So the kids school have decided to use Twitter for snow updates
Yup – thats fine, I look at their twitter feed which Ive bookmarked and the info’s there

But whats the rest of it all about?

If as well as the school I follow Bradley Wiggins, Steve Peat, Obama, some other stuff plus my mate Dave then when I register and log in dont I just get a page of a squillion messages/”tweets” which I imagine is pretty tough to wade through

So go on then twitts 🙂 whats it all about then?

Cheers

whats it all about then?

treat it like stw but you get to choose the idiots.

You get tweets from the people you’ve chosen to follow, plus those that they retweet.
Also, there’s no law says you have to spend hours tweeting every mundane boring incident of your average day.

Lots of legal types/journalists use Twitter to report on court proceedings. Small easily digestible chunks of immediate info.

It’s probabbly ‘useful’ for about 0.0001% of it’s users.

its good for bullying jamie on

#booooooooooom

I wondered that from the beginning. And why only such a short message? I’m suprised it ever took off at all with the alternatives of facebook or blogs to contend with. or maybe people have less to say about themsleves these days LOL 🙂

One way to find out, isn’t there.

dont I just get a page of a squillion messages/”tweets” which I imagine is pretty tough to wade through

You can organise people you follow into lists to help wit that, but the best approach is to exercise some quality control. If someone isn’t interesting or tweets incessantly, don’t follow them. There’s no ‘expectation’ like with Facebook.

And why only such a short message? I’m suprised it ever took off

Those SMS things will never catch on either.

SMS I can understand. But twitter? no…

I think for sending small bits of info out to a very targeted audience it’s brilliant – such as schools letting kids/parents know what’s going on.
Other than that…. meh 😐

I think the short message format was a technical limitation when its was first set up.. to do with mobile devices at the time – though I might be wrong…

My favourite description of twitter was “Millions of people with nothing to say, saying it anyway”

Yes you’re right about the SMS being something that could be done, but limited.

Also, there’s no law says you have to spend hours tweeting every mundane boring incident of your average day.

From what I’ve seen I thought that was the whole point of twitter/facebook etc, which is why I don’t use either 😆

SMS I can understand. But twitter? no

Both are asynchronous short freetext message protocols.

SMS = point-to-point
Twit = broadcast to subscribers

And why only such a short message?

It’s 140 characters, the same as an SMS text (as that’s what it was originally designed to be ‘tweeted’ from).

If you follow a few people who regularly tweet, as well as ‘important’ people, does the important tweet from the school that it’s closed disappear off the bottom of the screen when the other people you follow add tweets about random guff?

From what I’ve seen I thought that was the whole point of twitter/facebook etc, which is why I don’t use either

That’s not a fault of Twitter, it’s a fault of you following boring people. And, with respect, you can’t comment if you don’t use it.

It’s probabbly ‘useful’ for about 0.0001% of it’s users.

I’d say that’s wildly inaccurate. Again, it’s as useful as you make it.

Twitter has a reputation (amongst people who’ve never actually used it) for folk tweeting things like ‘just having a poo lol’ which is largely undeserved. It was maybe true for about five minutes when everyone suddenly started using it and were working out what to do with it.

I’m not about to go on a hard sell because, frankly, I don’t care. But for breaking news it’s exceptional. People in the know (about whatever subject) can fire out updates much, much quicker than if they had to write a blog post, compose a web page, write a press release, wait for a TV interview etc. If you want to know what’s happening with the production of the new series of a favourite TV show for example (which is what first drew me to it), there’s nothing better.

If you follow a few people who regularly tweet, as well as ‘important’ people, does the important tweet from the school that it’s closed disappear off the bottom of the screen when the other people you follow add tweets about random guff?

What I do is create lists, and use Tweetdeck to display those lists in columns. Historically these were ‘friends’ and ‘celebs’ for people I do or don’t know IRL, but over time this has evolved to a lower-traffic column where I read everything and everything else where I don’t care if I miss some stuff.

Oh,

The other thing I use it for is Instagram-like functionality. I don’t like Instagram because its USP seems to be “make your photos look like crap.” So I use Twitter to post pictures to the web when I’m out and about.

I thought that SMS was 160 characters.

It is. Twitter is 140, historically the other 20 were reserved for your @username.

I’ve tried it 2 or 3 times and just don’t find it useful or interesting enough of the time to keep it up.

But for breaking news it’s exceptional. People in the know (about whatever subject) can fire out updates much, much quicker than if they had to write a blog post

I think – for me – there’s nothing that I really have any interest in knowing about [in a breaking news sort of way]

I don’t follow the news. I don’t read newspapers (largely because their all biased fiction to varying degrees) or watch news on the TV radio, unless it just happens to be on.

Yet I’m usually up to date on what’s going on. Between STW, Mono and Twitter, people filter the important / interesting stuff out from the sludge and tell me what’s happening.

Push technology, it’s the future.

There’s supposed to be a point?

A good Twitter related site is this one: TweetPing. Shows all the people tweeting in the world and used hashtags etc. Pretty cool I thought.

My wife uses it a lot but just follows her family, she’s Italian so only about 60 of them. 😯
I find the thought of 60 Italians communicating without lots of waving arms quite amusing. 🙂