It's also interesting to follow some people you strongly disagree with just to see their day to day thinking, what they're reading and how they may've come to their conclusions.
You can also share a request/call into action/product you just launched etc. with your network and they'll spread it for you if you provide them with an interesting feed and generally quality stuff - must be a quality list of people you follow/they follow etc.
It's like your own personal humint if you know how to take advantage of it.
If you just engage with a bunch of random people, it's not that useful indeed.
See that sounds great in theory but in practice I have never figured out how that actually works. Any tips?
This would be largely avoidable if there was easy way to switch to a secondary/tertiary user to vent off thoughts that aren't the beef.
Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.
This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic.
A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.
That depends entirely on how you use Twitter.
Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.
Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.
>[Twitter] is a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
I think Twitter could have become ubiquitous, like Facebook or email, had it not gone the platform route and started to shut down third party apps. But then, how do you make money as a protocol?
I really think the reason Facebook first exploded in popularity (I was just entering college when it rolled out so have some first-hand experience) was because a whole lot of college age people love to show off pictures of themselves doing cool things, they want the audience. I won't comment on how Facebook has changed, but the original appeal was close to why Instagram is so popular today.
It feels good to have an audience, whether it's for your thoughts or pictures of your life. Not here to judge that as good or bad.
I don't "like" anything on fb so it's not just fb deciding for me what I want to see. I think that it's moving closer and closer to curated TV than a true social network
I use it to stay in touch with people I've worked with, other people in my sector who I've met at events, and with friends and acquaintances who live in other places. There's also people I've met on Twitter who have gone on to become friends 'irl'.
I find there are 5 useful ways to think about twitter:
1. It’s a way to follow people you’re most interested in. (Friends, authors, celebrities, professional mentors, restaurants you like.)
2. It’s a way to follow publishers of content you like. (Comedians, news, industry pubs, local events aggregators, food bloggers, magazines.)
3. It’s a tool for actively finding content you like or things you want. (Discussion about a show you like, jobs, deals, feedback.)
4. It’s a platform to get people interested in what you have to say, and be followed by those that already are.
5. It’s a quick, accessible opportunity to communicate with a peer, influencer, business, or supporters.
If you're interested in the rest of what I shared with friends (more actionable stuff on how to find what you want, how to handle noise, skimming other basics), you can find that here - https://medium.com/@jayneely/how-you-can-use-twitter-a-guide... - but the above is probably what's most interesting to the HN crowd.
I suppose I can try to make a more general case for it. Twitter is the global community of people who have some specific thing in their brain that is also in your brain. It's not the place to share life updates with your college buddies and cousins. It's a place to find people who have a specific niche interest you share, and to share in the thoughts that you all don't necessarily want to express to the people you interact with day-to-day. Unlike Facebook, you can actually meet people there. And it doesn't require the sustained attention (I won't dare call it obsession) of places like forums and LiveJournal so a wider crowd is willing to use it. I still don't know if it's an eleven-figure business, but I'm glad it exists. It makes me feel more connected to the world.
Everyone can chirp it up, tweet like crazy, or just go nuts.
It's a social network. If you're not being social it's pretty goddamn boring.
It's not without its flaws - nuanced, lengthy discourse is pretty much impossible thanks to that 140-character limit - but it's been a great way to keep up with my friends on an informal basis.