I'm curious to know the twitter names of other Hacker News readers to add to my following list. I've just started "twittering" recently, and it seems to have potential. Mine is at: http://twitter.com/gibsonf1
I had the same feeling, initially. Here's what I've found though: there are really two kinds of relationships on Twitter. Allow me to elaborate.
On one end of the spectrum, I follow people who have similar interests as me (Ruby, Rails, Clojure, Arduino, Macs, etc). Lots of them are well-known in their various niche communities. Yes, you do get some degree of "drinking coffe" and "walking the dog" type of notifications, but a lot more "hey, this piece of software is cool", and "I just released this new library" messages. The signal to noise ratio is really pretty good, assuming you are choosy about who you follow. If you follow interesting people, they will help you find interesting things. I wrote about this a little bit, particularly about how I read RSS feeds much less now because of Twitter: http://larrywright.me/blog/articles/209-the-coming-decline-o...
On the other end of the spectrum, I do follow people that I know personally, or that live in the same town (it's small). What I get from these people is different. It's more akin to meeting down at the local coffee shop and catching up. There's value in this as well.
It's very easy to dismiss Twitter unless you look closely. You're right, in a sense: I don't care what a random person is doing right now. But that's not really what Twitter is about, and until you use it for a bit, that's hard to understand.
If you want to try it, find some people whose blogs you enjoy reading, and follow them for a bit on Twitter. I think you'll be surprised at what you find.
But isn't the constant dribbling of information distracting?
Wouldn't you be able to find the same valuable information, when you need it, by googleing?
Isn't the constant dribbling of e-mail distracting? No, because I can go check it when I want to.
Twitter does, however, provide me with insights into the people I know (business or otherwise) and keeps me on the edge with developments in several communities I'm involved with. For example, I'm a Ruby guy, and so I follow a lot of Rubyists.. you can bet I'm pretty clued in to brand new Ruby libraries, etc, as they come out (or even just in a very quiet personal beta).
Explaining Twitter is next to impossible. Unless you've been using it in anger for a few months, you don't have a clue what it is, but then suddenly.. one day you do.
Isn't the constant dribbling of e-mail distracting?
Yes, it is. There's a reason why Knuth answers regular mail as a batch process (once every few months), for example. A common productivity tip is to limit yourself to checking email only a few times a day. The productivity harm caused be frequent context switching has been well-documented, especially if you're doing something context-intensive like programming.
But you don't have to deal with e-mail as a dribble, as you say. I deal with e-mail as a batch process, just several times a day instead of once every few months. Ditto for Twitter and the like.
The problem is that you don't know what you don't know. I see a lot of libraries, articles, technologies, etc that I wouldn't otherwise see, and wouldn't know to Google.
Not sure I explained that well, but I think you can get my meaning.
Twitter can be a distraction (and I let it be more than I should), but like anything else it can be managed.
Not aimed at you, but too many people are searching for that magic "something" that will help them be awesome. When you get to the top of a field and talk with your peers, you realise that everyone else has the same questions as you, and that the answers come slowly and loudly. It's hard to miss truly great things.
It is actually more than that. I am following some 150 people and it is very rare that people tweet about what they are doing. When i started using twitter, i was skeptical that it would be of any value. But slowly i realize that it is much more powerful than i thought. It is like speaking on a stage where your followers are listening to you always.
By just putting in 10 or 15 mins of your day, you will be able to generate a lot of value from your twitter account. It is like a brand, better you tweet, more followers you have (how you utilize them depends on you).
Giving you an example, I have around 225 followers, so whenever i tweet a link, i get around 50 views. There are people with more followers like 1000 who i am assuming get around 250 views for every link they post. Mike Arrington has close to 25k - 30k followers, i am pretty much sure he get lot of traffic from twitter and he is also socializing with his users.
I have a Twitter account with over 10,000 followers (not my personal account to which I only have 1500 :)) and you're guaranteed about 80-100 clicks within the first few minutes of linking to something (yes, I've used a tracker). Typically, it sees about 250 clicks overall (within 24 hours) with 500 being a record (back when it had about 8000 followers).
If that's true, then why are you on the Internet in the first place? If you have no care over what other people are doing and don't care if other people care about you, what utility can the Internet have whatsoever?
Actually, as a follow up here.. is there actually anything you can use the Internet for that doesn't require either you or a third party caring about the activity of another party? I suspect there is.
Weather, perhaps? Stuff like e-mail, most news, IM, chat, or whatever are ruled out though, even this very site.
I think his point relates to "say it for the sake of saying it" as opposed to "doing this for a reason." So, case in point, I come here to get in debates. I use Tumblr to store my ideas (I don't follow other users, and I've tried to disable the following count so I'm not influenced by my far-too-many followers). But for Twitter, I see it as "I'm here to talk for the sake of talking." I don't get it. As it is, now that my Twitter shows my Tumblr posts, I've been slowly picking up Twitter followers, and it baffles me. I follow people using RSS, and I've asked before to allow HN to give me a "new replies" RSS feed so I can centralize everything (and internally, versus on an open field like FriendFeed). I'm horrified at the thought of adding yet another outlet to post links and say random things - there're too many already.
It's a shame because I like how minimal Twitter is. It's zen in a way. I just don't see the point to having one and keeping it: one site is enough, and my poison is Tumblr.
You don't get much value out of Twitter if you just post for the sake of posting. It's like e-mail. If all you used it for was writing to a penpal, then there's limited value there. But.. most people have evolved beyond that.
My grandmother would never have seen the point of e-mail beyond sending "letters" to each other.. but we all know now it goes deeper than that.
People who don't see extended value in Twitter now are like my theoretical grandmother and her myopic view of e-mail.
(EDIT - Why would you downvote me for answering his question? Someone explain why twitter is such an amazing tool that I should incorporate it into my already busy life...)
I was also very skeptical, but finally I found one good use for Twitter.
If there is some real-time trouble (e.g. you couldn't access your Gmail account, or Hacker News), Twitter is the first place where you can confirm your suspicions (and sometimes even find a solution/explanation).
On Twitter you can find out in minutes if there is anybody else having the same trouble as you, instead of hours till Google indexes blogs with complaints.
Searching Twitter is now my default reaction to figure out what's going on:
I have had quite a few opportunities b/c of twitter. I will be speaking at GlueCon in Denver b/c of Twitter. I am much more deeply connected to my local tech community b/c of Twitter. And there are friends that I have a deeper relationship with b/c of Twitter.
Now, having said that, there is absolutely no reason anyone should have down voted you for answering the question.
Do you need it? No.
Can it be highly beneficial? Yes.
Some reasons:
I see no need for it.
I don't like exposing myself that much.
It doesn't allow for material long enough to be useful.
I also don't have a facebook profile, nor a Myspace, but I will make a Linked-In one.
I stood for election last year, and I wasn't thrilled that I had to make my name, address, email address and phone numbers as publicly available as it was. I guess some folks don't care much about their privacy, and some folks care too much.
If you're running for election I'm guessing you're old-ish? (From the point of an 18-year-old, where old-ish is 28+?) In high school I worked with a bunch of teachers on Internet-related stuff, and I found that there's a disconnect in how people across the gap view privacy.
For people 18 year old and younger, there's never not been an Internet. When I was 8 I had already been told a bunch of horrifying "keep your security" stories. I was probably younger than 15 when I first heard about sites like 4chan terrorizing people for years on-end. The result, though, isn't that you hide yourself (which is the reaction I see in my father especially). It's that you decide exactly how you'll let yourself be seen online, you avoid things that'll get you in trouble, and you don't take the Internet too seriously. Most harassment things won't happen if you sound reasonable, don't botch up spelling, avoid fanfiction, and don't actively taunt Anonymous. Similarly, a lot of stuff online is less serious than you can let yourself believe: if you get threatening calls, they almost never mean a thing. People troll. It's easy, and it's become a part of society.
In the end, the sheer amount of information means that almost nobody gets targeted. You're a small bubble in a vast ocean. We young brats see it like that, anyway: now, everything is considered public information but still under your control. (I was called into a teacher's office for something I said on Facebook: I said that it was my private space, that the teacher had no right accessing my information, and that the person who took my stuff off of Facebook was violating terms and against the law. She couldn't do anything after that.) So it doesn't become a matter of privacy or not: it becomes a matter of just what is most public.
I agree with you about Twitter, though. Constraints aren't particularly useful in its case.
For this particular office, the min age is 18 (the other 2 quals are to be registered to vote and live in the district). But yes, I'm more than 2x that, and the guy who won is even older than I am.
I don't, because I don't feel necessary to post every single thought I have, because I might not know what to post, or just basic laziness. But I'll probably get one in the near future.
I feel like thats a common misconception. It certainly not every single thought of mine, and very little substance even. It's nice because the whole system is async, so you can get to it when you can, if you want, care or not care. the barrier to tweet is non existent :)
I know. So maybe some tweets are interesting, they usually contain links to blog posts worth checking out. I'll get to them through Reddit or HN, maybe I just don't like to be so connected.
I have one, but all it does is parrot my Tumblr account. I don't check it, don't actively use it, and until I got the ability to parrot Tumblr posts, I didn't use it.
Reason being: Tumblr does everything I'd want to do with Twitter, but it's more flexible. I can write more, express myself. I don't see the point in small blurb updates, I don't care to post small, clever quips, and above all I find the interface bland after more than 5 minutes of usage. I tried Twitteriffic, but I had applications that do nothing but connect to the web.
I use IRC channels to ask arcane mysql, asterisk, and other tech questions, on the freenode channels. It's kind of hit or miss. However, a couple of times I have found good help on the #asterisk channel, and ended up talking with someone via private message who I recommended that my customer just pay to do the work instead of me.
At first twitter just seemed useless, but then I figured out what it's good for: "spamming" people. I signed up for rss feeds of various search terms I'm interested in, and when something goes by, zing, off goes an URL. I don't think this makes for very interesting reading, but in any case, I'm here:
This is only because the links where put there before pg changed the rules to not allow them... it is just an artifact of a profile that has not been changed recently.
I think I do. Honestly can't remember! I believe I set up an account and had something else push some kind of status update to it... perhaps even comments like these... through FriendFeed maybe?
So, uh, who is working on an online service to keep track of all the online services I use? ;-)
I'm using Twitter to keep a record of interesting URLs, along with a couple of hashtags and a brief description. I've been trying this with Delicious for the first time, too, but so far I prefer Twitter, probably because more people use it, and it's easier for my friends to peruse.
It's just links, mostly to technical-, math- or education-related things. I try to keep the off-topic stuff to a minimum (I think there are maybe 4 or 5 tweets total out of a few hundred that don't follow the formula.)
I do have a couple of concerns about using Twitter for this purpose:
* according to the Twitter API docs, they only keep 3200 tweets "online" at a time for any given account.
* the dependency on the TinyURL service.
* Twitter has historically spotty reliability.
So I'm working on an archiving solution, which I hope to make available soon. If you're the hacker type, it might appeal to you, too. I'll give a pointer to it on my Twitter feed when it's ready for testing.
I was slow warming to twitter, but really I've found that there's a pretty huge overlap between my LinkedIn contacts and my Twitter followers. It's largely my online-geek-entrepreneur persona and it's a nice way of letting other folks in the world keep tabs on what stuff we've got coming down the pipe and doing the same for other startups / geeks.
The problem I find with it is that if you follow more than a handful of active tweeters, then there are too many tweets to read in a reasonable amount of time. That said, I find I get useful information from people with similar (work-related) interests to mine, and a way to 'get to know' people, which can lead to more in-depth conversations when you have something you want to converse about. (twitter.com/billroberts)
I refuse. It's one of those things that comes along that I know I don't need (time sink), and stick to my guns and ignore it.
Didn't have a Facebook profile for the longest time... then started working with a client who wanted to build a Facebook application. Created a profile, and it snowballed from there :/
I'm at http://twitter.com/semel, I'm also cofounder of the 'Oscars for Twitter': http://shortyawards.com. My feeling is that Twitter is what you make of it. People use it for professional networking, sales, customer service, keeping in touch with friends, organizing events, letting people know what they're doing at the moment, or any other number of uses.
No. It's my opinion that people who twitter are either egomaniacs or who have something to sell. I have much higher respect for people who actually maintain strictly technical blogs these days.
Worth adding that my tweets are of course, by far, the most interesting here, and everyone should follow me right now so that they get the benefit of my infinite wisdom and mansuetude.
Don't listen to the others! I am the one true prophet.
also, http://twitter.com/zadr is mine if anyone's remotely interested.