Buzz Kill

Two words: Learning curve.

It takes time to understand what new media are for. Real, human-scale time, measured in years. The inventors of the telephone thought it was a B2B technology, didn't really grasp that everyone was going to have a phone in their home and use it to talk to relatives. The inventors of the phonograph, amazingly, thought of that as a business technology as well, for recording memos and stuff.

Twitter et al are in their infancy and are still growing. They get new users all the time; the new users happen upon different aspects of the tool and use it differently; some uses are ultimately better than others. It's the blind men and the elephant, except that the elephant is the size of the Library of Congress and there are seven billion blind men, two thirds of whom have yet to touch the elephant.

I, for one, don't have so many problems with Twitter, but that's probably because I use it differently from others. Let me offer some suggestions:

If you find that you feel lost because you no longer remember how many of the people you follow on Twitter are still alive you need to follow fewer people. I follow 97 people. Even that may ultimately be too large, although most of those people are very quiet, so I can probably keep growing it, especially as the client software gets smarter.

Remember that Twitter is RSS for humans. It's Delicious for non-nerds. It is for exchanging links, not ideas. If you have an idea that can't fit into 140 characters write it down in 2000 characters and then tweet the link.

Of course, Twitter can also be used to exchange ideas that are not worth more than 140 characters. Sometimes these Tweets are short because they are poetry. Sometimes they are short because they are stupid. Follow the poets; unfollow the stupid. Just because people are shouting nonsense doesn't mean you have to hear them. The Internet's soundproofing is very good.

Speaking of Internet soundproofing, signal-to-noise, and maintaining one's sanity: I don't follow hashtags. Like, ever. I'm not quite ready to pound the table and declare that hashtags are never going to work, because they're eventually going to be nothing but SEObots retweeting other SEObots in a vast, roiling AI botwar, but I for one don't miss them. Important things get retweeted by your followers or echoed in some other medium.

If someone's Twitter feed is not a net win you need to unfollow them. This can hurt. I kind of like Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, but the guy does. Not. Stop. My feed is like 85% Ebert. And almost everything he says is interesting, or could be interesting, but I'm not suffering from a shortage of interesting things, and he's drowning out the quiet folks. I need a Twitter client that has better stream management. For example, it could throttle access to my main stream: Ebert gets X tweets per hour on average into my aggregated stream; to see Ebert's full stream I need to click on something.

Speaking of which: I know there are ten thousand Twitter clients already, but there will be more. Client development is also in its infancy.

If you try to use social media as a traditional advertising platform, of course nobody's going to notice.

Leo used Google Buzz, Twitter, etc. to broadcast content instead of cultivating conversation & community. If he was using these tools for two-way interaction instead of one-way communication, he would've gotten a lot more complaints when he went offline.

In what way would it help to understand why?

Isn’t Facebook pretty much the same thing, though? I’d say it’s taken off with quite a few people?

"what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?"

It's an ego-driven medium. All of it: YouTube (when actually done for its intended purpose and not flagrant copyright flouting); facebook/myspace, foursquare, getglue. It's all about what you're doing and more recently _where_ you are when you're doing it. It's about the inherent need for self-fulfillment.

Let's say you have great taste in music. Just by someone noticing your daily playlist, you have an admirer. That admirer might want to know more about you based on that superficial quality, and follow you on your social update tool of choice. It's a tool of communication, much like a phone (actually more like a partyline, but I digress).

When it boils down to it, people need people, and as social creatures, we find every convenient avenue of acquiring and managing our social sphere as we can without expending too much energy. If we didn't care about any of that, hell, we wouldn't ever even comment in HN, right m0nty?

> but honestly, what do I have that's worth actually broadcasting?

Um.. how about your Hacker News comments?

Indeed microblogging is extremely ephemeral. I don't think it was ever intended to be anything otherwise though.

The fact is, we need systems like this. We need to know what the superficial people are talking about, in order to understand how people really think about the world, and what they are all talking about lately. It helps us get greater understanding of the world. Much easier to look at trends and graphs, than it is to actually listen to any of these people.

> Would you notice if someone stopped posting on Hacker News?

HN is also a bad medium for real conversations ... nothing beats directly seeing or hearing a person directly. It's all about the context, which in many cases is missing entirely from a textual conversation ... like your background or your body-language.

The later is very important: when 2 humans speak to each other, there's a synchronized motion going on, much like dancing. It is said that skillful sales people are so persuasive because they can get other people to dance on their rhythm.

Twitter is to me a tipping point ... an ADHD epidemy going rampant / information overload showing its side effects.

Ever seen a 14 year old teenager talk to his friends on messenger ... context free, incomprehensible, pointless messages written with a bad grammar and lots of misspellings because typing is just too much work.

That's what Twitter is ... a communication medium that's bringing everyone's communication style to a common denominator.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.

The use case is that people are online, at their computer and see their Twitter client notify them of an interesting sound update while they were wasting away time, procrastinating or just plain looking for some diversion. They see an update from a source they trust and decide to click through to read it.

That's not a very far stretch. People read things from Twitter all the time, that's not the problem. The issue is they only read the most recent stuff river of news style and who knows how many people they follow?

Leo's Buzz to Twitter cross-poster should have had some kind of link tracking built into the URL to tell him if people were clicking on his updates.

Leo says he had 15 updates in 2 weeks not broadcast, but when you look at his usual posting style, it's all notifications about his recent shows (which I get via iTunes automatically) and (self confessed) pictures of food he's eating. That's not exactly quality material that people will click through to. Had he posted more appealing content, his lack of updates would have been a greater loss.

For me, the use of Twitter is:

1. I see X happening when I'm walking around (protesters, fireworks, concert, police barricades). 2. I search where I am in Tweetie. 3. I find out what's going on and, if I'm interested in it, might join.

Twitter is all about discovery. Not communication.

I actually get a ton of value out of Twitter both personally and professionally (it's a question of who you choose to follow). However, what your expectations from Twitter are shouldn't be the same as your expectations from a blog. It's great for finding out about events or what might be happening at an event, about getting instant feedback on something (your example, although it can extend beyond a product), and finding material that other smart people find. But if you want to understand and hear someone's thoughts or wisdom, it's not the right venue, and that's what some people are finding out.

The people I follow on Twitter basically fall into two categories: people I know in person and people I don't. I like knowing what's going on in the lives of people I know & care about. And, the people I don't know share interesting articles and links to stuff they've done, which I'm interested in.

It's especially important to me as we all get older, move to other states, and have kids which eat into our free time. We can't hang out, but we can "hang out" with each other through Twitter.

He was absent from all of his podcasts for a while to take his daughter Abby off to college. I noticed he hadn't tweeted for a bit. I just figured he was relaxing after all that stress.

This is the gist of the article for me, in particular because his tweet is the way I found the post.

I think if anything it just goes to show that buzz is way more personal than twitter and most people unfollowed him on it because he was too spammy. My small circle of friends still routinely use it to share stuff that we find amusing/interesting.

> Twitter invented a problem and then solved

They haven't invented anything ... they just brought an existing paradigm to the Internet: and that would be SMS messages.

And don't know about the US, but SMS messages have been all the rage and are still really popular, with some anecdotal evidence of how similar they are ....

Retwitting (CHECK): I got the same jokes over SMS from multiple people.

Many-to-many communication medium (CHECK): Around every holiday, people are sending SMS messages with greetings to a whole list of people. It costs a lot more than on Twitter so it only happens around holidays.

List of connections (CHECK): it's called a phone-book, and phones have one incorporated.

Messages limited to 140 chars, encouraging retard-like talk (CHECK): of corZ, ritN crrct sentences S jst so lst yr

Yeah but if Leo Laporte can go that long without anyone noticing, what are the chances anyone cares about us tweeting.

He has a large fan base, and I believe is well liked. I think he points out that twitter isn't building up peoples attention span but making it much shorter. The vast amount of tweet poring in just drowns out the individual posters. I can tell you right now, I wouldn't notice if a couple of people I subscribe to disappeared from twitter except maybe my wife :)

This is closely related to some people that are 'dead' on HN and don't notice. They're still shouting to themselves though, some of those have been doing it for so long that it's scary.

You missed the point though.

No one noticed, or cared that it was broken.