Hacker News Reader

Most people new to Twitter don’t get it or the value it provides. That’s understandable for any new social network. I joined Twitter in June 2007, didn’t understand it, and my account sat dormant until just a few months ago, when I became an active user.

The value of Twitter is entirely derived from those users you choose to follow. It's not all about banal updates about meal choices, goodnight wishes, and Twitter slang. But some people will post that stuff, so your course of action is simple: if these people bug you, unfollow them.

Pruning and managing your following list is an ongoing effort, but it can yield excellent results. I follow a wealth of different types of users on twitter - from tech journalists/commentators (@gruber) to startup CEOs (@jasonfried, @ev) to companies I deal with (@thinkgeek) to former university professors I’ve had (@edbarr) to friends and family. And that’s just scratching the surface.

These people provide me an interesting stream of updates on things that matter to me. You might not enjoy the same set of users, and that's ok, but that should be your end goal - develop your following list into something that provides you with value.

And you know what? You don’t even have to tweet. Build yourself a following list and consume consume consume. Not everyone is—or should be—a content producer. But Twitter gives you the option to be one, and if you're not, you can still benefit from the community at large.

I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less.

I was going to call this a misconception. But, in fact, the answer is that Twitter is a high-bandwidth medium. For readers.

(It's more effort for writers, but who cares about us? There are orders of magnitude more readers than writers.)

It's true that I could dump a lot more raw information on you with a ten-second video Tweet than a 140-character text Tweet. But most of that information would not only be useless (you probably don't care to know the exact quality of the light falling on the bookshelf behind me, or how well I shaved this morning) but positively negative (because it will distract you, detract from my point, and tend to engage and distract many more levels of your brain, thus contributing to the mental cost of context-switching that is the bane of modern existence).

What I crave as a reader, among other things [1], is a source of plain-text links and messages (which can be followed up if desired) that are drawn from a body of people I vaguely trust, or their immediate circle of friends; that have been wordsmithed, at great effort, to pack the maximum content in the minimum space; and that have been arranged on a single screen that can be browsed without fuss or effort and that doesn't contain big blinky ads that have been engineered to be among the most distracting things ever made. And, what do you know, Twitter is a pretty good approximation of that, especially for events that are evolving in real time.

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[1] This is kind of an important point. Twitter is one tool, for one kind of reading. I wouldn't entirely give up blogs, or YouTube, or HN for Twitter, just as I wouldn't give up all books for Wikipedia.

Now say all that in a single tweet.

Put the comments in a blog. Tweet the link.

Then Twitter is essentially an RSS front-end.

Maybe, but its a tech that is more understandable to the masses, than "RSS feed". You have to think like a typical client with a new phone. How many phones have a twitter client? RSS?

I can guarantee that if a smart phone has a twitter client, it most certainly has an RSS reader. Furthermore, I can guarantee that many smartphones that do not have a twitter client have an RSS reader.

m.google.com/reader

I can guarantee you that if I ask 100 average non"hacker news" people what RSS stands for I will get a blank stare, but if I ask them about twitter.....

and/or nothing different than a link aggregator like the one we are using now.

Networking. Interruption.

That's it. Everyone says that Twitter is all about who you follow, and that's necessary but not sufficient. But judicious use of @replies and @mentions (when you don't start your tweet with a @username so everyone can see it) is easily 10x more powerful for business and personal networking than LinkedIn, which I find 10x more powerful than anything else (meatspace meetups excepted, of course).

Of course, you can leverage Twitter to make your meatspace life better - where to go at conferences, a "hey, can we meet up" in advance of events, where the afterparty's at, etc.

If you think of Twitter as a business tool like LinkedIn rather than a personal tool like Facebook, you'll get a lot more out of it immediately. If you develop a decent following base that's actually paying attention to you, then you can do second-level stuff as "what is the best [x] for me given [y]" and get exceptional answers. But that only works once you've cultivated a good following.

It's a place for real-time news.

Although the news reported in any particular tweet may not be reliable, you can easily examine many tweets (as they are short) perhaps taking into account follower count to try to figure out what's likely to be true.

I agree with djm. I've found no "news" via Twitter that was was either interesting, informative, had actualy content, or was not spam.

At best, I get a link to a longer form of the news anyway on some other site (but usually with an impossible to decipher link shortener so I can't tell if the link is just spam anyways), usually to something I've already read and found through news aggregators or google news or some such anyways with more information and content.

But twitter has news on an enormous number of topics, many too obscure for Google news.

For example, you could get real-time news on a conference.

This is a good point. But I've followed conference blogs before as well, and got more information content than what I could get out of a tweet (and got real-time updates via RSS).