And Slaters Go Plop

7 Responses to “Twitter”

1. Ken says:

   March 30, 2010 at 2:34 pm

   Ah, so you want Bleater!

   Mind you I find Twitter very useful. Certainly not for a conversation. But to get quick notification of breaking news, advice of interesting articles, fining our what articles/arguments the “opposition” is promoting, etc. In some ways it has replaced my RSS feed. It’s much quicker.

   It is also a good way of communicating/keeping up with things. When I went to Melbourne this month I became aware of extra meetings organised around the main convention. Consequently got to have breakfast with other bloggers (including PZ Myers and the local ABC religion journalist) and went to a separate book launch involving AC Grayling and Russell Blackford, Only knew of these via Twitter.

   I was also aware of meetups in pubs, etc. which I would have taken advantage of if I was about 40 years younger.

   This convinced my that Twitter is useful It really depends on who you follow.
2. Frank says:

   March 31, 2010 at 7:46 am

   Oh flip! That’s what I haven’t been doing… using it to keep up with the ‘opposition’

   Ken, I get the feeling that’s what a lot of people use it for; a more modern form of an RSS feed and it does that very well.

   Damian, you’re right, it can be shallow as it doesn’t allow for any depth in conversation.
3. Ken says:

   March 31, 2010 at 12:46 pm

   Actually, I don’t know that it is necessarily wise to use it too seriously to “check out the opposition.” The internet is extremely tribal. I have really only followed #climategate for “keeping up.” It does indicate that there is a huge amount of hysteria amongst deniers and that they are linked in with #teaparty and other conservative #. But it give a very false picture of the overall attitudes. Just because it is inevitably one-sided. I have to keep reminding myself this to stop getting depressed about humanity.

   But it is certainly a lot quicker than RSS feed. I got links to the just released UK parliamentary report on “climategate” very quickly today – and several hours before anything showed up on RSS.

   Mind you, I knew it was coming – but then only because of a tweet I had received a few days ago.
4. Damian says:

   March 31, 2010 at 1:44 pm

   I recognise that Twitter is useful as a kind of substitute for an RSS aggregator and that I may have too high an expectation but I really find that the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. For example, I received tweets every time Ken would comment on his blog and every 2km that Frank cycled.

   I’m happy to go back to a mixture of RSS feeds and my daily ‘doing the rounds’ of various websites. I guess that counts as old skool these days eh?

   (As an aside, I just went to check out twitter for the first time since abandoning it and the site is down. Nice.)
5. Frank says:

   March 31, 2010 at 2:25 pm

   HAHA! I can see how the cycling tweets would be annoying… annoying for me when they don’t work properly as well

   In all fairness though, they weren’t every day and it would only be 4 tweets over a period of 25 minutes… and I was really only doing it so I could see the results at the end since the dang app wouldn’t give me that info inside the iPhone interface itself. I should go hunting for a new one. But now I’m just making excuses
6. Ken says:

   March 31, 2010 at 3:32 pm

   I guess the way I use Twitter is not to try and capture everything. I just browse through recent tweets on my iPod from time to time. So I only catch up with tweets in a limited time range. So I end up ignoring a lot (and I really should delete some of those I follow which are of no use.

   Take your point about blog comments. perhaps I should operate several different accounts so that followers could choose. (Perhaps some would like to know about comments – and Franks exercising).

   So yes it is noisy, but I can handle that.
7. Damian says:

   March 31, 2010 at 3:40 pm

   Hehe, it’s OK, I’m just ribbing you both.