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Comment by marksutherland | Hacker News Reader

Yet another generic, vacuous article about twitter, of the skeptical variety. I suspected there might actually be some insight in this one since it got posted here, but it's as inane as the rest of them (deliciously ironic given most articles of this type scold twitter and it's users for their inanity). For once I'd like to read an article that at least muses on why folk tend to be confused when they first join twitter or why it seems to have a marmite effect (i.e. you either love it or you hate it). I'm getting quite tired of this sort of banality however.

goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting

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I think the number of vacuous articles about Twitter is partly due to its sudden popularity (obviously), but also because it's harder to discover the use of such a service. Sure, it's largely used for inane updates, but obviously it can have some interesting uses, such as keeping up with very current news/trends and social activities (ie: going to the bar at X, anyone up?).

However, to find out about these uses can take quite a bit of searching, especially if the reporter doesn't know anyone on Twitter. Granted, this is supposed to be the author's job, but I can understand that they wouldn't want to waste their time on what appears to simply be a worthless fad.

Really, I think the only way we'll see a decent article on Twitter is from someone who's used the service for a while, and has actually taken the time to find the signal among the noise. However, as most of these articles were probably pumped out within a few days due to deadlines, we won't find something like this among the major newspapers.

"goes off to check his twitter feed for something more interesting"

I think the entire point is, despite the already low bar this article has set, you won't find anything. When I used Twitter, I sure as hell never did.

I observe a tremendous amount of overlap between the links on HN and the links in my Twitter feed. I think it all comes down to who you're following, which is one reason why it's so useful: you can fine-tune your stream of links very easily to keep them synchronized with your tastes and interests.

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