Thursday, December 13, 2007

Twitter?

OK, Do you Twitter?
I'm intrigued by the service but not convinced. It's like having my IM status messages available to the world (but Twitter's bug that won't allow AIM update submissions right now is thoroughly ticking me off). Does this mean I have to sound more coherent?
I can see it being uber-handy if I were still a breaking news reporter, but I'm not.
How can this tool be useful to me or will it become yet one more Facebook-esque time-suck that gives me the illusion that my busy-ness is somehow worthwhile?

4 comments:

Greg Downey said...

Anecdote time from a fellow J-School professor lurking on your blog, Katy. So I was invited to this little new media and gaming conference called "Playful Technocultures" in Montreal this fall and the organizers insisted that everyone attending sign up for Twitter, telling us that it would be a great little social experiment and a boon to our conversations before, during, and after the conference. Of course everyone waited until the night before to register with the service -- from their hotel rooms -- and all people posted throughout the next day were messages like "Here I am trying to figure out Twitter" and "Why can't I figure out how to view anybody's Twittering?" By the time the conference was over nobody wanted to touch the service ever again. And these were all people who spend their days writing and researching about the supposedly transformative power of new media.

(As for me, instead of Twittering, I just use my Facebook status update, which anyone can subscribe to over RSS and which I can pipe to my own web page without too much code hacking.)

Bryan said...

Twitter is for lazy bloggers with attention problems... though some people disagree with me:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson

Katy Culver said...

funny you should say that, greg. i was trying to figure out how to embed my twitter updates into the personal site i'm developing right now. i'd copy your facebook idea but my status updates there are just lyrics to whatever song i'm listening to when i log on. one of those quirky "katy things" ...

Jenny said...

i've always thought AIM away messages and facebook statuses were kind of self-absorbed. why do we all think that other people care THAT much about what we're doing everyday? i just don't feel like people care that much about what i'm doing that i would take the time to update something like this constantly