On Twitter (was Re: [LINK] Microsoft Live Mesh)

Stilgherrian stil at stilgherrian.com
Thu Apr 24 11:39:50 AEST 2008


On 24/4/08 10:52 AM, "Craig Sanders" <cas at taz.net.au> wrote:
> if twittering was purely private between groups of friends or
> acquaintances, i wouldn't mind it at all...but with twitter<->blog
> gateways, it tends to infest rss feeds so that what might have made
> sense or been appropriate as an off-the-cuff comment or in-joke between
> friends gets published to everyone who subscribes to any of the feed
> aggregators (e.g. the various "planet" rss feeeds, or other aggregation
> services).
> 
> 
> twitter: 10:30 going to toilet now
> twitter: 10:45 wow, that took longer than expected!
> twitter: 10:46 cool, it's almost 11am.
> twitter: 10:49 sometimes i wish i was a butterfly
> twitter: 10:51 no, a bird would be better
> twitter: 10:52 i wonder if birds ever think about that.
> twitter: 10:53 yay.  lunchtime in a little more than an hour.
> twitter: 10:53 need to kill time until then.
> 
> and so on. ad nauseum.

Ah well yes, out of context Twitter streams are silly.

The whole point of keeping different data streams separate is so, well, they
can be separate. And indeed many bloggers who also use Twitter are finding
that Twitter becomes the medium for chat/ephemera and the blog maintains the
longer, thoughtful pieces.

That's why I think aggregator services like FriendFeed, which take all the
separate strands and dump them back into a single undifferentiated seer, are
wrong.

I want your thoughtful pieces when I've got time to be thoughtful. I want
your immediate status information now. Or not. And sometimes I want none of
it because I want to relax, or whatever.


> they might have time to actually think if only they'd just shut up.

I'm actually with you on this. In the search for ever-faster instant
responses, the thoughtful reflection is perhaps becoming under-valued. But
that's a different story, I think.

Stil


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Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
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