OCDProgrammer.com

I am on Twitter.  I don’t use it much, but I’m on that service.  My interaction with Twitter has been a work in progress.  My first three or four attempts just didn’t pan out. I found no value in using the service, but I would give it a fresh look every four months or so.  During my last attempt, it stuck a little.  So I’m going to share a few of my thoughts on Twitter.

Being OCD causes issues.

I’ve got a bit of an OCD personality to me.  The domain name on this site is not by accident.  I have to have a near empty inbox and Twitter works the same way.  I need it to be up to date on all the things I read.  This causes me to keep my friend list very well defined and pruned.  I use TweetDeck to sort out my friends.  A list of people I want to read all of their stuff, a few custom searches, a group for people who Tweet too much (hello @DanielJohnsonJr), and people who Tweet WAY to much (hello @Shanselman).  I’ll continually refine this list and I can’t wait for Twitter to release their new list functionality officially.

Twitter Stars

I’m sure there is a term for this, but the idolizing that some people get on Twitter is pretty disturbing.  I see this with some high end technical people, but its worse when it comes to some well known ministers.  When it comes to the technical people, it odd to see but when it comes to ministers… I just get a creepy feeling inside.  I’ve been in church settings that were defined by a personality of a given minister or staff member, and I just get that vibe when it comes to this dynamic on Twitter.

Can they stop the porn bots?

I get on average a spam friend a day.  Generally a link to some dating or porn site.  Can they stop that?  I will occasionally go a few days without incident and then get three or four in a row.  I can just see this taking over Twitter.

Stalkers

One of my friends is Daniel Johnson Jr.  He helped start up a local group called New Media Cincinnati.  He spent a lot of time building this organization, but lately a stalker came into the fold and created New(er) Media Cincinnati.  Dan covers it well on his blog, but the fact that Twitter has let this continue after many complaints disturbs me.  The newer person has no intention to use the site other than to cause Dan problems.

Get with the program!

OK, I’ll admit this is my OCD firing up.  However, there is a way to do things on Twitter and it annoys me when people don’t follow the given protocol.  Learn the tricks as you go, and as you do… change! 

It won’t last

I can’t imagine Twitter will last.  140 characters just isn’t enough to keep the interest of the average person.  Plus the people that do use Twitter hard core have a history to move on.  These people were the first on MySpace, then Facebook, now Twitter.  And if you really want to go back, these were your bulletin board people, your people paying by the minute on AOL, people that used a website that I think was sixdegrees.com.  It is the nature of the internet to move on to the next cool thing.  Few things stick around for more than a few years, and I’m not at all convinced that Twitter is one such site. 

I forget where I found this:

Being new to my current company, one of the big differences I’ve had to adjust to is meetings.  For a while we had a daily 10AM meeting and then occasionally we’d have another meeting at some point in the day.  Paul Graham wrote a great article on the topic that hits the problem well. 

The basic concept is that makers work in 3 to 4 hour chunks.  When a maker gets into work, they really don’t like distractions for three to four hours.  From a programmer’s stand point, this is very true.  There isn’t much you can accomplish in 40 to 60 minute chunks.  Its about that time frame when you’ve fully identified the problem and are ready to start writing some final code to fix the issue at hand.  Then managers work in hour chunks.  Each hour starts fresh with what is on tap.  So a meeting doesn’t really hurt their day because it is just what they need to do that hour.

You can read the source article here.  If for some reason that is no longer available, here is a PDF of the same article.

As I mentioned in my prior post, I have recently closed a personal blog and will post personal content on this blog on occasion. 

Today as I was going through my saved book marks I found this link which talks about free books if you agree to review them on your blog.  So I registered with their program, and I hope to get my first book soon and then I will review it here.

This is a Christian publisher so that will be the topic of those post.  One of the goals will be to show where my faith comes into play in my profession.

What I think is great about this is that the book industry is struggling and they know it.  Just like the music industry.  Many executives and companies are trying to find ways to prevent technology from changing the way they do business, but this publisher is trying to find ways to utilize the wave of technology to expand their business in new ways.  You have to celebrate that as a geek.