Twitter as the noisiest medium in history (and what to do about it)
As this year 2013 ends, I find out I haven't used Twitter much. Maybe just every three months or so to keep the account kind of active. Have no time. Have no inclination.
Seth Godin puts the supposed importance of Twitter to task -
all that noise making it useless most of the time:
Do you actually believe that Taylor Swift has 33,000,000 million (and counting) people eagerly waiting for her next tweet, ready to click on whatever she links to?
In fact, less than one in a thousand people who 'get' one of her tweets will click. Most of the 33 million won't even read it, making the word 'get' worthy of quotation marks.
So what do we do with this Social media behemoth, which I suspect is fast becoming a wasteland roamed by shameless self-promoters?
You can play at Facebook and Twitter, and make them work. But they will only work if treat them like a cocktail party, as an opportunity to eavesdrop and layer general connection and value and insight.
Labels: social media, twitter
What Celebrity Culture Means: A World of Token Hurt
Read
this post
“Thanks for joining us tonight Mr. Bieber. What are your views on climate change? How do you feel about Iraq? And what do you think of the criticism levied against the parents of the Columbine shooters?”
...that like a celebrity, you must answer; it would be inhuman not to lament a tragedy, callous not to join in the universal support of a victimized people, immoral not to condemn the latest injustice; and like a celebrity, you have only a few words —perhaps 140 characters— and small tokens of your feelings: a ribbon on a tuxedo, an icon on an avatar;
Labels: celebrity, trends, twitter
Why blogging still rules Part 2: We owe it to our ideas to give them a fixed home
Anil Dash says, "
If you didn't blog it, it didn't happen."
Prof. Jay Rosen: '
We owe it to our ideas to give them a fixed home'.
Anil Dash again:
According to a survey, the most popular blog posts today are longer posts, 1,600 words on average.
Instant Opinions aren't necessarily useful insights.
What is your fixed home online?
Twitter? Great.
Also read:
Labels: blogging, twitter
Why Blogging Still Rules (and why reports about blogging having peaked are wrong)
The
latest Pew survey shows that people of all demographics are using the internet more than ever. Nothing surprising, you will say. But, the survey also reports that less people are blogging.
1. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline-a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites.
2. ...blogging's popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010.
Some observations:
They have experienced life. Writing brings catharsis. We want to share.
2. Nothing beats blogging your experience.
If you have less to say on a topic, use Twitter, which is
the new blog for some. Otherwise, nothing beats blogging. (Unless you are someone like Jay Rosen, the master of Mindcasting.)
"Writing is an effective way of processing and coming to terms with challenging and potentially traumatic events," he says. "But blogging is more than the mere act of writing. It also fosters senses of both control and social connection, each of which is crucial for psychological wellbeing."
3. Twittering is not about cool.
Earlier, it used to be that blogging was cool. Nerds used to blog.
People like Jason Kottke, Dave Winer, David Weinberger, Jeff Jarvis, Rebecca Blood, Andrew Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Om Malik and even Michael Arrington made their names as breakthrough bloggers, people who could construct good pieces on writing on a regular basis about their chosen domains, generating a sizeable following and positive brand value along the way.
People created bonafied publishing empires out of blogging. Major news brands have teams of writers blogging for them. It is another matter that for various business considerations, the premier blogging empire Gawker is adopting a magazine-type look.
Other than Jay Rosen, and some funny one-liner specialists, I don't see any Twitter superstar. Correct me if I am wrong.
4. Blogging is still the only way of building your brand in your industry.
I agree that curating news links on Twitter is useful but nothing beats being able to structure your analysis about an important industry issue through a blog. Nothing beats a detailed interview about how your industry works, via a blog post. Nothing beats a weekly roundup of major news stories about your industry. Nothing beats writing about the truths about your industry. If you don't, you are chicken.
Labels: blogging, twitter
Twitter vs. Facebook, Part 1
The battle between Tweets and Status updates rages on. Chris Sacca, a Silicon Valley investor who invested in Twitter, says:
"When Facebook goes down, everyone comes to Twitter to talk about it. When Twitter goes down, the world falls mute."
Via
The GuardianLabels: facebook, twitter
Twitter is a Giant Blog
Here is a what I think after Twitter's decision to allow users to share other forms of content: Twitter is a giant blog. Twitter is a giant blog network.
1. On Twitter, the world is a user/blogger.
3. He calls us to tweet more - 'Don't apologize if you don't tweet - just come to Twitter and consume content instead.'
4. Twitter is a blog network that does not have to pay the freelancers [That is us].
5. A Tweet is actually a blog comment on a diet.
6. Twitter gets all the content for free.
7. Twitter also gets to push ads down our throats.
8. Twitter has a group of preferred freelancers, also known as the 'Suggested List'.
9. This list promotes the Twitter ['Twitter is God." Etc.etc.] and vice versa.
10. Thus, Twitter is Huffington Post on steroids.
11. Twitter is a blog.
Labels: twitter
How to use Twitter, redux
Labels: twitter
The Earliest Twitterer: Patanjali
All the shameless self-promoters of the world, take note. Yes, I am looking at you, Swami Ramdeo and all you social media spam-xperts. The Indian Sage Patanjali who compiled the Yoga Sutras apparently beats everyone else. :-)
This
Tweet is via John Barger.
Labels: twitter
Blogger 1 Twitter 0
Touted as the '
first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.
It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine
praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.
The Economist writes,
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.
So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.
Labels: blogging, social media, twitter
Swine flu and the uselessness of Twitter during emergencies
Mathew Ingram once said "
Twitter is the first draft of history." Sadly, this first draft is taken for truth on Twitter, multiplied with each Re-tweet.
What is more, in case of emergencies, Tweets become
'the first draft of fear'
- with little or no context, Retweeted over and over, until only nonsense remains.
The Foreign Policy blog explains the
uselessness of Twitter during emergencies:
Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.
Labels: social media, twitter
How Twitter will (not) make money
1. Twitter cannot make money because there are not enough scoops on
plane crashes and terror attacks happening on a daily basis around this 'pale blue dot' called Earth. A Twitter from a plane passenger do not a Citizen Journalism make.
2. Twitter cannot make money because try one might, the world cannot be on one single page.
3. Twitter cannot make money because friends cannot be bought. Twitter Users would not will
'sell friend connections between users and companies wanting to communicate with them'. Those of us who would, are not quite the demographic advertisers are looking for. Remember when out of work people clicked on ads for money? Remember Facebook beacon? It was going to '
change the world'.
Twitter will make money when someone like Google buys it, integrating Twitter with Gmail.
Labels: facebook, social networking, twitter, web2.0
Hyperlocal: where is the citizen media in small-town America?
Compared to people in the big cities, citizen media activity is mostly limited to pictures on Flickr. Steven Clift at the
PBS Idealab finds that few small town people care to participate in forums, write blog posts, shoot and post videos and do all the things that apartment-living, "pressed for outdoors" us big city folks do.
Small Town America does not Twitter that much. Steven writes:
I've stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don't want to type in village after village. The best site I've found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.
All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. ...
How can we explain this?
1. Hyperlocal is an acquired taste. The failure of Backfence is case in point.
Everyblock is working so far because it works more on the automatic aggregation lines, relying on government data for things like police records. Besides, it focuses on big cities including New York only.
2. Hyperlocal needs proactive hand-holding - where editors and link curators encourage and help out local contributors, doing events and so on.
Thanks for the
linkLabels: citizen journalism, citizen media, everyblock, hyperlocal, twitter
The State of Citizen Journalism in India Part 3 – Microblogging and Mobile Blogging
This is the last of my 3-part series on Citizen Journalism in India. In
Part 1, I wrote about Blogs and photos and in
Part 2, I wrote about Citizen Journalism on the Television and Radio. In this last part, I am going to write about the
phenomenon of Micro Blogging/Mobile Blogging that is sweeping across India.
As of January 2008, there were 241.6 million cellphones in India and every month 7.8 million new cellphones are bought. In contrast, the total number on internet connections in India
hovers around the 10 million mark.
There is no wonder why Indians have taken to microblogging in a big way.
The fact that you can only send up to 160 characters using SMS has apparently hasn’t deterred users. Services such as
Smsgupshup.com and
Vakow.com allow users to send common SMS messages to all members of their groups.
People are using these SMS-based services as news broadcasting tools. Users continuously update their groups on these SMS sites with the latest news from far off places.
For example, a journalist in North East India is offering breaking news from his small town on Smsgupshup.com. A news site in the eastern State of Orissa is offering breaking news via the same site.
This is similar to the rage for Twitter in the United States. When Twitter came out, I was one of those who complained about the distractive and inane aspects of the service (
here and
here). But after having seen Citizen Journalists using SMS-based services in innovative ways, and news people covering the Primaries in the United States using Twitter, I am glad few listened to me back then.
In this
interesting article, a user of a sms-based microblogging service in India writes about the time when he
flashed a message about a two boys having fallen into a river in a village in Manipur (North East India) and soon, people got the message on their phones and reached the spot and were able to save the boys in time.
Where users see utility, business sees money. Not surprisingly, bigger players have jumped in, offering a wide variety of
mobile blogging services.
Apart from smsgupshup and vakow, other notable players are Chitr (Twitter clone), ActivMobs, and MyToday MOBS. Reliance Mobile, the second largest mobile service provider offers mobile blogging as well.
I read somewhere and I am sure you would have too, that in 2007,
five out of ten best-selling novels in Japan were originally written on cellphones.
Indians are big texters.
Will the average Indian reader opt for Mobile Novels?
Hemingway wrote a 6 word story:
“For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never worn.”
I wonder whether the mobile novel will ever be half as good.
Previous stories in the SeriesThe State of Citizen Journalism in India Part 1 - blogs, photos & videosThe State of Citizen Journalism in India Part 2 - Television & Radio
Labels: blogging, citizen journalism, india, microblogging, mobile, trends, twitter
Twittergrams, anyone?
Dave Winer, who is an indefatigable idea fount, has now come up with
Twittergrams, which are essentially 200Kb and below-sized very short audio files.
Respondents of the Twittergram add their own Audio files eventually adding up to a potentially rich human conversation.
You can complete a song using Twittergram.
Or, do a survey using Twittergrams.
Labels: trends, twitter
Time for some Twitter bashing and coffee
Ranting against those who are not heavy on Web 2.0 thingies such as Twitter, Myspace and others,
Decafbad has this to say,
it’s not addressed to you if there’s a buzz and you’re not groking it. That’s a clue that you’re probably missing something.
It is arrogant to say that if one is not enthusiastic about things like Myspace and Twitter, one is missing something.
Why can't this be the other way round?
Maybe it is the case that People who are so busy twittering with their 'circle'/tribe/whatever and spamming Myspace are missing real life.Forget this if real life means your group of friends that you are afraid of let go sometimes in your life.
BTW, when people bash Twitter or any new thing, they are only fueling the fire for the thingy.
Labels: twitter
British MP using Twitter to campaign
Good news for Twitter lovers everywhere. British MP Alan Johnston is
using Twitter in his campaign to become deputy leader of the Labor party.
Mostly, the twittering campaign consists of constant updates among a growing group of campaign supporters.
However, Indian politicians have used Texting as so-called 21st century PR for quite a while now in this decade of almost universal mobile coverage – sending one-way promotional messages, reminders to vote, exchanging quick texts on polling booth arrangements, who’s buying whom, caste-wise canvassing, the list goes on and on.
Labels: trends, twitter
A verbose age?
Twitter, Blogs, SMS/Text, IM, people glued to their cell phones – are these signs of a verbose age?
Are we more talkative than ever before?
Talk in these times comes in many flavors and is not limited to spoken words.
There is something poetic about bloggers discussing the merits of the 140 characters limit by the uber/tool of the moment Twitter.
In his ‘lovenote’#2 (Nick Carr’s term) for Twitter, J. Governor he takes on my deliberate
rant against Twitter, where he says, with some merit, I should add, that it is indeed possible to say all that you want in 140 characters, adding that there are far too many words in circulation.
For your consideration, here is a Hemingway short story in less than 10 words:
"For sale. Baby shoes, Never worn".If you are sure that you can beat Hemingway in 140 characters, you are indeed entitled to complain about the excess words to the Oxford dictionary people.
However,
Nick Carr has taken up issue, saying that
rather than signaling a society that goes for brevity, Twitter is actually a signal that people are more verbose than ever before.
And I often wonder how people argue on micro-publishing tools like Twitter. It would require more than half a dozen messages to get one point across.
P.S. This is a
faster age too- I read a BBC story yesterday about people in cities talking faster than ever before.
Labels: blogging, twitter
Why I do not like Twitter
Let me clarify first: I don't like like Twitter and it has nothing to do with the software, which I think is good.
I just don't like the hype and all that
pseudo-eventory.
I look at this hype about Twitter in select media outlets, group of so-called experts and opinion shapers and it seems like a Seinfeld episode – take a teaspoonful of nothing and talk about it.
Only difference: Seinfeld was entertaining.
On the other hand, these twitter love songs are big put-offs.
Some say people are taking up Twitter because
they are jaded by blogging.
If by blogging you mean throwing your diary out in the open, you might be right there.
Makes sense talking about yourself all the time, huh? I haven't made a single cent out of blogging.
When I don't like it, I might stop blogging but I won't twitter.
Other point out Twitter
is a great tool for small teams and groups to be in touch at all times.
There is some merit there, but look at the bright side: You are not making enough sales breakthroughs today and your boss keeps pinging.
Some say the 140 characters per posting
makes people post throughout the day – hopefully, all that twitter makes sense.
You can indeed make sense in 140 characters, provided you are Hemingway, on a commando operation, cheating in exams and …Besides, when you post nonsense throughout the day, you are putting more starin on a free service.
Another pro-Twitter argument goes like this – it helps you in touch with your close friends, so that you are up to date about the latest development.
Sounds too
‘Teeny’.
After a while, people need some space and I guess we have evolved up to appoint when too much familiarity does not breed contempt.
Finally, the ultimate pro-Twitter argument:
If you do not get Twitter, you must be tool old.I am a 30-year-old guy, and I do not use Twitter.
Actually, I do not text either. I do not care what you are doing unless I happen to be your boss and I suspect you waste a lot your work time on Digg, Orkut and of course, twittering with other people.
Therefore, I have had enough of twittering; let us get back to work now.
Labels: blogging, twitter
