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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

As a pretty direct example of usefulness of Twitter, I posted a tweet this morning about what sort of luggage people might recommend if I was looking at doing a fair bit of travelling in the next few years. I got some great answers/links that provided some useful starting points to continue researching the topic.

To me, that had direct value. It saved me a lot of time, and pointed me to useful, relevant information that I was looking for.

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I can post questions like that and out of 10 such tweets I will get maybe 2 or 3 replies (total!) from my 78 followers.

Twitter has no huge value for me any more and I use it less and less. I plan to remove 90% of the people i follow becuase they add nothing useful & clutter up the stream.

I imagine most of your friends will experience the same problem (and can see it from the outset).

Maybe I am just using it wrong but I have failed ot have any meaningful conversations on Twitter. For questions/ideas like you mention I find Facebook much more responsive (as I have personal connection to everyone there).

> I imagine most of your friends will experience the same problem (and can see it from the outset).

Very definitely they will - I followed swombat on twitter for a bit and had to let him go because he makes up for the 140 character limit by churning out messages at the rate of a zillion a day:-)

Hardly... :-) You just need to follow more noisy people :-)

whilst I dont want to join in the swombat bashing ;) I do also tend to unfollow over the top tweeters. I stopped following Kawasaki and plan to stop following R. Scoble. Whilst thye do tweet useful stuff it is lost in a mountain of rubbish.

The real value of twitter is in the 10 - 30 posts a day tweeters who only post valuable content (or rants or w/e).

Totally agree. Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account is basically a pile of spam. I never understood why people were interesting in Scoble in the first place.

I do tend to stick within the 10-30 limit.

And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google? I don't see how unless you have 2 million followers.

> And Twitter gives you better results than asking The Google?

Possibly. He got several direct, trusted answers from people risking social capital to help him out. There are lots of cases where personal recommendations are more valuable than indirect, impersonal discussions or reviews.

Yes but that's one example. I suppose the opposite could easily be true for other examples. My question is how is twitter better then google in the general case?

It's not. I never suggested that it is, either. Google is great for some kinds of searches. Twitter is great for some other kinds of searches.

I am one of those people who just don't get twitter. I have some friends on it, it seems to me all they use it for is pointless chit-chat. I am slightly intrigued by the potential for real-time search. Like the picture of the plane in the Hudson which appeared on twitter. But how do you rank search results? What about people like me, whose work requires deep focus, how would I with minimal twittering ever generate enough followers to get something out of a twitter search?

Yes, absolutely. Googling for "luggage reviews" or "which luggage is best" yields only trash (try it, you'll see).

On the other hand, tweeting gave me the following links:

http://onebag.com/ http://geekeasy.com/travel/articles/Luggage_2.shtml http://garry.posterous.com/muji-kicks-ass http://wherethehellismatt.com/faq.shtml

And a variety of other tidbits of info, including some tweets from someone who runs a blog dedicated to location-independent life ( http://locationindependent.com/blog/ ):

http://skitch.com/swombat/bm4y1/twitter-swombat

That represents immediate, obvious value to me.

That's not a bad point, but I wonder how stable the situation is? Will people start flooding twitter and trying to game it just like the Google results? Will they be able to?

I'm not convinced. Those links don't seem all that useful, to me at least.

On the other hand googling for "packing for long term travel" (minus the quotes) gave me:

http://www.vagabondish.com/practical-guide-long-term-travel-... http://eurosatemydollars.com/trip-planning/packing-and-gear/ http://travelindependent.info/whattopack.htm

Those links seem more comprehensive to me.

People can search based on keywords as well. I managed to get a couple of cool followers based on that. Helped one guy get his Wii WiFi hooked up. Just search on #lost this evening (4/15)

With search, your overall reach is far more than your direct followers, and it's "real time" as well.

Bots and shameless marketers (I'm looking at you, @guykawasaki) are easily blocked or avoided altogether. It's like a community spam filter.

It gives you value, but to your followers it's just confusing. We see your question about what luggage to get, followed by a bunch of '@someone: Ah thanks, that's a great idea!'. It's often like that on Twitter - I miss the other half of the conversation.

To generalize, I'd say "lazyweb" questions are GREAT on Twitter.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lazyweb

Anything where a person is going to make a better judgment than an algorithm, from product recommendations (which are better from friends than strangers) to "which of these pictures is a better shot of me?" type of judgment calls.

That's what I'd suggest people do. Ask a question and then show the person you are trying to convince.

I'm not a fan of Twitter and have, under great pressure, resisted joining. The only thing that has really impressed me and made me want to sign up was seeing someone ask a question to their followers and get instant responses.

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