Now, I get that there is definite value to be derived from Twitter, a lot of its appeal has waned for me after surfing through what are, when it comes right down to it, the public text messages of a few people I know, and a whole lot of people I barely know.
Not that I needed Harvard Business School Study to confirm the obvious, but herein lies the rub -- rather than being a useful real time communications tool that (imho) is best used at capturing stuff like conference calls, events, sharing links, and maybe leave a haiku (x 25)-like opinion or point of view, Twitter is used to chat. Don't we already have enough chat applications? Email, IM, FaceBook, (cell phone, as opposed to public forum) text messaging? This overactive active 10% -- they are really out of control.
Apparantly not. Now, I realize I don't have to read the mundane details of the work days (and nights) of people I barely know. But they are cluttering up the platform with useless crap. I uninstalled Tweetdeck after way too many of those irritating beeps alerting me to to the fact that it is way more entertaining to peek into the lives of the freaks on reality TV (including Jerry Springer guests) then to follow the mediocre work chatter of my colleagues, many of them I don't know well, if at all.
That said, Twitter does have some interesting uses for voyeur types like me, but I'm not about to list them here. While I am not so arrogant to think I am the only one using it for what I do, its not discussed in any of the chatter I see on the site. Plus, I don't want to lose my edge, even if its only a perceived edge. I will say this -- One thing Twitter is quite good for is tracking what news headlines are sticking in people's minds.
One more interesting factoid the study unveiled -- men tend to follow men and are much more likely to follow other men, while women are more selective and men tend to have more followers then women. Now THIS could make for some interesting Twit-fodder. Let me guess - it's already made its way around, I just haven't taken the time to mine the site for it.
Which speaks to the last major a-ha of the survey - over half of Twitter users communicate less than once every 74 days. I would like to think when they do Tweet its because they have something interesting to say, but I doubt it.
Ultimately, when it comes to Twitter I am more of a watcher than a doer. Blogging is more my thing, although you wouldn't have guessed it from the six-week gap between this and my last post. While I am hesitant to make any bold claims about how often I'll be posting, I do have some writing aspirations that go beyond writing press releases.
That said, there is definitely an art to writing a press release. And for those who sneer at that (you prissy, self-important bores know who you are), let's see them write one that mixes in the vendors agenda with the factual meat of the corporate announcement. That's right, your SUPPOSED to do that....but that's a segue into a whole other post - one third or fourth down on what is a fairly long list of catch-up posts.
So until next time...Tweet on. Just don't expect me to read it -- I'll be too busy blogging.
Macro-blogging, that is.
Well it's nice to see you remembered your blog. Personally, I tried the twitter thing and found it basically useless. Most of the people I was following on there have Facebook also, and their tweets weren't that different from their FB status.
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Welcome Back
Don (customer 318)
Posted by: Don | June 09, 2009 at 01:03 PM