72 replies to this topic

[Overstreet]

Do you Twitter?

Do you have any favorite news feeds? Feeds about music, film, etc?

I thought it would be just another distraction, but I'm actually benefitting from this (yet another) social-networking site. (I know, I'm very very late to this party.)

[Jason Panella]

I can see how Twitter can be useful, but honestly — I've only seen people abuse it. Most of my friends that have it have fallen into this habit of Twittering every single mundane thing they're doing. "Sam is twittering: watching the cat yawn," or "Greg is twittering: got the mail." I care about my friends, but that's information I can glean from friendly conversation in person. Yippee!

[B Rabbit]

I twitter. I just have a few friends on it and strawpoll. No feeds or anything.

[MattPage]

So I had one of those periods where all at once, everyone seems to mention something technical and I decide to get involved. And this period that something was Twitter. And I even found MLeary, although apparently I'm tracking the Hyde-esque biblical studies MLeary not the Jekyll-like film critic MLeary (and I have no idea how to change that).

But now I have no idea what I'm meant to be doing. And even having read a few bits and pieces on it the point of it is still lost on me.

So is anyone else in there? And if so can they give me some tips?

Matt

[Overstreet]

I've been Twittering for months. I love it. It's a wonderful creative exercise, to post interesting tidbits with an extremely limited character count. I see people using it just to chat, or to share Links Of The Moment, but I also see people using it very creatively... journaling in haiku, so to speak.

http://twitter.com/Jeff_Overstreet

[Overstreet]

Here's one way to use Twitter.

[MattPage]

OK so I've added Jeffrey and looked at the facebook application, but, like twitter generally there's no information as to what it actually does.

Does it record changes to facebook status in twitter
Or record changes to twitter in facebook
Or both?

Matt

[Overstreet]

I don't know. I haven't connected them, but I've noticed that some of my friends have connected them. I *think* that if you update Twitter, Facebook has an application to draw from that for the Facebook Status line, but I use them for different things.

[opus]

I believe that Facebook's Twitter app will update your Facebook status based on whatever you "tweet" (to use Twitter's term). However, I was never able to get it to work -- the app was down for quite some time, I think -- and I sort of gave up on it.

In general, I'm with Alan. For me, there's little difference between tweets, Facebook status updates, short blog posts, tumbelogging, etc. I'd probably use Twitter (and Facebook) a whole lot more if I hadn't spent so much configuring my website to send out short little "microblog" posts (or "elsewheres", as I call them on the site).

I find Darren Hughes' discussion of how he uses Twitter (and other online tools) really interesting.

[Overstreet]

You can reply to other "tweets" on Twitter. I've carried on whole conversations there. That looks pretty awkward if a segment of a conversation appears as your Facebook status with nothing to provide the context.

Edited by Overstreet, 15 January 2009 - 10:42 PM.

[MattPage]

FWIW I've ditched the celebrity Twitterers that I was following. They were mainly comedians who weren't as funny in the medium and who cluttered up my feeds so I had to scroll and click a lot more to follow the people I really wanted to follow.

Matt

[BethR]

Finally, a Twitter-widget for Wordpress that actually works. I tried the RSS thing--broke down after a couple weeks or so.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Roger Ebert on Twittering and The Selfish Mind.

[MattPage]

Hmm, some parts of Ebert's post are interesting, others just sound like today's fame equivalent of "let them eat cake".


Anyway, it occurred to me the other day that, in this country at least, we have this strange thing where people are opposed to the big-brotherness of all the CCTV cameras we have, but don't really realise that the ideas in 1984 necessarily require ordinary citizens to be complicit in their own imprisoning. So perhaps the CCTV isn't the problem so much as the ground many of us are giving by posting photos and describing the minutiae of everyday lives. We don't need to government to do it, we're doing it for ourselves. The next step closer will follow fairly soon when the first people get sacked for saying something inappropriate on Twitter.

Matt

[Tony Watkins]

I'm late to twitter, too. I started about four weeks ago and I'm finding it a very valuable tool. When it's at the level of trivia, I'm not interested. One or two friends are about to be filtered out of what tweets show up in my feed, I think, and I was very quick to drop Stephen Fry. But for discovering what people whose opinions I value are blogging about, or what they're finding interesting online, it's great. Arguably I could get all their RSS feeds, but that assumes they're blogging everything. And many people don't. I certainly don't - I abandoned my blog which was so intermittent it was too embarrassing ever to post something else to it. But a couple of days ago, twittering spurred me to start a new blog - here's my blog post on why. It's also useful for quickly sending out a discovery of an interesting web page, or news of what I'm doing (usually in relation to my work, not my leisure, though I do those sometimes) to people who are interested. At a recent conference where a colleague and I were leading a seminar track, which included a session on social media, we encouraged people to tweet their questions to us. It turned out that internet access was so poor it didn't work, which was a shame. I heard of one major (5000 people) conference in which tweeted questions during sessions were (after a quick human filtering!) displayed on big screens so that everybody could see what questions and ideas were being stimulated, and the speaker dealt with them as he went. I think there's loads of potential which I'm only just beginning to see (and by selectively using tweets to update my facebook status, I can get more usefulness out of facebook without having to log in, except occasionally to deal with comments my updates have elicited).

http://twitter.com/tonywatkins_

[gigi]

Did the news about the British tourists that got lost skiing being found by Twitter reach the US? Unfortunately one of them died, but they were able to rescue one of them by zeroing in on his mobile phone signal.

Guardian article

All a bit weird.

I mostly use it for the professional updates: David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, SF MoMA, Magnum photos always has great links that serve for 5 minutes distraction. A friend of mine that manages a UK version of ticketmaster has also floated the idea of updating ticket releases on there, which I would find much more useful than email bulletins. Don't know why, it's just the medium.

As for my own updates; its mostly out of boredom, not selfishness. And also because I am usually quite fond of new internet toys to mess around with. I still haven't got the hang of twitter, though, think it has a lot more potential than how I currently use it.

[opus]

Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets (emphasis mine)

Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET," he thought.

That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can't move.

"We're more interested in the applications," said Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin's Neural Interfaces lab. "How do we actually make these technologies useful for people with disabilities?"

The researchers built upon the BCI2000, a software tool pioneered by Williams and Wadsworth Center neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk. The software translates thought-induced changes in a scalp's electrical fields to control an on-screen cursor.

[Andy Whitman]

Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets (emphasis mine)

Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET," he thought.

That message may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell's "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Brain-computer interfaces are no longer just a gee-whiz technology, but a platform for researchers interested in immediate real-world applications for people who can think, but can't move.

"We're more interested in the applications," said Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin's Neural Interfaces lab. "How do we actually make these technologies useful for people with disabilities?"

The researchers built upon the BCI2000, a software tool pioneered by Williams and Wadsworth Center neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk. The software translates thought-induced changes in a scalp's electrical fields to control an on-screen cursor.

And if my thought life could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
-- Bob Dylan, 1964

[Peter T Chattaway]

Apparently the makers of Terminator: Salvation are now encouraging people to play a movie-related game on Twitter. If THIS doesn't inadvertently advance the cause of Skynet, then I don't know what will.

[Jason Panella]

Apparently the makers of Terminator: Salvation are now encouraging people to play a movie-related game on Twitter. If THIS doesn't inadvertently advance the cause of Skynet, then I don't know what will.

This might be the funniest thing I've read in a long, long time — thanks, Peter!