Nick:
>DC to me:
...
>> I'm wondering what your basis for this belief is? In what sense do
>> you think Twitter caters to the personality that shouts very loudly
>> into a cellphone in public places? I don't really see the connection;
>> people who post to Twitter are only going to be heard by people who
>> explicitly listen to ("follow") them, not by everyone who happens to
>> be standing nearby.
>
> You read the article I linked to about the hopeful Cisco employee?
>
> He was obviously shouting in the darkness _AND_ unaware that that was
> what he was doing.
>
> Sure, he _could_ have set his tweeting "private" so only those he agreed
> to see his emanations could, BUT HE HAD NOT.
>
> On Twitter he was just like all those loud, stupid people you hear
> shouting into their cell phones in public places all round the world
(and
> doubly so in the US, it seems).
Ah, I think I see. You find Twitter users to be like people shouting into
cell phones not because they annoy the people around them (since that
doesn't apply to Twitter), but because they may not be thinking hard
enough about who might be listening in. I missed that connection.
Twitter's hardly unique here; people have been getting into exactly the
same sort of trouble on (for instance) Usenet, and (certainly) weblogs,
forever and ever. Would you say that Usenet also caters to the
personality type that shouts into cellphones in public?
> I don't actually mind if people are this stupid, but I question the
> propriety of _enabling_ them to expose themselves...
You would then question the propriety of weblogs and usenet for the same
reasons?
> I don't think that Twitter is totally useless, but it is almost
certainly
> bordering on totally unnecessary as there are/have been other mecahnisms
> to achieve its useful functionality that suffer fewer/none of its
> undesirable features.
I suppose that depends on what the useful functionalithy is. :) To me
the most interesting difference between weblogs and usenet is that while
on usenet you choose what to read by subject (in theory), in weblogs you
choose what to read by author. And this has lots of interesting
consequences of various kinds, and weblogs end up being good for some
things that usenet isn't as good for (reading what your favorite five
experts in a field have to say, for instance, without having to read
another dozen or thousand less interesting people just to understand the
context of what your favorites are saying).
Twitter is a micro-weblogging platform, encouraging / enabling / requiring
postings of a certain type (very short, minimally tagged, minimally
threaded) in what is otherwise basically a weblog structure. I'm not sure
yet how significant the interesting and useful new behaviors that this
leads to will be, but I'm glad the experiment is being carried out.
Interesting contrast of viewpoints. As usual. :)
DC
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