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Buzz Kill

leoville.com

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Re: Buzz Kill

#61

Post by marknutter »

m0nty wrote: post #17

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because…

> but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?

Um.. how about your Hacker News comments?

Re: Buzz Kill

#62

Post by marknutter »

bad_user wrote: post #50
skybrian wrote: post #33

Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? Does that mean Hacker News isn't valuable? What if someone decided to stop editing Wikipedia? When you read the news, do you remember the byline of every story you read? For large public conversations, most of what you read is contributed by people you don't know. Your friends' contributions are only a small part of what makes the place what it is. And yet t…

> Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background or your body-language. The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a synchronized motion going on,…

You're bordering on Andy Rooney-ism here.

Re: Buzz Kill

#63

Post by elblanco »

marknutter wrote: post #61
m0nty wrote: post #17

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because…

> but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting? Um.. how about your Hacker News comments?

Unfortunately, most of the HN comments (and yes, the above would fit into a tweet, but it would be so devoid of context as to be absolutely meaningless to people who weren't already reading this same thread)

Re: Buzz Kill

#64

Post by elblanco »

megablast wrote: post #55
MC27 wrote: post #7

Not sure what to think about this post. I've heard Leo speak about the likes of Twitter being the "internet's nervous system." In reality, these social networks - although useful for certain activities, like networking - are mostly superficial and disposable. Perhaps, when you are surrounded by pundits and PR types, it becomes difficult seeing beyond the hype.

The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.

> We need to know what the superficial people are talking about...

ugh, no thanks. If I have an hour of free time and a choice between hearing what vapid morons have to talk about, or illuminating myself with something a bit deeper, I'll take the later.

Re: Buzz Kill

#65

Post by elblanco »

jschuur wrote: post #24
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've ever read anything on Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would. What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another reason I'm missing?

The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion. They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to read it. That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time, that's not the problem. The issue is…

>it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating

Leo, after the thousands of words he's written promoting these types of social media, found out that that's what most people are writing about, trivialities of interest to no-one/notification information we already have two dozen ways of getting...and thus everybody finds everybody else's tweets annoying and instantly put into that same part of the brain that selectively ignores web advertising.

That's why nobody noticed. I doubt most people would notice if most of the people they follow stopped tweeting. They're probably ignoring most of it anyway.

Re: Buzz Kill

#66

Post by spudlyo »

jwr wrote: post #43

Finally! I've been hoping this would happen. About a year or so ago Leo's podcasts became all about Twitter. Twitter this, twitter that, people on twitter, followers, yadda yadda. It got so tiring for those of us who really couldn't care less. I'm glad Leo has seen the light.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.

Re: Buzz Kill

#67

Post by dingle_thunk »

megablast wrote: post #55
MC27 wrote: post #7

Not sure what to think about this post. I've heard Leo speak about the likes of Twitter being the "internet's nervous system." In reality, these social networks - although useful for certain activities, like networking - are mostly superficial and disposable. Perhaps, when you are surrounded by pundits and PR types, it becomes difficult seeing beyond the hype.

The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.

... But the people with real insight very rarely share it. All you get from these sorts of networking tools is a mishmash of mediocre gibberish.

Re: Buzz Kill

#68

Post by megablast »

dingle_thunk wrote: post #67
megablast wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.

... But the people with real insight very rarely share it. All you get from these sorts of networking tools is a mishmash of mediocre gibberish.

it is useful to have a pulse on what the majority are thinking, talking about.

Re: Buzz Kill

#69

Post by Tichy »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #32
m0nty wrote: post #17

I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because…

"what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?" It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace, foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently _where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self-fulfillment. Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone no…

I often get good information on Twitter, for example about events happening in my city. I am thankful that some people share the information. Ego driven, I don't know - obviously there are "egos" behind the keyboard, but sharing can be a win for everyone.

Maybe it is just hard to grasp for people who don't understand the concept of "pay forward"?

Re: Buzz Kill

#70

Post by thingie »

rimantas wrote: post #34
mechanical_fish wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two words: Learning curve . It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real , human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.…

Twitter is not a technology. Unless you want to call phone calls shorter than 14 seconds a new technology too. Twitter is RSS for humans. Uhm, what? Maybe for some weird breed of humans who cannot digest more than 140 chars and hate context.

I'd call phone calls limited to just 14 seconds a new technology, and I'd love it. Imagine that you could just answer any call because you know that it's not going to degenerate into 5-minute long series of you just nodding to the endless story of the other side.
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