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Lazybones:
During frag it was announced that there would be some Twitter only contests and such announced so I finally caved and created an account, however I think I may end up never being used here is why:
1. There is no need for Twitter it self to follow any one on twitter or any major site, why? Well because a) all twitter feeds can be monitored via RSS/Atom and b) most sites are really posting anything unique their.
2. URL shortening makes abuse too easy, twitters 140 character limit created this trend and it is a bad one.
3. You can't really use it to talk to your friends, your account has two modes, useless shut in, and public nothing to hide. You can send direct messages but at that point I might as well use email instead of trying to remember the dm @ syntax or using yet another client.
4. I don't want to post my life publicly, just to people I know.
Thorin:
I hear ya.
I read an interesting article about how Twitter and Facebook are different and how Twitter tends to attract an older, post-teen crowd while Facebook tends to attract the younger teen crowd. And it comes down to what the two apps are useful for, and what those two groups tend to look for.
Twitter is better at getting information out in a (mostly) one-directional stream. People know about a possible trade for Dany Heatley minutes after it's announced, rather than hearing about it on the six o'clock sports segment. Complete strangers follow each others' feeds to get this information.
Facebook is better at connecting with a circle of friends. You can post updates on your life that matter to you and (possibly, hopefully) your friends. You can post pictures that your friends will like but that complete strangers won't care about.
It just so happens that teens tend to be more interested in keeping up with their circle of friends and tend to be less interested in keeping up with the latest news. while older people tend to be more interested in keeping up with the latest news and tend to be less interested in keeping up with their circle of friends.
Of course, I used the word "tend" in there because there are lots of exceptions either way. The numbers bear it out, though - there are a lot more teens on Facebook than Twitter, both numerically and percent-of-total-users.
Lazybones:
Twitter is mainly pointless babble and other rubbish
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/twit_research/
--- Quote ---The Texas-based research firm declared that pointless babble accounted for 40.55 per cent of traffic, while spam accounted for 3.75 per cent and self promotion 5.85 per cent. We'd take a guess that "conversational" will largely consist of people asking the pointless babblers what exactly was in their sandwich. Either way, it accounted for 37.55 per cent of Tweets.
This leaves us with total news accounting for 3.6 per cent of Twitter traffic and tweets with pass along value - or retweets - accounting for 8.7 per cent.
--- End quote ---
Darren Dirt:
Over the last few months I've seen a handful of articles or blogs that mentioned that there are literally MILLIONS of accounts on Twitter that are never used (i.e. they sign up then realize it's useless for them, and no need to -- or no easy way to? -- cancel the account).
And I wonder if cell phone service providers are behind the heavy promotion of Twitter -- cuz the "140 limit" is based on the text message limit, which ITSELF is based on "free" space that that the cell companies can CHARGE the users to use, even though it costs them exactly NOTHING (technical details surely will be provided by one of the rest of you, I just know the summary).
PS: What about Facebook's new Twitter-like feature? Any thoughts on that? (I have neither account, although I'm thinking of signing up for Myspace just so I can say Dane Cook is my friend ;) <-- TOTALLY KIDDING here, btw. )
Thorin:
--- Quote from: Lazybones on August 17, 2009, 07:30:50 PM ---Twitter is mainly pointless babble and other rubbish
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/twit_research/
--- End quote ---
Did you catch the hidden message in that article? Pear Analytics might be a bit suspect to quote for Twitter stats considering Pear Analytics then suggests using Philtro (a Twitter-filtering service), and Pear Analytics' Business Intelligence Expert happens to be the CEO of the company that makes Philtro.
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