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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2009-05-06, 07:43

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gizzer View Post
Very good point.

I use Twitter over Facebook precisely because it does one thing very well, and very simply. For me it's essentially a realtime news ticker with a very focused set of sources. Nearly all the people I follow are either application developers (representing their software company) or certain gadget blogs. I basically get the lowdown on the apps I love to use (what features they are working on for version x) and the head's up as to when a new version is ready, and it gives me the opportunity to give "live" feedback to a developer by bypassing all the "Contact Us" pages on a website. Developers also seem to enjoy posting a quick Tweet rather than filling out a whole article on their blog.

It also means I get news as it happens, without me having to subscribe to RSS feeds. I'd much rather fire up a Twitter client on my iPhone to "read the news" than fire up an RSS reader, because I know exactly who and what type of news I will be getting.

I'm not interested in knowing what people ate for breakfast, but I am interested in keeping informed.
Yeah, I can certainly see the appeal. I can't speak for anyone else in the thread, but when I say I think Twitter's going to collapse or get absorbed by another company within a year, it's because I don't think it's a sustainable business model, not because I think it's worthless to everyone. Clearly, a lot of people like it.

So many people have blogs that it takes them forever to update. When you keep a personal blog, you feel obligated to type a bunch of stuff and really make each post feel meaningful, but the problem is that it requires more of a time commitment (you actually have to sit down and write something rather than just banging out 140 characters or less during your break). People end up putting it off, and the longer they put it off, the more stuff they want to talk about when they do eventually get around to writing the post, and that just delays it more.

So I can see the appeal. Oh yeah, and on top of that, people seem more comfortable with checking someone's Twitter feed than they are with subscribing to an RSS feed of a friend's blog. Not sure why. Maybe because Twitter-reading apps are just simpler and meant to do exactly one thing, whereas RSS is a catch-all for any website that is updated regularly.

For me, there is no reason at all to use Twitter:

- Only a few of my friends use it, vs. nearly all of them who have Facebook
- I have no mobile device that can access it, nor will I ever have one in the foreseeable future (too expensive to buy and to pay for on a monthly basis and zero benefit to me)
- 99% of the times that I actually want to keep in touch with people through computers instead of my phone, I am either at home or at work. If so, there's not much reason to get Twitter since the 140-character limit is very restricting. Facebook makes more sense if you're primarily accessing it through computers instead of underpowered, small-screened mobile devices.
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