Huckleberries Online

Alex: Twitter’s Nothing To Chirp About

Posted by DFO

March 30, 2009 5:37 p.m. • 29 comments

In case Facebook isn’t creepy enough for you, the latest form of online ADD, Twitter, is there for your basic stalking needs. After all the hype I had been hearing, I eagerly created an account, hoping for the same sense of bedazzlement I felt as soon as a logged onto the MySpace world back in 2005 or Facebook in 2007. What I felt logging on to Twitter for the first time was a sense, not of stepping into a vast world of endless possibilities, but of stepping into a dark void of nothingness. I’m here to confirm that there is absolutely nothing about Twitter that makes it different or new or any more interesting or entertaining than Facebook. It’s a giant scam if I’ve ever seen one, created merely to cash in on the success of stalker-esque internet applications that have been so popular recently/Alex Gratzer, WSU Evergreen. More here.

Question: What do you think of the relatively new Internet tool Twitter?

29 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

JeanC on March 30 at 5:51 p.m.
Meh, it’s a fad.
jreighley on March 30 at 5:51 p.m.
Twitter is an awesome tool. I think the critics don’t really get it.

Basically it is instant access to the knowedge of hundreds of people. It is a new media that is much faster and less centralized than the traditional media.

Nearly any conference or event I can listen in to the impressions of people who are experiencing it.

I kinda liken it to “The Borg” on Star Trek. “You will be assimilated”
cantyoureadthesigns on March 30 at 5:56 p.m.
Twitter is for twits with extremely short attention spans.
blushresponse on March 30 at 5:58 p.m.
@jreighley You’ve got it right. It’s a single experience experienced by the entire world in a single conversation. Those not on Twitter should be assimilated :)

I put a question out there to my followers and I get instant feedback. There’s always somebody listening in your time of need. BTW: There’s a huge Spokane following for Twitter. We have “tweet-ups” once a month which usually consist of going to a neat place to eat, drink and be merry. We get to know each other and it’s just another friendly face in this small town of ours.
hhuseland on March 30 at 6:20 p.m.
I am on face book and I noticed some of the “tests” like find your IQ asks a ton of questions that I refused to answer. I see some possibilities, if not probabilities of serious phishing. One has to always be on the alert.
meghannc on March 30 at 6:34 p.m.
I hate Twiiter.

Still, follow me @ megsymegs.
RandomGemini on March 30 at 6:36 p.m.
You thought MySpace was “dazzling”… and you’re here writing about tech tools. I hope that I’m not the only one who finds irony in this.

MySpace was a lot of things, cute, novel… enjoyable, something you can show your mother in law how to use in short order, sure. But it was never something that impressed anyone for being of great technical prowess. MySpace was, and is, a fad.

Twitter may be the same thing, but it certainly has a different take on the universe and none of the tacky music or blinding graphics that web designers abandoned more than a decade ago. Also, Twitter so far, certainly seems to be more useful than any other social networking site that I have used so far. Within days of signing up for twitter, my husband received over a dozen job offers from local companies who were looking for employees within his field. This did not happen with myspace or facebook.

Furthermore… Twitter has only figured out its own business model in the last two weeks and will use a system similar to LiveJournal. The guys that wrote twitter wrote it because they wanted to play around with Ruby on Rails and never expected it to take off and were surprised when it did. So the argument that they were just trying to cash in sort of ludicrous. Of course they are looking to cash in now (wouldn’t you?), but originally, it was just a way to learn a programming language.
Cindy_H on March 30 at 7:23 p.m.
I don’t follow.
I lead.
Since I don’t have Twitter, the rest of you are out of luck.
heh
starvingartist on March 30 at 7:37 p.m.
Like any tool, it is only as good if the person knows how to use it and has a good purpose for the tool. Yeah. Anyone can type in what they are doing in 140 characters or less and hit “send” Pretty boring if you ask me and to be honest, the first time I used it…after a couple of weeks I didn’t bother with the thing.

Cleaning the floors of your entire home with a dust buster would seem a bit pointless and a waste of time. Why bother, right?

However, my opinion has changed as I began to find a use for it for myself. ( That dust buster IS good for some things! )

Because of twitter, I have made new friends in a place where I knew no one after moving here. It’s helped me stay connected with my community. The majority of people I follow on twitter are in Spokane or close to it. This is a choice I made from the beginning. This makes it great for meeting new people, sharing local concerns, finding out new places/events going on locally, and it is great for traveling. It is so nice to be out of town and quickly tweet, “I heard it was supposed to be sunny, but I see it snowing in Ellensburg. What are the roads like?” and get REAL people responding in a matter of minutes. But that is because how I like to use twitter.

At the same time, following breaking news is a breeze. Why get your news from one place? With all the media stations in town utilizing twitter, I can get breaking news first no matter which media outlet does. That of course goes for national news too or find twitter accounts that are more specific in your areas of interest when it comes to news like sports or politics.

If you have a favorite blogger, find out about their updates quickly. If the person using twitter is smart, they will link you to their entries. Some websites use it for fun, other companies letting you know what they are working on, these are all people who have found a use for twitter and they all use it differently. Have an interest in what people are doing in your profession? You can follow people who tweet about that, share tips with each other or find comfort in knowing you aren’t the only one having to deal with a troubling client that day. Only you can decide what and how to use twitter for yourself.

And of course…twitter is not for everyone. But just because you haven’t found a good use for it or simply don’t like it ( because vacuum cleaners do have attachments after all. ), it doesn’t make it a bad or pointless tool.
Cis on March 30 at 8:09 p.m.
I think Twitter is for the younger crowd (yes, I know, McCain uses it) but the younger crowd is less private and has a no fear attitude.
But us older ones, are more private… and our greatest fear is ID theft.
After using a new (to me) site called www.pipl.com and looking up my name, I was surprised how much information was there, and also how much information was on one of my children that was from Facebook. Pictures, relatives.. it was scary to me.
Escapee on March 30 at 8:43 p.m.
I still have no working idea of what these networking sites actually ‘do’. Why do I need to be on these sites when I already have a blog and a couple of e-mail accounts? I keep getting messages that read something like, “so-and-so has left you a message on Facebook”…then I have to leave my e-mail box, go to facebook, sign on there and get through all the Facebook stuff to read what they sent me, when it would have been easier–and Just As Effective–to send me an E-MAIL. I see these networking sites as a more complicated way of doing what you’re already doing when you get your e-mail. As such, I don’t, nor will I ever, ‘twitter’.
Frum Helen Back on March 30 at 10:52 p.m.
Golly Cis. I didn’t know about Pipl until you mentioned it. I’m ready to throw out my computer it scared me so bad.
toadman on March 31 at 9:03 a.m.
I’m totally gonna tweet about all this…so long as I can trim the tweets down to something small enough worthy of a tweet…suffice it to say, I have twatted numerous times. (innuendo intended.)

;-)

Me? I don’t really care one way or the other. It’s just something else to shove content on to the internets, good or bad, or empty, or whatever. Also, it’s always a challenge to come up with 140 characters that are witty and informative. All you naysayers are just negative sourpusses. Again.. I’ll tweet about that too..

heh..
Arch_Druid on March 31 at 9:22 a.m.
@everyone CNN had no problem buying into the “scam.”
hollykb on March 31 at 10:58 a.m.
This column is worthless. The author didn’t even bother to explore what Twitter is capable of. He went into it thinking it’s like Facebook, which it’s not.

I wrote a column about the practical uses for Twitter last week. It’s a lot more useful than this guy says it is:

http://www.uiargonaut.com/content/view/7746/44/

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About this blog

D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.