but attempt to fit them to one of our existing generalizations.

For example, my first impression of a plantain was an inaccurate approximation, biased by my previous knowledge. More often than not, that's close enough for our daily purposes and saves us from having to approach everything as a child, but sometimes it fails us as too inaccurate.

Similarly, some people immediately group Twitter in as just another form of SMS messaging or "ego-casting", because those are the closest approximations they have to understand Twitter with. They know they don't like those things, so they "know" they don't like Twitter either.

The paper went into a lot of detail and was very interesting. I tried to find it again this morning to link, but couldn't.

Of course, maybe I'm poorly approximating the curmudgeons by using that report as my closest generalization that fits.

Though you will see these days that there are many, many older people who use Facebook now. My parents are both over 60 and use it, and I know of a good amount of others.

That 'categorization based on what's known' is a universal human trait exhibited from toddlerhood on; but human beings vary widely, and largely independent of age, with regard to their willingness to try new things.

Younger people aren't that much more flexible *as a group* (although neural plasticity as far as the ability to make intuitive leaps goes peaks in the early 20s and then begins to decline, which is why *language* invention overwhelmingly occurs among the young) as 1) exposed to a wider variety of new things by osmosis (*someone* who is a 'tryer' in their peer group starts using it, and it gets socially passed around) and 2) they're the primary target in our current society of the vast majority of our marketing efforts so they have a whole lot more 'thrown at them to see what sticks' as they have more 'disposable' time and peer ideation and the egocentricity of youth makes them more susceptible than most.

I had no difficulty finding a use for adopting ICQ at age 39 (and use it daily, albeit mostly for social reasons) and MySpace/Facebook at 43 (and use it sporadically) - but I *will* say that I'm significantly less flexible with regard to adopting new things of that nature (technology in particular) than my roommate is, even though we're approximately the same age. By the same token, I had an amazing professor at UT Arlington (in his mid '70s at the time, botanist ;) ) who had the amazing knack of *always* being able to see everything with new eyes and in his later years had become very enamored with the potential uses of image analysis software (in the mid '90s) in and out of his field doing everything from measuring and calculating ranges of seed sizes/dimensions/characteristics in a sample to measuring biomineralization in chicken eggs. He was one of those who believed that good microscopy was as much art as science (something I happen to agree with) and I would observe him drawing little visual puzzles on napkins at meetings, and numerous times I'd walk into his lab where he'd be poring over something and say 'look at this neat thing I found you can do with *this*'...

Philip's aunts and uncles (all in their 60s-70s, in Mexico and the US) all use ICQ, send each other pictures and files, and generally don't have any problem picking up on 'new' things. With regard to Twitter specifically though, and its gigapet-like build based on the idea of constant attention in short bursts, I expect that the single biggest predictor of who will ultimately find it appealing and stick with it, versus those who find it relatively useless or an intrinsically repellent idea, is extraversion vs introversion.

Regards,
Nydia

When we encounter new things, we rarely approach them with an open mind, but attempt to fit them to one of our existing generalizations.

With regard to Twitter specifically though, and its gigapet-like build based on the idea of constant attention in short bursts

:rolleyes:

The point isn't that some people will never use the new things, but that they'll be dragged along by the early adopters instead of "getting it" for themselves. Brought along by the "tryer" in the peer group, as you put it.

Of course, there will always be exceptions too. My grandma was one of the most actively open minded people I've known, even in her 80s.

Twitter has just barely "crossed the chasm", as they say:

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/1999/11/paulk1.gif

I'm sure some people do approach Twitter with the burst of attention approach that you're describing, but those will be the ones who use it awhile and then lose interest. They're doing it wrong.

Anyone that uses it for more than "Ate waffles for breakfast" type messages will leave a client like Twhirl or TweetDeck open most of the time. They won't be actively using it in bursts, but passively over time. Not unlike an IM client, but more as a cross between IM, RSS, and micro-blog.

Are you, like, sponsored by Twitter?

Are the Luddites sponsoring you?

but wait...twitter uses the evil SMS! Sanchek wtf dont give up!!!

Using Twitter over SMS is like trying to use a messageboard in lynx. I doubt anyone seriously does that for more than a few days, before realizing it's pointless.

'before realizing it's pointless.'

- You'd probably be surprised.

One sec, I have to google Luddities.....

I mean, where else is this going to happen?

http://kensingtonvictoria.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/zombie_outbreak.jpg

hehe

http://twitter.com/zedsquad

So... now that the party is finally over. I will say that without Twitter and Facebook and myspace I could never have reached all of Leah's friends to invite them to her surprise bday party. Fab tools, they helped the party be a big success :D

eddietang68 Twitter has justified its existence more in the past 12 hours than it has in its entire previous lifetime.

Regarding Iran riot coverage..

I had never used Twitter until tonight. It has kept me informed on the situation in Iran when all other news broadcasts are showing reruns of earlier programming. Is Twitter pointless? After 4 hours of using it... Hell no!

Aye, and it's great for Botany, too.

Have to agree with jedd here, that twitter had a large role in keeping folks informed of what has been occurring in Iran's capital and major cities.


And, I have to give a nod to the communal fun as shown by Fildien's zombie attack tweets.

I don't know that I will still ever use it. But I see it's contribution.

The problem with that is there's no evidence to suggest the writers from Iran even live in Iran. They could very easily be coming from Wisconsin for all we know. There's no way to prove any of the information is real, in many ways exactly like the zombie attacks.

most of it was real regarding the Iran thing

The problem with that is there's no evidence to suggest the writers from Iran even live in Iran. They could very easily be coming from Wisconsin for all we know. There's no way to prove any of the information is real, in many ways exactly like the zombie attacks.

Kinda like the "real" news!

If you go to search.twitter.com (http://search.twitter.com) and watch the results for a trending topic that you're interested in, it's highly unlikely that the aggregate of that news is false. Just like with any other news medium, you have to take any single bit of it with a grain of salt, but that hardly invalidates the entire medium.

The problem with that is there's no evidence to suggest the writers from Iran even live in Iran. They could very easily be coming from Wisconsin for all we know. There's no way to prove any of the information is real, in many ways exactly like the zombie attacks.

This has nothing to do with Twitter; it's the trust problem. Normally, we (somewhat foolishly) grant trust in authority, so we figure that anyone who has the resources to put together the news couldn't be totally dishonest (ha, ha, ha) -- incidentally this why phishing-style attacks work.

Individuals, however, usually must demonstrate some level of trustworthiness before we believe them -- however once they have we are socially indoctrinated to trust information from "people we like" more than information supported by evidence. If most people are twitter are generally honest, people will trust tweets with equally good reason.

Twitter in practice is just as trustworthy as the TV news.

So if I Twitter about the second coming of Christ, that means it's happening?

I mean after I Twitter reliably on a few other subjects, of course....

It's just as good as the evidence in the Bible, why not.

And on Botany, too.

So if I Twitter about the second coming of Christ, that means it's happening?

I mean after I Twitter reliably on a few other subjects, of course....

This needs to have the :smug: emote from the something awful forums after it.

Sadly twitter DID cover the unrest in Iran over the weekend better than any other news outlet. So people should really just drop the idiocy and accept that these mediums are viable as other MSM goes....and like someone else said you should filter it the same way you do other things...with a grain of salt. Woe to anyone who believes what MSM tells them as 100% fact.

So, I’m trying to find out something about what’s going on in Iran, and on CNN I can watch a rerun of Larry King interviewing several gentlemen without shirtsleeves who apparently assemble choppers. On Fox Mike Huckabee is trying to explain why Jesus hates credit card relief. MSNBC is rerunning something about a prison in New Mexico. CNBC is evaluating whether college students should be able to afford Chanel tote bags.

And Twitter and Youtube show why governments will now find excuses to completely control the Internet.

The revolution will be tweeted, not televised.

I have to admit, I'm not big on Twitter, but its uses in bringing different people together is quite remarkable.

'Sadly twitter DID cover the unrest in Iran over the weekend better than any other news outlet. So people should really just drop the idiocy and accept that these mediums are viable as other MSM goes'

- I've always said it's brilliant for botany.