Twitter

These are my thoughts about Twitter. Yours may differ.

I have a Twitter account and I find there are folks worth following. Currently I particularly like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (@kaj33) and Bill Simmons of ESPN (@sportsguy33). I’m also following Levar Burton, Kevin Spacey and Jerry Brown, among others.

I do not myself post anything on Twitter. Any thought I have worth sharing takes me more than 140 characters. For example, on NMK I’ve usually said why I think a link is worth your time (and often given you an excerpt). I myself hate being given a link without any commentary, and I don’t think you can provide worthwhile commentary in 100 characters, which is about all that’s left to you after the url of the link.

And I understand the need to use tiny URLs on Twitter, but I hate them. I almost never follow the links because I want some idea of where I’m going with my click before I go, and tiny URLs give you no idea. This just compounds the problem of lack of commentary. You’ve got to sell the link pretty hard to get me to click when I have no idea where I’m going, and frankly almost no one can do that in 100 characters.

I was talking to an intelligent and informative retired Air Force officer on the plane the other day. He was using so many acronyms that even I (after 30+ years of federal service) had to occasionally stop him and ask what such-an-such meant. Twitter is pretty much that way. Some good stuff, but too much figuring out. Briefer is not always better.

But, as I said, your opinion may differ.

6 thoughts on “Twitter”

  1. I always click on the waitwait tiny urls. They’re worth it.

    I wouldn’t use Twitter except that I have two friends who *only* use Twitter, and I feel like I’d be way out of the social networking loop if I didn’t keep in touch via Twitter. Well, that and now I’m addicted to the waitwait and Stephen Fry tweets.

  2. The tinyurls were an adjustment for me. I really liked being able to muse over a URL and get some idea of where I was going.

    But I’ve learned that giving up a little control can have its rewards. 😉

  3. Using Twitterfox, if you mouse-over tinyurls and a couple of other url-shortening services it shows you what the destination link is.

  4. @Matt – that’s what a number of Twitter applications let you do. Nambu is what I use, and it lets me know what the tinyurl is before I click on it.

  5. Nambu, a Twitter desktop client for the Mac, does that as well. My willingness to click tinyurls – or bitlys or whatever other shortening service people use – is directly related to how much I know and trust the source. There are those I follow that I personally know well, and others, not so much (as in your Levar Burton/Kevin Spacey/et. al. example).

    Twitter is just another communication tool, same as email. It’s just more public and less one-on-one than email, that’s all.

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