Twitter: Why Should I Care?
Last night, someone on Hacker News asked what was so good about Twitter. I’ve been asked the same a few times, or told that my posts there are pointless.
This conversation seems indicative of the main argument against Twitter: it’s intrusive… but it doesn’t have to be: for example, I have a set up that allows me to be sent IM updates when I’m at my computer, SMS when I’m not, and to get no updates at all between midnight (for those odd occasions that I go to bed at a sensible time) and 8am.
What’s good about Twitter, though? Fundamentally, it’s a blogging site for when you don’t have much to say, but you want to say something: it seems utterly pointless to update my LiveJournal or blog with a quick message like this… but using Twitter and LoudTwitter means I can construct a blog post over time and have it posted automatically to my blog at the end of the day.
…and of course, it’s free text messages. If I were sitting at my computer, for example, and I wanted to get a message to Fish, but he wasn’t at his computer, I could send a direct message on Twitter and it would go to his phone at no cost to either of us.
The tracking is fun, too: last Friday, for example, I was working at the May Ball at uni but I wanted to know what was happening in the London elections, so I tracked “mayor” and I got a text message whenever someone mentioned the word mayor in a public ‘tweet’ - there were some completely unrelated messages, but I found out the unfortunate news at the same time as anyone else following the election results.
Oh, and the Twitterific logo is cute.
Posted: May 7th, 2008 under geek.
Tags: geek
Comments
Comment from Katie
Time May 7, 2008 at 10:33 pm
It does seem that most of the people who say that getting other people’s notifications to their phone is annoying don’t actually use Twitter or know that they don’t have to have the updates.
You would assume that if someone isn’t happy to receive messages for whatever reason, they wouldn’t give twitter their number, but this is the Internet. There are stupid people.
Comment from Fish
Time May 7, 2008 at 11:00 pm
As it happens I often check Twitter using twibble on my mobile, thus no SMSes sent. Only direct messages get sent as SMS. In any case, it doesn’t cost me anything to receive twitter SMSes (AFAIK).
Comment from Thomas Thurman
Time May 7, 2008 at 9:03 pm
at no cost to either of us.
As long as the recipient doesn’t pay per text message received, of course, which is something you can’t know unless you’ve arranged it with them beforehand– but then I suppose if they didn’t mind paying they probably wouldn’t have told Twitter the number.