Does e-mail not work well enough? You can send text, photos, video — anything really, as an attachment. You can mail multiple people, some even silently so as to not alert other people to their peeping. I’m quite fond of e-mail. It works great. But apparently we’re all looking for more ways – and thus more complicated – means of communication. Maybe this is my first “back in my day” speech of my young age, but seriously.
First there was e-mail. Then we were all instant messaging. Now we’re text messaging from our phones (which is just IMing with a smaller keyboard), and next it will be Twittering. I read about Twitter a while ago in one of my regular nerd blogs. Then again today I read an article from an established blogger talking about Twitter and the others (Pownce, to name one), and how it is really just information garbage – “casual information” as he calls it. It’s comparable to standing in a room with millions of people you don’t know. Eavesdropping on the universe. Most of the time it’s crap but if you’re watching carefully enough you just might see something valuable, like “party @ Bob’s 2nite @ 8p” – Bob might get a few more guests than he expected.
Actual Twitter tweet:
“Putting away dinner for leftovers later…maybe Friday? I love red beans and rice!”
I’ll being saying “Twitter” since I believe they were the first to kick of this whole craze, but in this case it means any service that does Twitter-like things. I compare Twittering to life blogging. And I’m not talking life events and experiences like I write about here at the Toast. No, I’m talking about life blogging…things like “I’m sitting on the couch” type blogging. Literal life blogging. Twitter is not a blog in the terms of web page or site. Twitter can be understood more as a giant bulletin board where people can post their stupid thoughts for everyone – and I mean everyone – to see. This includes friends, family, and the general public. But nothing is permanent or searchable like a regular site, it’s not supposed to be.
I attribute Twittering’s new found rage because it has a low entry barrier. Twitter can be done from any type of device; computer, PDA, phone, iphone, whatever so long as it is on-line. The messages, called twitters, are very small messages maybe only 100 characters at most. Frankly, that’s not a lot of room so it forces you to be brief. But why bother in the first place? Do you just need another outlet where you can bitch? Or are you searching for something…or someone?
Actual Twitter tweet:
“Kitchen is officiall “clean” now. Very Excited. Need lots of sleep now.”
Blogs are typically themed and let people come and read (hopefully) well-written and thought out entries. A blogger is usually after a specific type of audience. Not a demographic but people of certain tastes, such as liking the same sports team or liking movies. When you write for a blog you’re trying to get “your people” to read what you have to say. You don’t always succeed but that’s the goal. But with twittering, how does telling everyone “you’re eating dinner” make you attract a narrow set of people? We all eat dinner, so why would that make me want to communicate back? So I can tweet back, “i’m eating dinner too?”
I see Twittering as two things: 1) a marketing tool, 2) a soap opera
I’m already considering using Twitter-type communications to promote web sites and on-line features. It’s low cost, low overhead, and just outright doesn’t hurt. Nothing ventured even if nothing gained.
Second, if you just sit and watch the twitter stream for a while you can get hooked eavesdropping. This held my fascination for few minutes until I lost track of the person I was watching. Unfortunately, there are so many tweets coming and going your chances of seeing a continued conversation/thought are slim. You’d have to be paying attention for a while to see Bob tweet “eating dinner” and then a few minutes later see his tweet of “now on the can.”
The one thing that fascinates me most about the twittering concept is that people are willing to go out of their way to tweet something. They are conditioning themselves to tweet before every minor (or major) event in their life. At no time would I want to have my phone attached to me 24-hours a day and then think, “oh yeah, I’m going to the fridge, I better tweet it!” and then proceed to text out that tweet and send it. The time I spent twittering I could have done whatever mundane task I was doing. We all have boring lives 80% of the time, there’s no need to confirm that with others.
Why add more pieces to your puzzle? What do you gain?
Actual Twitter tweet:
“Just got done playing game”
Sure, you can argue a blog like this is the same thing. Who cares about it? But I pick and choose what I blog about, I don’t blindly write about everything I’m doing, every TV show I watch, or every time I mow the lawn. Topics make a blog.
Do we all really need another means of communication? Now I’m expected to check e-mail, IM, and Twitter? And I get squawked at when I fail to check MySpace too. Plus cell phone messages. There, that’s five modes of communication. Can’t we please pick one. They all work and do the same thing.
If you want to communicate with your circle of friends, e-mail them. Or start a message board somewhere…something basic, easy, and most of all, just pick one, agree on it, and use it. Don’t choose something new and make everyone learn something new, especially if you don’t give up the old method. No one is going to adopt new methods when their old methods are still around – why go to the food bowl in the other room when I have a food bowl in this room? You have to eliminate things for new things to get adopted. Sometimes it happens naturally, but only when it’s really cool and really worth it, and that is rare.
Twitter on.
Writing letters worked too. When was the last time you wrote a letter? Beyond that, when was the last time you actually used AIM for something other than work communication?
Email is good for two way communication between two people. As soon as you start having a group discussion via email, it becomes difficult to keep the thread straight (yeah, I know, enter gmail). It’s just plain unwieldy. Email is also good for sending out a broadcast to a group about a specific event, say, the party at Bob’s place.
Myspace (or facebook, or virb, or friendster) is useful for reconnecting or staying connected with people who might not have your email address, or who are geographically separated. People want to see what you’re up to, but don’t care to watch every move of your life. The problem with Myspace (or the others) is all the extra crap that comes along with it. I’m predicting that within two years, myspace will have been forgotten. We’ll see if I’m right.
Twitter and Jaiku were the first generation of what some people call “micro-blogging”. Although, Jaiku is nice because you can set it up as an RSS aggregator and never actually have to post anythign directly to it. It can keep track of your feeds from everywhere in one easy to access place. Pownce is similar to twitter in many ways, but I see it as a second generation product.
Pownce makes it easy to share files, links, thoughts, whatever, with your friends. It really isn’t useful until you get your friends to join. I’ve started using it, but honestly, until all you slackers sign up, its hard to tell how useful it might actually be. Much the same way that email wasn’t useful until your friends got email addresses back in the 90′s.
I like the fact that Pownce lets you setup various groups of friends. For instance, I’ve set up groups for real friends, family, a group for Internet friends, and even a subgroup of the internet friends for people who I talk to in a specific IRC channel. There is some overlap between these groups, but when I post something, I can choose to send it to the public, or pinpoint it to a certain group or groups.
The way I see it, you all would probably get pretty annoyed if I started sending out short emails every time I simply thought I wanted to share something. With pownce, I can post it, and when you happen to look at your pownce feed (or use the pownce client) you can see what I wrote. It doesn’t clog your inbox.
It’s really very similar to the way many of us used to use our away messages on AIM. It’s an easy way to let people know what’s up.
The trick is balancing what you post so that you’re not flooding it with “I just got off the john, what a satisfying shit that was”, but at the same time you don’t feel that you have to always have something profound to write an entire blog entry about.
Sure, a web forum works too for a specific group of people or friends, but it doesn’t work well if you have multiple circles of friends. That is what was so revolutionary about the idea of these social network sites in the first place.
These new sites are about friends. If you don’t care what your friends are doing, what they’re thinking, what they find to be interesting or cool, etc… are they really your friend?
I’ve decided that WE (our age group/demographic) are the target audience for pownce. We grew up with (alongside) AIM, but we’ve outgrown it. We used it from the beginning. We’re used to being connected, but our lives are beginning to take us in other directions. We’re not using the tools that used to keep us all connected, but it looks like there are some new ones that might work well for us. It’s updates, without entire conversations.
Give it a try. You might find that it’s more useful than you initially thought.
G+
I got Pownce account for myself and for my dog. But I’m guessing it will end up like my MySpace account – I will only check it when I happen to get some e-mail notice from it, otherwise there’s no time to mess with it.
I agree that MySpace will be dead sooner than we think. It is good for finding old school friends but it is horrible as a means of communication. It’s ugly, hard to use, and makes no sense.
Frankly, I still use IM for personal chatting, although I admit most of it is work related. But even then I try to avoid work chat with IM because it isn’t automatically saved or recorded, which is no good in a workplace setting.
“If you don’t care what your friends are doing, what they’re thinking, what they find to be interesting or cool, etc… are they really your friend?”
I guess my thought on that is that if I want to know someone’s opinion or what they’re up to, I’ll ask them. I won’t just blurt it out and wait for a response. I would rather have actual dialog with friends than try to piece together parts of their life they choose to throw out to the world.
I am also partial to not telling friends things on-line because it then gives us something to talk about when we gather. If I know what everyone is doing everyday at every hour, what is there to talk about when we gather? What’s the point of gathering then? (Besides playing cornhole, which I must say is always good reason to gather)
And it looks like people CAN’T balance this micro-blogging because I’m watching people send really mundane events in their life for everyone to see. It’s just pollution at that point. I agree that balance in the key, but as we see in MySpace, the general population can’t balance because they don’t have to the tools to be able to balance.
And if you have something relevant to say, put some time behind it and write it out (somewhat) nicely, not in 100-character mini-messages. Another problem I have with micro-blogging is it yet one more mode by which people can be lazy with their writing. E-mails are bad enough with poor thoughts, bad writing, and hard-to-read abbreviations…do we need something to make that even worse? I don’t claim to be Shakespeare but you’ll be hard pressed to find abbreviations here, IMHO.
Here at the Toast (macro-blogging) I think about what I want to write about and try to write something that is engaging enough for people to respond, as G+ has here. If I don’t think it’s going to be interesting enough for people I won’t write about it. I choose what I think is relevant because I don’t want people’s feedback on everything I think about. But a blog and Twitter are serving two entirely different purposes, so it’s almost not even fair to compare. Apples and oranges.
I see Twitter as a benefit when organizing events, but you could use MeetUp or some other calendar-type mode for that purpose. What I say to one group/person I may not want others to see. I know I can group and sub-group people on Pownce, but then I’m managing my friends list constantly and having to watch what I say to who — just asking for that accidental send to “everyone.” And that type of management will eventually end up dealing with people one-on-one, it always does, and at that point, why not just call them or send a mail?
I guess I’m just amazed that people are so starved to share their uninteresting lives with people. I don’t know where it stems from and that’s what I’m interested in learning. The psychology behind it.
“I guess I’m just amazed that people are so starved to share their uninteresting lives with people. I don’t know where it stems from and that’s what I’m interested in learning. The psychology behind it.”
It’s the same reason we all would continually peruse our friends away messages on AIM.
If you didn’t do that… maybe you’re just naturally less nosy than I am.
G+
I must be one of the few people who doesn’t want to know everything about everyone all the time.
I can’t stand reality TV, ETV, any of the talk shows, tabloid TV shows, MTV, etc. I don’t IM unless it’s work and I don’t go on message boards (save during football season) unless I need an answer to a specific question.
I like being able to see people once a month and ask “What’s up?” and not already know the answer. Communication for the sake of communication isn’t my thing.
I agree with Thee – communications for communications sake is silly and takes too much effort and time with little to no pay off. When you tell everyone everything all the time there’s nothing left to do/say when you get together in person.
And I don’t use IM away messages to convey where and what I’m doing at the time. My away message is simple, its says “I’m away” – no reason or location of what I’m doing. No one needs to know why I’m away, just the fact that I am away and can’t reply right now is all they need.
I have no real interest in IMing someone knowing they are away – if I can see that they’re away, why would I send them a message? That’s like knocking on someone’s door when you know they’re away on vacation.
I can understand being nosy, everyone is curious – the part that perplexes me is why you would want to share minor details of that aren’t even interesting enough to be worth being nosy over.
I’ve scanned this article but one thing that I disagree with is that myspace is losing power. Myspace is very annoying and ugly but I think it is here to stay, if only because musicians, actors, writers, etc are able to use it as a free and easy communication tool. It might lose its steam a little but sorry, I don’t think it is going any where.
This is my thought on all this stuff: people are egotistical and twitter, pownce, and myspace provide an outlet for that arrogance. And I don’t mean egotistical in a bad way. We all have an ego to some extent and people like to talk about themselves, they like letting people know what books they read and what music they listen to and that is why people make it easy to be nosy. It is all about getting attention.
It is all about ego, I understand that, but I think there is a big difference between someone publishing a specific topic, like movies, and someone just posting their trivial moments.
It’s one thing to go out and say “I’m know the most about cows,” and flaunt that around the blogosphere. But it’s another thing saying, “look at me, I’m eating!”
The sharing of trivial moments almost seems like it is a worse case of egotism.
It is one thing to say “I’m know the most about cows,” eh?
Oh, I agree…how arrogant to people have to be to think that anyone gives a damn about what you’re eating. Communication is great but the term “diarrhea of the mouth” comes to the mind.
I found a great list of Top Blog Cliches and #8 relates directly to this problem of Twittering and over-communicating. And the rest of the list isn’t bad either…
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000834.html
I agree with just about everything he said. I HATE those cloud tags that he talked about. I kind of laughed at #11…it said don’t blog about blogging. I agree with him but that’s eaxctly what he’s doing :-)
Wow, that guy sure does think highly of his own opinions. Does he have some sort of advanced degree in blogging? He’s obviously an expert when it comes to the web.
What a pompous jerk.
BTW… I think we’ve noticed moog breaking the rule about random images inserted to break up article text. Such a terrible abuse of your blogging power over your readers!! For shame!!
G+
Hah, awesome. And so far from what I’]ve seen I completely agree with you. I guess I’ll try to think of stuff that is at least a little interesting to put up there, and try to promote my blog just like you said :) Thanks for the info! I promise to never post about leftovers or cleaning.