Remember this? Probably many don’t, but I’ve been a member of Twitter, since last May or June. Previous to Jabber integration. Previous to the funky tricked out personal landing page. Previous to the vowels. (oh and that was the first recorded “twitterquake” btw)
I’m not trying to say that I’m uber cool ’cause I was part of Twitter before others are, but I would like to stand up for the service in the face of the multitude of naysayers and hype machines that appear hell-bent on taking it down before understanding why it has become so popular in the first place. Those of you who are arriving here now are experiencing a very different Twitter than the Twttr I fell in love with ages ago.
Let me tell you what Twitter means to me:
Twitter is a representation of my stream of consciousness.
In the past year, we’ve become busier and busier and I’ve slowly been taken away from one of my first loves, blogging. I used to post several times per day. I could start and end a complete, fairly coherent thought and have a good dialogue here. As I became busier, it became more and more difficult to do this and I’ve found myself posting about 1-2x per week at most. I always loved the quote by David Weinberger from a talk he gave at the Library of Congress, “We are recording our histories, one blog post at a time.” By not having enough time to post my blog, I was “losing” much of my thinking along the way. As my blog became more and more ‘professionally focused’, I was losing the personal things that matter to me.
Twitter came along and gave me a tool to keep recording these things that matter to me. Things about my son. Things about my health. Things about my current state of mind.
Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my attention data.
Don’t tell the advertisers, but looking back through my twitters, it gives a pretty good picture of where I’m headed and what my needs are. In fact, many babies and weddings have been ‘announced’ on Twitter, which could signal a change in someone’s buying behaviour. How is this helpful for me? Well, Scoble expressed his disgust at the lack of responsiveness by advertisers for baby gear. There are some things for some people that give us great pleasure to buy. I think most people would agree that if they send a twitter that they are looking for a perfect ___________, being pointed to the perfect __________ is a good thing.
Oh and…call me lame, but I DO care about what you had for dinner. I may want to eat there someday. It’s helpful for me.
Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my activity.
For me, twitter was also very useful when assembling my receipts for tax purposes. A couple of receipts I had forgotten to write the name of the person I dined with and what we discussed. My calendar didn’t reflect the meals, either, as both were spontaneous…as referenced through Twitter posts. Twitter, basically, helped me with my taxes.
This type of thing has happened more than once. Check out the Twitter Quakes. I matched my recent Ikea twitters to unknown Zipcar rentals (another business purpose tax fill-in). Twitter helped me remember when I first coloured Tad’s hair.
Twitter helps me keep track of my friends.
I may not get enough time to spend with my amazing friends these days, but I certainly know what they’ve been up to, thanks to Twitter. I know that Alicia’s flight home was frustrating. I knew when people got sick. When I got back from Vegas, everyone asked me if my new dress that I twittered was the one I was wearing. I knew what I missed in Austin whilst away. The next time I see someone, I’ll know what they’ve been up to, so we can go from there instead of playing catch up.
Twitter has led me to making more friends.
Maybe not new friends as much as it’s helped me create a deeper bond with ‘acquaintances’ of mine. Thomas Vander Wal and I knew one another in passing until we became twitter friends. Now I feel like I know Thomas well and when he comes to SF, it feels like we’ve known one another for a long time. I know when his kids are sick and when he’s frustrated with clients and he knows the same about me. I’ve gotten to know many people better this way and, even though they are non-personal sms messages that are under 140 characters long, they seem to say more about people than many blog posts or emails or even in-person conversations (as some of us are nervous or apprehensive when we first meet people, where twitter creates a level of inhibition in many).
There are many more reasons why I love Twitter and Twittering. I love the common language emerging from this less than 140 character medium. That people come up with clever words to describe Twitter phenomenon, which become a shared language between us.
I feel so strongly about it that it upsets me to see people reduce it to another friend collecting service or hype. It is compelling, interesting and captures the imagination of alot of people. Tell me other web apps these days that can say the same. It goes to show you, once again, that simple tools that disrupt are what we need to be concentrating on…not more ‘me too’ and ‘this will make me $$’. Sure, it’s human nature to dismiss something (or someone) gaining in popularity. Is it jealousy? Fear? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t self-reflective.
Do I think Twitter scales? Nope. I don’t think community ’scales’, either. I look at my long list of friends and feel I need to start switching some off (although it’s an insanely difficult decision because I’m actually interested in learning more about the people who update rarely as well). I have found it insanely helpful as well as entertaining. It IS crack. It IS distracting. It has also created an awesome ‘efficiency’ in my life…an emotional efficiency so to speak, where I have 140 characters to vent and get to connect with others that do the same.
I passionately and fervently in heart with Twitter and there will probably be a day that I feel the same way about something else that captures my attention, but until then, I will continue to wave my twitter flag, post kitty photos to the twitter fan wiki and snobily roll my eyes at twits twittering for the sake of tweets.
View Tara Hunt's profile
24 Comments
Hi Tara, we met v briefly when you were in London.
As a Twitterphobe I felt I had to respond to this post, which I did here on Broadstuff
(put the link in because the trackback didn’t link when I ref’d your post)
Hey, twitter definitely tracks your attention and helps you keep track of your friends. I used the command-line version of twitter called yam. http://www.geek.org/ It’s been in use since 1989, and there are still some UC Santa Cruz geeks that use it.
Now yam totally died because of negativity and usenet like, scorched earth arguments. I so hope that doesn’t happen to twitter.
Anyway, now that twitter is here, I don’t have to tell friends to compile yam on a freebsd box. Instead, I point them all to twitter.
Thanks for writing this.
What do you see in twitter’s future?
Cheers,
Barce
http://twitter.com/barce
Tara, you posted a couple squibs last Sunday, I think, while in transit from Austin to Vegas — just stream-of-consciousness observations, but somehow they prompted me to think “See? This is what it means to live the principle that one’s attention has value.” Can’t say with precision what connected the dots for me… I think it’s simply that there is a fearlessness to the way you record the details of your days. It’s subversive, somehow.
I’m a newcomer to Twitter. I like it for all the reasons you describe, and some others too. I think I’m just going to ignore all the sturm und drang and simply keep using it for as long as I find it satisfying.
I’m new to twitter and I’m finding it useful despite the fact that no one else I know is using it (I follow a few “celebs” for the entertainment value for now.) The stream of consciousness thing you mention is what I like best. Throughout the day things happen and I think “I should blog this” but I often just don’t get to it. But I can twitter it (or tumble it). And there’s something about reading the random thoughts of other people that seems to break down walls… everyone else thinks about what to eat and whether they got enough sleep and how frustrating work is, too.
Using/liking Twitter is one thing… but people trying to seduce others into getting on it is another. Twitter is addictive in the same way we’re suffering from an obsession with checking email, blogs, etc. (it’s the same psychological principle that makes slot machines addictive)
Linda Stone’s “continuous partial attention” talks about how we suffer from this because we’re so afraid of being “out of the loop”. I think Twitter encourages this in a more substantial way than anything we’ve ever seen before. Although I do think it has some VERY good uses for some people/scenarios, just because we CAN Twitter our life–and follow the Twitters of the lives of others — doesn’t necessarily mean it’s adding value to our lives. It might just be feeding the addiction and making it harder than ever for us to step away from the always-on-always-available-always-aware thing.
One interesting thing… it doesn’t seem to be as appealing to the (16-21) MySpacers as much as it is to a somewhat older crowd. Mid-to-late 20’s through 30’s, big Twitters. 19-year olds, not so much. This is purely anedcotal, though — I haven’t seen actual demographics.
I don’t see why Twitter would go down. First of all, the data model is so simple that you might not even need a relational database. You might use Berkeley DB just to take care of concurrency issues but Twitter is not an inherently costly operation the way, say, DabbleDB is, which has highly stateful, complicated sessions. Thus, hosting-wise, it should scale very nicely and be cheap to host.
Kathy Sierra: I submit to you that the fact that young people like MySpace is proof of how dumb they are and how poor their taste is. Have you ever looked at typical MySpace pages? Did you resist the urge to claw your fucking eyes out? MySpace users take an ugly, poorly laid out default page and somehow manage to make it uglier. Anyone who is a “MySpacer” probably thinks Linkin Park and 50 Cent make good music. My point in saying these things is that their opinion is irrelevant from the perspective of the quality of an application. If Twitter got flooded by MySpace users, that would likely spell the service’s doom, just like how after everyone found out about Napster it was impossible to find full albums because of all the retards with no taste and no organization to their mp3 collections.
I’m 21 years old and I love Twitter, it so happens.
Hi Tara - nice post. I enjoy your tweets. I linked to your post in one of my own about the value that *I see* in Twitter. Just saw Mr Messina’s: “Twitter is the new cigarette” roll by my Twitterific screen which brings me to my point in commenting again. Perhaps Factory Joe agrees more with Kathy’s comment.
Kathy: your comment “but people trying to seduce others into getting on it is another”
Are you likening a web service to an actual drug - for real? It came across that way to me in your comment. In my post I just encouraged my own technophobic niche, known generally as the recruiting blogosphere, to try twitter before they condemn it as a purely geek tool, after reading a peer’s post who had pretty much written twitter off without so much as trying the service himself.
My wife Shannon and I read both Tara and your blog and respect you both. Here’s the thing. You are calling us promoters out as getting someone addicted to this. I guess since I come from a family that truly have addictive personalities I find this funny. I turn twitter off all the time. Just as I have no problem ignoring IM’s, phone calls, emails or anything else that gets in the way of my tasks or my whims. I recognize that some people have an easier time of this than others. If I have time to twitter I do - and I enjoy it - when I don’t, I tune out. People who *REALLY* can’t manage may have other problems. I hardly think they represent a majority. Never mind one that you need to stick up for, as one might a poor 12 year old girl standing on the corner next to a known pimp.
You carry a lot of weight around our community and you’re throwing it around pretty hard on this one. That seems at odds with your balanced opinions and writing. I just want to understand what’s got you so riled up about this topic.
One last thing. Every social media tool I use has an end goal of facilitating real live conversations on the phone and face-to-face meetings. I agree with your post that people are craving this more. For almost my entire life I could care less for social interaction beyond typical work life. I shunned parties (even from good friends) kept to myself, even though I have always held the jobs of an extrovert, I am introverted by nature. Blogging and other tools has brought me out to play in a way that I just can’t quite believe. I’ve become the friend that everyone is in touch with. I dug up a friend that I grew up with in Australia that I knew when I was 12. I hadn’t heard from him since 1982. We have a running dialog now. Online social media facilitated that and I see Twitter as one more great way to make these very real, very visceral connections.
As a web worker (and god bless Om for giving a name to what I do) I love that Twitter re-connects me in real time to the outside world. It’s like gossip at the watercooler in small delicious bites. And unlike other communities in which I participate, I do find myself digging into the friends of friends of friends to find interesting new people. Not to mention, it’s pretty cool to see the collective consciousness of web 2.0 in action, with everyone tweeting at each other and seeing the interconnectedness of it all.
http://www.twitter.com/gillie
The reason you don’t see younger people using Twitter is because they already have Facebook, which does EVERYTHING Twitter does…
Julian: “Are you likening a web service to an actual drug - for real?”
Almost… I specifically said “slot machines”, not drugs.
But given that I write whole posts on how to get people to evangelize things they have a passion for, I’m hardly one to criticize someone for promoting the things you believe in!
However, yes, I really DO think that Twitter could be that bad, although certainly not for everyone. Twitter could be a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of “intermittent variable reinforcement” (one of Skinner’s most significant discoveries), and people *are* suffering from the problems of continuous partial attention — a significant chunk of Web 2.0 company investments are for companies that promise to bring some element of control to our out-of-control info overload/organization nightmares.
That said, email and blogs are ALSO good examples of intermittent variable reinforcement, and I can’t imagine being without them! But Twitter (just my wild-ass opinion here) greatly amplifies the negative effects. I’m sure you–and everyone else here including Tara, of course, have no problems with it whatsoever. But I’ve read too many studies on the negative effects of modern media-created multitasking (Scientific American had an entire issue, almost brought up in Scientific American Mind, and a cover story in Time, etc.), to not be concerned.
If you think I usually have “balanced opinions and writing”, you must not have seen my anti-TV rants ; ) I pick my battles carefully, but this just happens to be one of them. I’m always willing to admit I could be dead (and ridiculously) wrong on this one. And given that I seem to be in the minority, that’s probably likely. In any case, I apologize for the way my earlier comment came out — I certainly didn’t mean to offend, but I see how it came off that way.
Hi Kathy,
Thanks for your reply. I enjoyed your response - too tired to digest it all just yet. I can see though that I certainly have some reading to do.
Your comments will help me no doubt get clearer on why I like Twitter in the first place - it’s not the kind of thing I normally go for, so I am studying my own reactions as much as anything. If not for the humanity of it all, the connections it makes, I might not use it.
Perhaps your T.V. comments seemed mild since I grew up with a college lecturer who I regularly watched teach (rail would be a better term) on the subject of media studies. I have a pretty good idea of what’s good and bad about T.V. and the media and I’m not exactly a big fan. Though my 16 year old has an impressive grasp of history that was fostered by the history channel more than anything else. I remember as a kid I attended a large public celebration and later watched the same event on the T.V. news. The reporter seemed to be covering a different event. I was stunned, and this wasn’t even a controversial event.
Your reference to Skinner reminds me of some comparisons my father and I have made on current Internet and social media trends through the lens of Marshall McLuhan’s work. I find myself constantly questioning how much of what we have learned in the past is truly applicable to this new stuff we’re involved with. My intuition says that most of it *is* relevant but that in the subtle differences can lie whole mountains of misunderstanding. I’m not inferring that your reference of Skinner’s work is off target - just that we need to constantly be on guard against too neatly fitting stuff into neat boxes because our feeble little minds can’t handle the divergent data.
Cheers for now - enjoyed the chat.
Julian
Reading some of the blogs about Twitter it seems many people are not following their friends, instead they are following their fave A list blogslebs’ every move - is Twitter therefore just Hello! magazine for the geeks
Yeah micro bloggin is the future.. if tis twitter that thats tweet :)-
The only problem I have is the scalability and at times the Site is very very slow.. I got feed up.. so the next best thing is to slurp down the pubicrss and plug into into my sideabar.. have all the twittering World Wide ..rolling vertically in my sidebar..Literally :)- Thats a new thing for me !!
Secondly, I just post directly from my twitterbar (FF plugin). Now, I hardly ever log onto twitter site. Albeit I am consuming info that is voluminous..but that the heck early adopters need to figure out things for themselves..
HEres a typical e.g of catching the chatter..and I have not added Halley to my Friend list to boot !1 : )-
“Halley Suitt: Noticed stuff we write on Twitter is avail on Google … is this also the case if you connect to FRIENDS ONLY, instead of Public Timeline?”
Interesting post, Tara It’s funny to see that since about 1-2 weeks some major German bloggers discovered Twitter and now discuss and make polls wether it’s hip or not.
I agree that Twitter has taken off for all the reasons that Tara cites (it certainly has for me - although I’m in no way as prolific a twitterer as she!). Maybe one answer to Kathy’s question of why it seems to have more appeal amongst an older (although hopefully not too old - ahem!) age group is that, we’re the first ‘generation’ of web users - lack of geographical and physical proximity in relationships we kindle online or elsewhere must somewhere strike a dischord. Twittering fills in those gaps (although ironically of course still via the web) recording our friends’ feelings, geographic location and actions as if we were spookily almost there. That makes us feel *really* connected, as Tara points out. The second (mostly younger) generation of people online maybe care less about this stuff.
It’s also fast and doesn’t require too much of our attention/time to cultivate - when you work really hard all the time, that’s important.
I’ve been on for a while now. At first I was in love with Twitter. And I still believe my prediction that Ev will be the first to be double bought by Google. Or, maybe the first web celeb to be bought by AT&T. who knows.
As a platform for ubuquitous IM, Twitter has usefulness, but mass appeal will come only if it can cross the chasm of the internet/valley crowd into the world of real people in real world scenaries, if it can become useful for more than those of us who live and work in the online culture.
Following the current gaggle of web obsessed on their conference and dinner rounds is not useful or interesting for long. That’s what made me fall out of love with Twitter. As a microsom of the shallowness of humanity in 2007 it depressed the hell out of me.
If I could “follow” ER interns or veterinarians or teachers twittering, I’d follow more closely.
As for the slot machine analogy, anything’s addictive if the pain is deep enough to make dissociation worth the trip.
I for one am tired of all the ‘it won’t make it but it would be good for business’ talk that I’ve been reading on the internets. I agree with you, I like knowing that my friend is having trouble staying awake at work, that another just got tickets to a show, and another is eating 4 cheeseburgers for lunch. It’s a fun way to keep up on each other. Aside from Ma.gnolia I don’t subscribe to ‘pro’ twitter uses, as I want to keep it just my close friends.
Of course I do the same thing with myspace - I don’t accept requests from people I don’t know - but on twitter it seems… more important to do so.
Cool service or more mindless drivel for the masses. You choose.
Whatever the ultimate role Twitter plays in our online lives, it certainly has generated some passionate discussion, and that’s always a good thing. It’s definitely not… mediocre. A lot of us would love to have someone as smart and visible as Tara coming to the defense of our products! I don’t have to like Twitter to recognize that the Twitter guys have done/created an amazing, successful thing.
Sorry I’ve been absent! En route and sans connection on my computer…see…it sucks when I can read all of the fabulous responses I’m getting to my post and not be able to reply directly to them whilst on the road…and darnit, I’m on the road ALOT. I suppose I could use my browser, but it’s slow and relies on this crappy EDGE network that is flaky.
Nonetheless, I understand some fundamental things here that I did not talk about in this post:
1. Twitter ain’t for everyone.
Nope. Some people will find it totally stupid and I’m glad. Loads of people still think blogging is inane and that’s probably a good thing. Think how many people thought email was ridiculous. As soon as they stopped thinking it was ridiculous and all started using it, our inboxes exploded with messages about nothing. Our friends selling us stuff. Lost plans. Etc.
Personally and selfishly, I hope Twitter remains a niche product.
2. Twitter adds to our ‘continuous partial attention’ issue.
Kathy is totally right, but guess what? I’ve been ‘gone’ for eons. All my life I’ve had CPA. Remember the growing number of kids diagnosed with ADD? That was me, too…but the thing is that it wasn’t ADD, it was television and video games and all sorts of things in the world vying for our precious attention.
Over the years my CPA and lack of attention to specific things for too long has turned into a flow of its own. Sounds nuts, I know. But hear me out. Sitting down for coffee sure is more meaningful and I really, really love it. But diving deep into one conversation isn’t any better than skipping stones across dozens. It’s just different and I need both to keep my knowledge growing and my creativity piqued.
It may not make sense now, but there is this awesome article in Inc. mag this month called Taskus Interruptus: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070201/column-freedman.html
…that starts to build a really awesome case for how multitasking and constant interruptions lead to many innovations and creativity. Muchos worth the read.
For me, there is a rush in being connected, but I know that doesn’t replace being in person. Still…little lesson from the BarCamp planners summit the other day. I was involved in the IRC channel, practically ignoring the conversation that was going on around me…shooting questions to the far-away participants that couldn’t be there. The answers from those questions threw out many of the assumptions we were making as a group and informed, I think, a much better outcome. Sure, it took us longer and we were probably less productive, but imagine if we would have been uber productive in the wrong direction? Not so good.
I think there is an argument for both sides, really, and, in the end the world needs all types. It needs those focused…those that get into the flow of things by getting deep into an issue…then it also needs those crazy ADD types to jump around like ninnies, connecting the dots here and there until we all collide into making really awesome stuff.
Hey Tara, thanks so much for the inc. link! It was written by the same guy who is my current hero (David Freedman) for telling me my messy desk is actually a Good Thing (“A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder).
More than anyone I’ve ever known, Tara, you do put a huge priority on face-to-face, and seem to combine Twitter with the real world in creative and useful ways. I look forward to seeing you again (face-to-face) in San Diego next week : )
you are by the way, uber-cool too.
This ia how I see the future of Twitter and other Micro Blog services(e.g. Jaiku)
MySpacers age issue: i think it is because MySpacers prefer a kind of secondary “orality” while Twitter, though using ultra-short statements, is still feeling quite “literate”. difficult to explain why that is, though. (a case for further twitter philosophy.)
29 Trackbacks
[...] Thanks to Tara for this post on Twitter and twitter philosophy… [...]
[...] Since twitter revolves around people, it takes many forms and people see value in Twitter in terms that make sense to them. For me, as someone who likes blogging and connecting with people those are keys to me. You have to use twitter to find your own hot buttons. One thing is for sure, as Shannon pointed out, we need to convince WAY more of our friends to try it and use it. This is key to enjoying Twitter! You have to get connected with people who are ALSO watching you or it’s just like a tree falling in an empty forest. Did it make any sound? [...]
[...] Particularly fun to read is this interesting interchange between Tara Hunt and Robert Scoble… [...]
[...] Tara has a good post about her concerns about the rising popularity of Twitter, read the comments to see some of the debate about Twitter. [...]
[...] As for professionals who use Twitter, Tara hunt is a seasoned twitter user who isn’t just using it, but being really passionate about it. [...]
Hello Twitter (G-d)…It’s Me. I’m trapped at Club Deville in the rain…
Looks like Twitter is becoming ‘hot’ again, as evidenced by several blog posts including one from fellow Yahoo, Greg Cohn [Twitter status: Having a drink downstairs in the hotel bar.] For the uninitiated, Twitter is like Instant-messenger (IM) status…
[...] With all the buzz over Twitter, I decided to create an account — if for nothing more than to stake out my claim to my username. [...]
[...] Is all the fuss about Twitter much ado about nothing, as Shakespeare put it? Is Twitter the crack of the Internet, as my friend Mark puts it? Is it a useful way of staying connected to friends, and keeping track of your thoughts — as Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt has said? Or is it a waste of time designed for the self-obsessed and those with short attention spans or attention-deficit disorders? Is it all Robert Scoble’s fault? [...]
Twitter, the bus…
…the paradigm of even-driven programming may provide a better idea for those familiar with it. With Twitter you should be able to build applications that react to events triggered by people. …
[...] El mayor beneficio que la gente parece alcanzar con Twitter, es la habilidad para sentirse más conectados con otros. Lisa de Carson Systems lo pone así, en un comentario a la defensa de Twitter que hizo Tara Hunt: [...]
[...] However, Tara Hunt posted a great defense declared her love for Twitter, and somewhat more convincingly so: [...]
[...] Twits Twittering for the sake of Tweets: or that’s not why I twitter “I would like to stand up for the service in the face of the multitude of naysayers and hype machines that appear hell-bent on taking it down before understanding why it has become so popular in the first place.” [...]
[...] If anyone has a predisposition to become the sort of Twitter-induced continuous-partial-attention basket case that Kathy Sierra has warned of on her blog and others, it’d be me. (It’s just the way my brain works — capable of intense focus when I’m locked in on a problem, but also jaw-droppingly prone to spur-of-the-moment digression at other times.) So I’d be advised to take heed, and be mindful of my Twitter usage and habits. As I’ve said before I believe it’s a good tool; this Web Worker Daily post sums up many of the basic virtues. [...]
[...] Why I’m doing this? Just check this post, or this one. They resume my interest in this new way of communication or social network. As you have noticed, this blog is dedicated to the software development life cycle, and I don’t usually post about myself or my personal interests. So twitter brings me the possibility to talk about what I’m doing or what I’m thinking on a more informal way, without blogging an elaborate post. [...]
[...] I’ve been Twittering like a fool this past week, despite saying only LAST week that I’d never Twitter (I know, I know). I’ve got some Twitter friends already (yay me!) and am slightly scared at how well it’s fitted into my life. But all that aside, I’m really crap when it comes to explaining to people why I Twitter. I’m working on a post, but in the mean time read this because it explains things really rather well. [...]
[...] Despite loving what both these ladies have to say on a regular basis, I have to say I’m with Kathy Sierra rather that Tara Hunt on the matter of href=”http://www.twitter.com/” title=”Link to Twitter”>Twitter. Frankly, I just don’t get it, and would love to have someone I understand and respect explain why they love it to me. [...]
[...] Source: HorsePigCow, “Twits Twittering for the sake of Tweets: or that’s not why I twitter” [...]
[...] Twitter, twitter, twitter… March 19, 2007 Posted by (un)relaxeddad in twitter, communications, web. trackback There are people who take twitter extremely seriously. Then there’s most of the other people in it. [...]
[...] Tara explains her passion for the service with a detailed post about how and why she uses the service. Do I think Twitter scales? Nope. I don’t think community ’scales’, either. I look at my long list of friends and feel I need to start switching some off (although it’s an insanely difficult decision because I’m actually interested in learning more about the people who update rarely as well). I have found it insanely helpful as well as entertaining. It IS crack. It IS distracting. It has also created an awesome ‘efficiency’ in my life…an emotional efficiency so to speak, where I have 140 characters to vent and get to connect with others that do the same. [...]
Twittering or not twittering, that is the question…
Much has been written on, about and around Twitter with a clear acceleration over the past…
[...] I say who cares? If it is truly useful to some people (like Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt), it will find its (killer) application amongst other publishing and collaboration tools. And in the meantime I have added my own Twitter badge on this blog. [...]
[...] Right now we’re in the General Session trying to answer the question what is the “social web” and so far Twitter is winning in terms of getting some serious buzz as an example of social media. Tara Hunt would be so proud. For those of you who are new to Twitter, it’s a social media tool that helps users answer the question “What are you doing right now?” My sister Kris is here with baby Nathan and she’s Twittering on a Palm right now. I’m hoping this catapults her into twitter stardom since she’s the best one liner I know. [...]
[...] I like this post by Tara Hunt from citizen agency. Tara talks about her enthusiasm for Twitter being that it’s all about keeping in contact with people as work and family commitments begin taking over peoples lives. [...]
[...] opiniones sobre Twitter en Passionate y en HorsePigCow (en [...]
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[...] some thugs scared her off the blogosphere argued that Twitter was Too Good. I am more aligned with Tara Hunt and Lisa Reichelt (Ambient [...]
[...] say who cares? If it is truly useful to some people (like Tara “Miss Rogue†Hunt), it will find its (killer) application amongst other publishing and collaboration tools. And in [...]
[...] a Twitter, c’è chi lo usa per monitorare la propria attività e c’è chi è sicuro che la pigrizia degli utenti ne causerà un rapido declino. Ipotesi poco [...]
[...] connected to others. Carson Systems’ Lisa put it this way in a comment to Tara Hunt’s defense of Twitter: “Twittering fills in those gaps…recording our friends’ feelings, geographic [...]