Whats the point of Twitter?

[Kaz]

You can use your settings to hide the stuff from your friends you don't want to see Rodo, and stop it reappearing!

Each to his own though.

Absolutely!

[Suff]

I have a twitter account. I use it to follow elections mainly so it's hardly used. I tweet from time to time, but, twitter like, if you tweet what they don't like you can find it suddenly vanishes.

I have no time for wading through the chaff to find the one very small kernel of wheat. It's about 10 tonnes of chaff per kernel in my experience.

Yes it can be useful but in my life not really that much. I have no interest in local services in France or Belgium and wouldn't understand what they were tweeting anyway. It has it's uses. Parisians were tweeting porte overte with their address during the last attack and anyone who could see it and make it was made welcome.

It is an instant messaging vehicle. The lifetime of any information on twitter tends to be in minutes. Yes some public service stuff will be more long lived, but, "my life in 146 characters or less" is not in my lexicon. It's just cheaper text messaging and as I send about 20 of those "Per Year", you can understand I have no time for it.

I did hear that Proximus in Belgium were putting more of their helpdesk on Twitter than on the phone lines because Twitter is visible and can create a real public storm if things go wrong. However that is a small narrow slice of the whole.

To me a world encapsulated in 146 characters is a world full of sound bytes and no substance. You all know what I think about that.....

[Weka]

I like it to find out what's happened, like an earthquake etc. you can find out the effects long before the news catches up.

[Osc]

I don't use it much, but like Weka, find it useful when something big happens or for instant reactions to a tv programme.

[Aggers]

I think a lot of people use Twitter at a time when they should be doing the job they are paid to do.

Once I wanted to find out about the Police set-up in my district, so I sent them an Email asking them.
I was thoroughly disgusted when they replied telling me to log on to Twitter to find out.
No wonder they are failing to do their job properly when they fart about on Twitter.

If I wanted to send silly obscene messages I might be interested in Twitter - but I don't, thank you.

[Diflower]

My goodness, such a lot of totally unfounded prejudice, I confess I'm quite shocked

[Aggers]

I'm afraid a lot of my adverse opinion about Twitter has been caused by reading
examples of postings often printed in the newspapers. Some absolutely disgust me.

[Gal]

My goodness, such a lot of totally unfounded prejudice, I confess I'm quite shocked

Same here Di. IMO you can't knock something unless you have tried it. But as Rodo says each to their own.

[Suff]

Personally I have tried it and have no illusions as to what it is. Yes it does pictures today but that, ever more so, is something I have no intention of ever using.

I find people are aghast, these days, that I don't have a FB page. Many think that I'm a dinosaur and haven't kept up with the times. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was one of the first few million on facebook until I deleted my account. Notably when I signed up to facebook you could tell it you were Donald Duck or Saddam Hussain and it would quite happily say "hello Donald" when you logged in.

Over the years that I had FB I decided that it was simply something that I did not need and was just a route for utter garbage and trivia to enter my life. So I deleted it. Note, not the deactivate they offer on their site but the "Delete" which you can only find by doing a Google Search.

Somewhere on my LinkedIn site I am a member of the first million users to the site. In fact I had to re-register for Linked in when I lost one of my email addresses. I was one of the first thousand because a colleague of mine was friends with one of the founders.

Twitter I avoided for quite a long time. Averse as I am to text messages, there is little chance that I will use that information medium for my day to day life.

But there is a much more important fact here. When Aggers mailed the police and asked them about their services he was sent to their twitter account. Twitter is a "real time feed" which you can also see historical "tweets". For someone, like me, who makes their life out of corporate information systems where we have to interact with the community, twitter is nothing more than a joke. Twitter is only good for announcing information, the home for that information needs to be a "place" (website, online community, call it what you want), where people can go, view, research and understand.

Trawling through real time short text "announcements" for services is one of the worst possible forms of communication I have ever been involved in. This is my business and I have been doing it for more than two decades now. E-Mail is bad enough, but instant messaging for vital services? I've seen companies struggle with this time and time again. I've watched IBM fall over with Connections, Google try to do "Good FB", I currently have a POS at work called Pulse+. All of them claim to be "Social" and "better than the rest".

I don't see lack of understanding here so much as lack of acceptance. In this case lack of acceptance, for me, works. Tweeting changes to the council bin service this week is fine, if all your catchment area is on twitter. Tweeting your entire council service plan, service offering and structure of your services is a joke and a bad one at that.

So called "Social" media is impossibly immature right now. It will morph into many different branches over the following years and there will be many dead ends on the way. Those of us who lived "Web 1.0" and the dot com boom on mobile "Telephones" which did "Dial Up" internet and WAP websites (cWAP as I call it), understand this very well. Web 2.0 may be here but it's still an infant taking it's first steps.

I won't live to see what our social network becomes eventually, but I have few illusions as to what it is today.

[Diflower]

Only the other day you all loved this story - which only happened thanks to both facebook and twitter.
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