Twitter. I don’t get it

Posted Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 11:53pm in Blogging |

There’s been quite a lot of ~~hysteria~~ coverage on Twitter since its launch not too long ago. I first read about it on Drew’s blog and at the time left a comment pretty much saying what I’m saying now. I don’t get it. In short, Twitter allows you to alert your friends with simple one liners to what you’re up to throughout the day. This can be done via your IM application (think it only works with Google Talk at the moment), phone or on the Twitter site itself.

Okay, I’m either cynical or completely boring but why on earth would you want to know what youe friends, family or colleagues are up to EVERY part of the day. Seriously, does anyone not value a incy tincy bit of privacy now and again? A little bit of escape? Get away from it all? Disappear for a while?

For example, here’s one-man publishing machine and A list blogger, Robert Scoble’s Twitter page. As much as Scoble is as good a blogger I particularly don’t value his content from Twitter whatsoever. Am I missing some point here?

I’ve signed up for Twitter through a recommendation from my colleague, Justin. Check me out. I even wrote a twit (?) tweet (?) but that was it. I added Justin as a friend and changed the settings so I’d be alerted on my phone. Now, as much as I like Justin (great guy), I’m not too concerned to know how creative he’s feeling on any particular day and especially being alerted to it by text message.

Guess I’m just too boring to twit/tweet/whatever. This is what my day today would have looked like.

8.15 Just got out of bed, watching Sky News and eating bran flakes.

9.07 Doing washing up and about to take a shower.

10.01 At Sainsbury’s deciding whether to treat myself to olives or sun blush tomatoes.

11.15 Making egg and soldiers (bought the tomatoes if you’re interested).

12.31 Doing my ironing. Don’t you just hate ironing shirts?

15.47 Lying on couch feeling rather sleepy. Yawn.

15.48 zzz zzz zzz zzz

I say no more.

I’ve even read people saying they want to integrated Twitter into their FeedBurner feed. Please no! Honestly I’ll unsubscribe from your blog. I’m not a big fan of automated del.icio.us links some bloggers use already. I think it’s lazy blogging imho. The best example of Twitter I’ve seen so far is on Matt Brett’s blog using the Twitter WordPress plugin. It serves as an extension of his blog in a very unobtrusive way. That I like.

Other than that I’ll give Twitter a miss until someone can convince me it has real communicative/creative value. Read …the world’s leading… for more cynical commentary too. I love this part: “So, as far as we can tell, it’s a way for people that for some reason think you might give a shit telling you what they’re doing for pretty much every minute of the day. Crikey, and we thought blogging was ego-driven.”

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17 Comments

Matt Brett

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 12:57am

Twitter is definitely a strange creature. I didn’t “get it” for the longest time, then one day I signed up and have been using it daily since.

BTW, I’m not using that plugin you linked to. I think that does that opposite of what I’m - publishes Twitter updates when you post on your blog. Where as, I’m publishing my Twitter updates on my blog. I don’t post all that frequently and I find I’m updating my Quick Bits section less and less. So at least having my Twitter updates right on my homepage keeps things somewhat fresh.

That quote is pretty funny as well. I mean, it’s not like Twitter is a mandatory thing that is being forced upon unwilling audiences. Well, maybe in my case when I’m presenting my updates on my site. But I figure if anyone wants to know what I’m up to, it’s my friends and my readers.

Ged

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 1:36am

Hi Stephen,

Twitter is one of them technologies like SMS where its limitations make it useful. IM neccessitates that you have to have all your peers, friends etc on one network or a multi-protocol client like Adium X or Trillian for PC users. My current employer blogs most IM service ports. Twitter also integrates with mobile phones via SMS, so from a PR PoV you could use it as a private group comms for managing an event like CeBIT.

From an external comms PoV most of the communicating we do is more filler chat, blogs and press releases may not fill that roll particularly well and it doesn’t have to be managed in the same way as a forum.

Heather Yaxley

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 9:29am

From your explanation, I can think of a couple of uses - maybe it could help with the old timesheet thing at consultancies - or maybe for movement scheduling on events? Although the counter to that is maybe an authoritarian boss would expect to monitor their employee movements every minute via the technology.

Or I can imagine those who are in the early infatuation stage of a relationship wanting to keep up with each other at every minute of the day!!

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 12:03pm

Movement scheduling at events is likely to be more useful, there are a number of online services that provide excellent timesheet apps however

Drew B

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 8:46pm

Twitter will be huge. Nobody gets it at first. For sure it seems strange and it won’t be for everyone, but what it allows consumers to do will be re-spun in various ways, and soon having open, cross-platform conversations across instant messenger, SMS, blogs and RSS will make one-dimensional conversations like this message-board style blogging malarky seem really backward.

Stuart Bruce

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 9:10pm

I agree to some extent, which is why I don’t twitter as often as others. However, as Ged says it does have potential for specific circumstances (watch my blog in the next few days).

BTW Ged, online timesheets must be the dumbest app ever. I’m not online for lots of things I do, doesn’t mean to say it’s not important (often more important than the stuff I do online). There are some brilliant online timesheets, but WTF is the point?

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 9:18pm

Stuart, we do quite different PR I am more often online than offine.

If you are part of an agency that can’t afford a service like Maconomy and you still want to get the benefits of time sheets in terms of team utiliation and planning, then it makes sense, also it makes sense for other creative services like graphic design.

To be honest some of these services are more intuititive and responsive than the current time tracking regime I am using on our intranet. Its horses for courses.

Random thoughts on Jaiku (and Twitter) | appoulsen.dk

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 9:22pm

[...] Well, services like Twitter and Jaiku kinda split the crowd down the middle. Some people - like my colleague Mads, for instance, think they’re excellent, some think they’re horrible and others - and this I think is the largest group - don’t get them. I tended to agree with Stephen Davies over at PRblogger, who basically thinks they’re pointless, but then I tried Jaiku on for size. [...]

Stephen

Monday, March 12, 2007 at 8:36am

Matt: I agree. Your use of Twitter is more of an extension of your blog which, to me, is a good concept.

P.S. That is lazy research on my behalf. I.e. Googled for ‘Twitter WordPress plugin’ and assumed that was the one you’re using.

Ged/Heather: I guess event coordination is one good use for it. Still quite niche though.

Drew: I just don’t see it taking over blogging as a communication platform any time soon.

Stuart: Will be keeping an eye on your blog to see what you come up with.

I still don’t any big potential yet. I have played around with it. Honest.

Simon Collister

Monday, March 12, 2007 at 1:07pm

Out of leftfield I signed up to Jaiku which I ‘get’ but don;t actually ‘get’ - so a bit like twitter then!

See Neville’s take on the situation: http://www.nevillehobson.com/2007/03/11/twitter-could-become-compulsive/

Justin

Monday, March 12, 2007 at 1:39pm

Steven if i knew you were signed up to text message alerts from me i would have made sure i was sending you even more irrelevant alerts…

Agree with all that is said here, i seem to be (when it comes to Twitter) a voyeur (hardly seem to post at all these days). I certainly don’t subscribe to the SMS alerts (i don’t need to know anything that bad) but use the IM function to hear what everyone is up to. I’ve used to collaborate with a number of fellow PR’s on roundtables, events, story ideas and news agenda items.

I couldn’t tell you what all this will lead to, but use it as i like to tinker with tech and think Twitter might just be a snippet of something quite exciting in the future.

Mats Lofgren

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 2:32pm

Well spoken Mr Davies - welcome to the cynics.

Jon Bell

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 12:25am

I do get it. From the standpoint of a dynamic friend chatroom, it’s an interesting idea. Much of the reason people used MySpace back in the day.

But personally I care more what my friends have actually accomplished, so I made this (warning: self link) app:

http://www.baresquare.com

Rather than posts like “Um, trying to decide what to wear” and “OMG JAMES YOU’RE AWESOME”, the idea is you have concrete accomplishments, like “Saw midnight showing of Evil Dead 2″. “Designed new T-Shirt for threadless”, or “paid bills”.

The Interactive » All hail the newest revolution in social networking and online mobile communication!

Monday, March 19, 2007 at 7:08pm

[...] Audiences are split over the potential uses and benefits of Twitter, with some cynics suggesting it is another unnecessary tool in an already overcomplicated box. Our own blogging guru, Stephen Davies, at PRBlogger.com is cynical of Twitter, yet another Edelmanite, Steve Rubel, has been tweeting about twitter for some time, going as far as developing his own archival search engine for the service. [...]

First steps with Twitter | Simon Wakeman - Marketing, public relations and digital communications

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 at 7:57am

[...] When I first took a look at what all the fuss was about I was a bit bewildered. I certainly shared the sentiments of Stephen’s post where he questions the real value of Twitter. [...]

ShinyRed » Blog Archive » Twitter reaches twipping point?

Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 6:03pm

[...] It’s been an interesting few months for microblogging service Twitter. Launched in June 2006, the concept is almost too simple - answer the question “What are you doing?” in less than 140 characters and all your friends and contacts get updated on your status. At first it received mixed reviews, with the general response being “but what would I use that for?” However, earlier this year, a number of national journalists and online organisations started experimenting with the service, resulting in a peak of activity in March, which is when I joined. [...]

So I joined Twitter | PRBLOGGER.COM - PR blog

Monday, May 26, 2008 at 11:56am

[...] I have no excuse. In March this year I wrote a rather scathing blog post on micro-blogging service, Twitter. In short I didn’t ‘get it’ and was rather [...]