Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
If you try to use social media as a traditional advertising platform, of course nobody's going to notice.
Leo used Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. to broadcast content instead of cultivating conversation & community. If he was using these tools for two-way interaction instead of one-way communication, he would've gotten a lot more complaints when he went offline.
It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real, human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.
Twitter et al are in their infancy and are still growing. They get new users all the time; the new users happen upon different aspects of the tool and use it differently; some uses are ultimately better than others. It's the blind men and the elephant, except that the elephant is the size of the Library of Congress and there are seven billion blind men, two thirds of whom have yet to touch the elephant.
I, for one, don't have so many problems with Twitter, but that's probably because I use it differently from others. Let me offer some suggestions:
If you find that you feel lost because you no longer remember how many of the people you follow on Twitter are still alive you need to follow fewer people. I follow 97 people. Even that may ultimately be too large, although most of those people are very quiet, so I can probably keep growing it, especially as the client software gets smarter.
Remember that Twitter is RSS for humans. It's Delicious for non-nerds. It is for exchanging links, not ideas. If you have an idea that can't fit into 140 characters write it down in 2000 characters and then tweet the link.
Of course, Twitter can also be used to exchange ideas that are not worth more than 140 characters. Sometimes these Tweets are short because they are poetry. Sometimes they are short because they are stupid. Follow the poets; unfollow the stupid. Just because people are shouting nonsense doesn't mean you have to hear them. The Internet's soundproofing is very good.
Speaking of Internet soundproofing, signal-to-noise, and maintaining one's sanity: I don't follow hashtags. Like, ever. I'm not quite ready to pound the table and declare that hashtags are never going to work, because they're eventually going to be nothing but SEObots retweeting other SEObots in a vast, roiling AI botwar, but I for one don't miss them. Important things get retweeted by your followers or echoed in some other medium.
If someone's Twitter feed is not a net win you need to unfollow them. This can hurt. I kind of like Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, but the guy does. Not. Stop. My feed is like 85% Ebert. And almost everything he says is interesting, or could be interesting, but I'm not suffering from a shortage of interesting things, and he's drowning out the quiet folks. I need a Twitter client that has better stream management. For example, it could throttle access to my main stream: Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream; to see Ebert's full stream I need to click on something.
Speaking of which: I know there are ten thousand Twitter clients already, but there will be more. Client development is also in its infancy.
For a lot of sites, the RSS feed is basically a headline and a link to the actual article. 140 characters can be sufficient for those purposes... Not that that's necessarily taxing the limits of RSS or anything though.
I'd call phone calls limited to just 14 seconds a new technology, and I'd love it. Imagine that you could just answer any call because you know that it's not going to degenerate into 5-minute long series of you just nodding to the endless story of the other side.
The kind of throttling you're talking about here is something these "statusphere" products need to get better at. I don't necessarily want to unfollow someone, or unfriend them, or whatever the local idiom is. I just want to see less, and preferably just the best stuff. I need something like those huge mixer boards with a slider for each source, which I can tune to adjust the overall info mix.
> The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives
Much less in their pockets.
> Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream;
And those should be the ones re-tweeted most often.
Schopenhauer had a name for this empty talk, he called it “fencing in the mirror.” It’s more common than you think. Consider all the times you’ve seen some blogger apologize for not posting recently – profusely addressing some concern that likely was never expressed. Or the Twitter updates to 38 followers, half of which are bots or uncaring companies. More realistically, maybe you’ve read too much into looks from a table of girls at a restaurant (a type I evolutionary error). Maybe you like like to roll down the windows in your car, turn up the stereo and know that everyone is just so impressed by your classic taste.
This isn't really directed a Leo since he does actually have an audience, but people obviously aren't hanging off of his every utterance. The same goes for all of us (for the most part) and our comments here, haha.
I've never understood the appeal of Twitter and I think it would help if more "social media people" (and web app developers) could try to understand why. They are obscure little techie tools that a huge percentage of the population will never use. When Leo says "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber" what he really should say is "I was shouting into a miniscule echo chamber". And nobody was really listening because it's not really a conversation, it's all about self-promotion and that tends to be a very one-sided activity.
Buzz and Wave will never take off with the people I work with, or my friends, because we're all a bit old-fashioned and I doubt any one of us would sooner "tweet" a message than phone someone up and talk to them directly. Sure, I realise it's a one-to-many operation (unlike a phone-call) but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?
"what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?"
It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace, foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently _where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self-fulfillment.
Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone noticing your daily playlist, you have an admirer. That admirer might want to know more about you based on that superficial quality, and follow you on your social update tool of choice. It's a tool of communication, much like a phone (actually more like a partyline, but I digress).
When it boils down to it, people need people, and as social creatures, we find every convenient avenue of acquiring and managing our social sphere as we can without expending too much energy. If we didn't care about any of that, hell, we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?
"we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?"
I guessed someone would try to make that point :) You'll notice I rarely do comment here, and I don't on reddit, youtube, Digg, etc. At least here, there is something approaching a conversation. But, Golden Rule: if I have nothing to say, I don't.
But you do acknowledge that you are a user in those networks, correct? You check those sites, and by reading (even without active commenting) you are a participant. Some people project themselves, others observe, that was how social interactions had always been.
My apologies if I was unclear: I don't check those sites. Also, this insight you have that people are basically social animals, that's not exactly a revelation. But I would contend, along with OP, that our natural sociability is not best served by social networking.
Certainly the ego-driven component you describe is there, but as with group events, there is a balanced version, and then there are the networking whores that don't understand the difference between having a natural connection with someone and "hi my name is X, here's my card, let's have lunch!"
You don't have to post navel-gazing facebook status updates. It is also a very elegant way to share family and friend group photos and plan events.
Do you even remember how hard it was to plan events with Evite? That was incredibly horrible, and yet people were thrilled because it was better than nothing.
I often get good information on Twitter, for example about events happening in my city. I am thankful that some people share the information. Ego driven, I don't know - obviously there are "egos" behind the keyboard, but sharing can be a win for everyone.
Maybe it is just hard to grasp for people who don't understand the concept of "pay forward"?
And quite a few people, one generation from now, will look back and go "I wasted thousands of hours on that?"
What will we have to show for Facebook other than a bunch of divorces and bad memories from resurfaced high school acquaintances? I guess another guilt-ridden billionaire charity fund but not much more.
Unfortunately, most of the HN comments < 140 characters are so content free as to basically violate the site's guidelines.
(and yes, the above would fit into a tweet, but it would be so devoid of context as to be absolutely meaningless to people who weren't already reading this same thread)
Not sure what to think about this post. I've heard Leo speak about the likes of Twitter being the "internet's nervous system." In reality, these social networks - although useful for certain activities, like networking - are mostly superficial and disposable. Perhaps, when you are surrounded by pundits and PR types, it becomes difficult seeing beyond the hype.
The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.
> We need to know what the superficial people are talking about...
ugh, no thanks. If I have an hour of free time and a choice between hearing what vapid morons have to talk about, or illuminating myself with something a bit deeper, I'll take the later.
It's the primal appeal of Twitter to me: a digital alternative to screaming into a pillow / bathtub / primal scream ball whenever a politician does something stupid.
A little while ago, Twitter only stored our last 20 tweets and discarded the previous ones. When they stopped being that much ephemeral, no one noticed.
Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News? Does that mean Hacker News isn't valuable? What if someone decided to stop editing Wikipedia? When you read the news, do you remember the byline of every story you read?
For large public conversations, most of what you read is contributed by people you don't know. Your friends' contributions are only a small part of what makes the place what it is. And yet the overall effect is valuable.
So post or don't post, as you please. There are only a few people whose posting schedules I keep track of, but I still value the overall effort.
> Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News?
HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background or your body-language.
The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a synchronized motion going on, much like dancing. It is said that skillful sales people are so persuasive because they can get other people to dance on their rhythm.
Twitter is to me a tipping point ... an ADHD epidemy going rampant / information overload showing its side effects.
Ever seen a 14 year old teenager talk to his friends on messenger ... context free, incomprehensible, pointless messages written with a bad grammar and lots of misspellings because typing is just too much work.
That's what Twitter is ... a communication medium that's bringing everyone's communication style to a common denominator.
Finally! I've been hoping this would happen. About a year or so ago Leo's podcasts became all about Twitter. Twitter this, twitter that, people on twitter, followers, yadda yadda. It got so tiring for those of us who really couldn't care less.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.
Yeah, while I enjoy the long format and the lively discussion (it keeps the car commute enjoyable), the TWiT podcast is very much an echo chamber. I've since stopped listening to it and instead have broadened my podcast list.
Can I ask to what you have broadened your podcast list? Sometimes twit gets boring, and that leaves an hour long void to fill during my commute. Searching for 'technology podcast' unsurprisingly returns a lot of terrible podcasts.
Currently I've been catching up to old episodes of Radiolab. I've had a hard time finding tech-related podcasts that are enjoyable to listen to. Currently what I listen to are:
* NPR: Car Talk
* NPR: Planet Money
* PRI: Selected Shorts
* PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge
* Stuff You Should Know
* This American Life
* WNYC's Radiolab
* Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio
That's usually more than enough new content to last me through a week (1.5 hrs per day in the car). Sometimes TAL has re-runs that I've already listened to, or SYSK has a not-so-interesting topic, but it's usually not a problem.
I really miss the Stack Overflow podcasts, but I suspect they just ran out of material.
I've tried listening to Software Engineering Radio, but I'm practically ADD when it comes to podcast hosts, and it's difficult to pay attention to this sort of podcast (others seem to love it, but it's not for me). This is one of the reasons why I love Planet Money and Radiolab. Both usually talk about topics that aren't in my field, and usually do so in a very interesting manner.
Doesn't this say more about his observation skills and his style of interaction than anything about social media? He says himself that there was a big drop off in engagement over the last few weeks. The fact that he didn't notice that is hardly the fault of Twitter or Buzz.
That's a timely article, because I looked at Buzz within my Gmail account just the other day and found pretty much a similar story to Leo. I havn't really made any significant use of Buzz, and it didn't seem to be adding any value, so I disabled it. Fundamentally there was no activity going on within Buzz that I really cared about.
Maybe if Google do something more interesting with Buzz in future then I might re-enable it one day, but otherwise it seems to have gone the same way that Wave did.
Funny, but not at all surprising. I don't think I've ever read anything on Twitter. I can't imagine why anybody ever would.
What is the use case where a human being would ever actually read a piece of text coming from Twitter? The only one I can think that of is searching for one's own product name to see if anybody is writing about it. Is there another reason I'm missing?
The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion. They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to read it.
That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time, that's not the problem. The issue is they only read the most recent stuff river of news style and who knows how many people they follow?
Leo's Buzz to Twitter cross-poster should have had some kind of link tracking built into the URL to tell him if people were clicking on his updates.
Leo says he had 15 updates in 2 weeks not broadcast, but when you look at his usual posting style, it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating. That's not exactly quality material that people will click through to. Had he posted more appealing content, his lack of updates would have been a greater loss.
>it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating
Leo, after the thousands of words he's written promoting these types of social media, found out that that's what most people are writing about, trivialities of interest to no-one/notification information we already have two dozen ways of getting...and thus everybody finds everybody else's tweets annoying and instantly put into that same part of the brain that selectively ignores web advertising.
That's why nobody noticed. I doubt most people would notice if most of the people they follow stopped tweeting. They're probably ignoring most of it anyway.
I actually get a ton of value out of Twitter both personally and professionally (it's a question of who you choose to follow). However, what your expectations from Twitter are shouldn't be the same as your expectations from a blog. It's great for finding out about events or what might be happening at an event, about getting instant feedback on something (your example, although it can extend beyond a product), and finding material that other smart people find. But if you want to understand and hear someone's thoughts or wisdom, it's not the right venue, and that's what some people are finding out.
1. I see X happening when I'm walking around (protesters, fireworks, concert, police barricades).
2. I search where I am in Tweetie.
3. I find out what's going on and, if I'm interested in it, might join.
Twitter is all about discovery. Not communication.
I don't consider the folks from my town (Baltimore) self-promoting new media douchebags. They're people about my age who I know socially doing what they would normally do but stopping to mention it every once in awhile.
I don't see it as "hey, hey, look at me!" but I have mellowed out a lot in the last few years, so it's probably just a difference of perspective. I'm optimistic with people I know and pessimistic with people I don't.
The people I follow on Twitter basically fall into two categories: people I know in person and people I don't. I like knowing what's going on in the lives of people I know & care about. And, the people I don't know share interesting articles and links to stuff they've done, which I'm interested in.
It's especially important to me as we all get older, move to other states, and have kids which eat into our free time. We can't hang out, but we can "hang out" with each other through Twitter.
" was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves."
I really don't think this is true at all. Leo runs a media company and many people follow him to keep tabs on what he is doing. It is not a personal relationship. He doesn't answer a large percentage of his audience so there is no true conversation. Most people probably thought he was on vacation or something. They were probably listening to others or talking to the people they actually have real "engagement" (oh, how I hate that term) with. Dunbar's number seems to be in affect.
The funny part is that many people with high follower counts crowd source answers instead of doing research, but don't balance that with answering questions themselves.
He was absent from all of his podcasts for a while to take his daughter Abby off to college. I noticed he hadn't tweeted for a bit. I just figured he was relaxing after all that stress.
I actually see this as a strength of Twitter-like microblogging services. If you have no more contributions you fade gracefully into the background while the collective move on uninterrupted.
I think Leoville is misguided for treating microblogs literally as a lite version of blogs. I guess the term is a little misleading but the platform really isn't a place for any random blogger to find a cult following.
Individuality is not that big of a deal. Trends are. I wonder if this is a contributing factor to Twitter's success in Japan, which has a culture favoring the collective over the "me" mentality.
I hope that when he posts a picture of a sandwich he posts an update to Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I hope he posts updates to these services in a selective manner.
I like being able to follow people on Twitter because it gives me a convenient way to see snippets of info about what's going on in their lives. I think he should continue to provide that for the the people that want it, even if the hub of the information is once again his blog.
Twitter is awesome if you're a brand or company doing the shouting into the darkness. It's a great way to advertise or promote for free. You can also identify and engage with your most ardent supporters.
Otherwise, from a personal standpoint, it's pretty useless. I just post to stroke my ego every now and then.
This is the gist of the article for me, in particular because his tweet is the way I found the post.
I think if anything it just goes to show that buzz is way more personal than twitter and most people unfollowed him on it because he was too spammy. My small circle of friends still routinely use it to share stuff that we find amusing/interesting.
I think the gist of Leo's post isn't that blogging is better then microblogging, it's that putting content onto a system you control is better than putting it onto an open service where you are basically a sharecropper for Da Man and your content can vanish without notice.
And that this is a valid point even if your "content" is a photo of a sandwich.
They haven't invented anything ... they just brought an existing paradigm to the Internet: and that would be SMS messages.
And don't know about the US, but SMS messages have been all the rage and are still really popular, with some anecdotal evidence of how similar they are ....
Retwitting (CHECK): I got the same jokes over SMS from multiple people.
Many-to-many communication medium (CHECK): Around every holiday, people are sending SMS messages with greetings to a whole list of people. It costs a lot more than on Twitter so it only happens around holidays.
List of connections (CHECK): it's called a phone-book, and phones have one incorporated.
Messages limited to 140 chars, encouraging retard-like talk (CHECK): of corZ, ritN crrct sentences S jst so lst yr
Yeah but if Leo Laporte can go that long without anyone noticing, what are the chances anyone cares about us tweeting.
He has a large fan base, and I believe is well liked. I think he points out that twitter isn't building up peoples attention span but making it much shorter. The vast amount of tweet poring in just drowns out the individual posters. I can tell you right now, I wouldn't notice if a couple of people I subscribe to disappeared from twitter except maybe my wife :)
I think you hit it on the head at the end of your post. His status as a nerd celebrity essentially ensures that many of the connections he has via these social networks will be tenuous at best. You can't classify the connection you have a to guy who's heard your podcast the same as your good friends and co-workers (or your wife! ;)).
This will sound conceited, but I think most people I'm associated with via Twitter would probably care if I disappeared without a peep for more than 5 days. So I think that while most people don't really care about his tweeting, nearly every other user's connections to their followers/followees will be much tighter.
This is closely related to some people that are 'dead' on HN and don't notice. They're still shouting to themselves though, some of those have been doing it for so long that it's scary.
I used to have a huge axe to grind with pg over his use of hellbanning as the only metamoderation mechanism. I would track down [dead] users when I noticed them, but I mostly stopped after noticing that this guy was still posting.
This guy is the perfect use case for hellbanning. It would be a much bigger problem for him and for us if he was disrupted. A padded room is perfect for him.
I don't fret so much about hellbanning anymore, especially since pg's gotten much less capricious about it.
What shocks me: I can't imagine being surprised at a result after two years. Analytics, while having many flaws, tell me the impact of my companies social media projects pretty quickly.
Then I noticed that I wasn’t seeing my posts in my Buzz timeline at all. A little deeper investigation showed that nothing I had posted on Buzz had gone public since August 8. Nothing.
This reminded me of something from one of Joel Spolsky's last regular blog posts (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/14.html):
Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.