July 25, 2011 19:40 by ckincincy
This is not another post about how Google+ works or another post about why Google+ is better than <insert social media platform here>. This is, however, a note that I’m abandoning Twitter for Google+… for now.
I’ve “left” Twitter a few times. Ultimately I don’t get it. 140 characters has always seemed way to small for me. While many, maybe even most, updates are fine for 140. What about the replies and post that aren’t? It becomes some disjointed mess of last reply first reading.
So do me a favor, come follow me on Google+. I’d like to follow you.
October 9, 2009 21:17 by ckincincy
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.