11–20 of 21 posts
They fester off each other. We're seeing a relatively new phenomenon in terms of coverage because people inherently love talking about nose dives. It wont' last...nobody talks about Friendster anymore.
Twitter articles are popular here, as in other social news sites and blogs, because of selection bias. Who likes twitter? People who always have something to write. Who posts stuff on the web? People who always have something to write. It's the same reason most of the people who apply for a job are idiots, because they just have to do it over and over. Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A smal…
actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes. Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity. Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent…
I didn't think Twitter was useful until a few months ago. I started using it and completely changed my mind. I see it like a buffet of interesting comments from people I choose to follow. I get updates from people who are working on interesting stuff, going to conferences I care about, etc. Unlike a social network, I don't need to be friends with someone to see what they post. I can stop following someone whenever an…
Twitter feels a bit like a 24/7 cocktail party full of intelligent and interesting people, where you can chose who to listen to. I think they've also evolved (or perhaps resurrected) a cultural norm of openness where you can listen to and engage in conversations with anyone. I think that, along with the asynchrony and discoverability, is what makes it slightly magical.
That being said, it has problems: - It can definitely be a waste of time.
- There aren't good tools for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing the feed.
- There's an excessive density of 'professional' social-media types who seem to spend all day twitterring about nothing but Twitter.
- I don't understand the appeal of the IM-type clients at all. They look pretty, but I can't imagine anything worse than being constantly interrupted by windows popping up all over my screen with random, disconnected tweets.
Are people upvoting because they are avid users of twitter? Yes, sometimes. Or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons? Yes. Let me add a few observations of my own: Are people upvoting because Twitter is a genuinely new and popular service, and hence very fashionable at this moment? Yes. Are people upvoting because Twitter's design has just been sitting there, right in front of our faces, for years , a…
It's a social thing and I love it.
I've thought about how I would have made Twitter, but the truth is that the Twitter problem is probably not something that is easily fixed. The people at Twitter have had a lot of real world experience and have more data to base their development on.
Two ways to look at Twitter: 1) Twitter is like any other social network-- its value to you is dependent on which of your friends is on it. For most of us who have lots of friends that aren't 100% plugged-in to the hottest web trends, this severely limits twitter's value. However, the technorati get a lot of value from Twitter in that it's an elite social network (aka mutual backrubbing), and a way of getting to each…
I think this might by one reason why twitter is so popular - it can be used for many different purposes.
Twitter articles are popular here, as in other social news sites and blogs, because of selection bias. Who likes twitter? People who always have something to write. Who posts stuff on the web? People who always have something to write. It's the same reason most of the people who apply for a job are idiots, because they just have to do it over and over. Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A smal…
actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes. Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity. Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent…
;)
Two ways to look at Twitter: 1) Twitter is like any other social network-- its value to you is dependent on which of your friends is on it. For most of us who have lots of friends that aren't 100% plugged-in to the hottest web trends, this severely limits twitter's value. However, the technorati get a lot of value from Twitter in that it's an elite social network (aka mutual backrubbing), and a way of getting to each…
The point 1) is only partially true. For example, I don't have any friends on Twitter, but I use tweetscan to search twitter, when I want to see most current events about something...for example, I want to buy some newly announced gadget, so I do a search now and then to see links to new reviews, or short ideas from early users about how they like or dislike it. I think this might by one reason why twitter is so popu…