5 Myths About Twitter the Media Wants You to Believe | Hacker News Reader

5 Myths About Twitter the Media Wants You to Believe

twittown.com

5 pointspanda888 comments

This article seems kind of strange, talking of "Twitter haters" and "this loathing of all things Twitter", and what "The media wants you to believe".

IMHO Twitter is getting an amazingly positive treatment from the media. Anyone following the tech media has seen their share of hype, but I cannot remember anything that got so much coverage for so few users.

In any case, why would you even care? In the long run, if Twitter's valuable it will stay, if not it will fade. "The Media" and "the haters" have absolutely zero influence on that.

"The Media" does matter because it serves to recruit more users, thus increasing the size of the Twitter network and thereby the utility provided to everyone.

This is true. I crawled the twitter graph back in Dec 07 as part of my research on social networks (which is coincidentally on HN currently), and I was shocked by how few users they had (at least in the giant connected component, which is really all that counts.) The numbers that were being thrown around by Arrington and co. were ten times greater.

Twitter has indeed received an amazingly positive coverage, if not for which it would have taken them far longer to get to their current user count (and who knows if they would have had enough cash in the bank in that case?)

In that case, any coverage of Twitter in the media is positive almost by definition?

Coverage is positive by definition only if it leads to increased profit for Twitter.

I have not seen a single instance of "the media" promoting these stereotypes at all. On the contrary, it seems like there is some covert Twitter media blitz going on all around me. From Comedy Central to C-SPAN there are mentions of people "twittering."

It's normal people who are "promoting myths" about Twitter, although the author does a pretty bad job dispelling those myths. I signed up for a Twitter account, but I find it totally irrelevant to me personally. It is kind of useful for publishing our updates at www.trailbehind.com, but other than that I just don't get it. Maybe, at 24, I'm just too old to tweet.

I get the feeling I shouldn't bother clicking if Twitter is in the title. Yet, why do I fall for it every time?

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rubbernecking

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