Ever Feel Like You're Being Followed?
Wednesday, July 9. 2008
Seen the new (PHP-driven) federated micro-blogging? http://identi.ca/topbit You can download the source, set it up for yourself and subscribe into your account there from another compatible system.
My initial experience with Twitter started and then stopped. I actually ended up deleting my account. I felt too much need to follow all the people I know through conferences, etc. I couldn’t deal with it and didn’t "get" it, so I packed it in.
As someone who struggles to keep up with feeds at all, Twitter has actually become a nice digestible alternative to some of my feeds and/or mailing lists. However, there is an awful lot of noise. Now though, I feel no remorse for stopping following someone.
So, for me at least, Twitter has become modal. I have Twhirl running when I feel I can deal with it, but the rest of the time it’s ignored. It’s also useful for staying connected when at conferences or meets. So, I’m keeping with Twitter for now.
My tweets are also protected because I like my tweets to be more of a friendly "hey" or a passing thought to share with my friends rather than yet another form of publishing myself to the Web.
The fact that I miss a lot of the conversation doesn’t bother me, in real life I’m also not in constant contact with all of my friends. But when I am online, I like the fact that I can see a bit of what the people I know are doing, reading, finding out etc.
Many of the articles I read or websites I check out, I got from someone’s tweet, rather than a blog post. Personal news also travels faster over twitter.
I also discovered that twitter in combination with a phone makes it more useful. I occasionally read tweets on my phone, and I can post updates through text. I track a few keywords that are sent as sms, so if people talk about certain things, or people address me directly, I’m notified. (unfortunately, this hardly ever works, after a few days twitter just stops sending sms’s until I completely remove and re-add my number).
I’m following about 100 people and I’ve discovered that this gives a good signal to noise ratio.
What I like:
– it’s less noisy then irc, yet has the same feeling of ‘connectedness’ to your friends. – it’s ok to miss out on tweets, similar to how it’s ok to not hear people when you’re not around, but still it’s fun to hear them when you are. – it’s more efficient than reading blogs (for news and interesting links) – the relevancy of links is higher than blogs, since I’m only getting things from people I actively follow.What I don’t like:
– The fact that sms notifications break all the time. – that there’s no filter to ignore certain statements. (e.g. if several of my friends are at #someevent, and I’m not, their updates might not interest me at that point.hmm, there seems to be an nl2br missing, all my bullet points are messed up..
I’m actually (weirdly) feeling better about twitter now … going to be posting more technically interesting and random stuff there, and perhaps less of those things that make me wonder who is reading it! Its a great way to share links and broadcast information to people.
