- Information source.
Twitter can have a number of uses but for me it's just like an interactive form of teletext. I can search by hashtags and filter something like the old teletext news feed; I can watch real time reactions and keep track of things like the Tour de France and the News of the World fallout as it turns toxic. Although I wonder about its value; I can get these things elsewhere, often covered in greater depth, on news websites. I don't think I gain that much from seeing it all happen in real time but it does feel more exciting. - Conversation analogy.
I am not comfortable with the conversation analogy. For a conversation I need to know whom I am adressing but with Twitter I don't; it strikes me as being like shouting into a dark cave and waiting to see what echoes come back. Twitter is not a conversation but rather provides a medium for user interaction: it is good at providing people with a medium to interact with information; it provides a medium to broadcast as well as receive; and it provides a marketplace for people to advertise and generate a sense of brand interaction or strong brand identity. All of these provide opportunities for libraries but I do not see it is a conversation. - Talking Personally
I follow a variety of accounts from personal to corporate. This means I get personal conversations between friends from which I would usually be excluded mixed with news items, interesting pieces of information, and the occasional plug. At times it can be a fascinating polyphony but I still find it annoying. I do find this mixing of public and private space odd and I have noticed that Twitter is a medium where larger organisations adopt similar language. ¿Qué opinas? asks El País What do you think? wonders the guardian yet I wonder why they care. - Taking Time
Twitter is an excellent resource for links and articles using a crowd sourcing principle to filter the internet. However, it does take time and frequent attention. I will persevere with it but as an information source. For a while I have used it as a newsfeed for my tumblr account, I also publicise blog posts I have written for my Spanish friends, which a great way to learn a language as their comments are encouraging as well as helpful, and the occasional interaction.
Monday, 18 July 2011
¿Qué opinas? What do you think?
At the start I used my experiences with Twitter to illustrate some issues I have with social media. Over the past week I've been putting in a lot of effort and while there has not been a revelatory moment, I am now more comfortable with it. Here are a couple of thoughts:
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Twitter is a tool you can use however you like - as an info gathering source or for chatting to friends and collecgues. I'd be interested to hear what you think of LinkedIn as this is a more work orientated networking tool, so would cut down some of the chatter (although if you join very active groups on LinkedIn you can certainly get involved in discussions)
ReplyDeleteRowena 23 Things Team
Why thank you! You may have noticed I loooove Twitter, so writing about my experiences has been pretty good fun.
ReplyDeleteRe the 'conversation' point: I agree with Rowena, I think it depends on what you use Twitter for - for me, a lot of it is about just chatting away with people, whereas if you were more interested in just the information-gathering side of it then yes, I think you're right, it's not conversational.
It turns out you really can end up knowing twitter people, though: I went to a conference yesterday where I only knew one person IRL and about 10 from Twitter, and it was great. We were all chatting away just like we do on Twitter, drawing others in in the same way, introducing each other to new people, etc.
That shared experience of silly joking tweets about storms and new articles and the odd bit of library-ing translated into really getting on, and it made what could have been a pretty daunting experience really good fun. And people really are very similar IRL to how they are on Twitter...
p.s. if I'm not following you, shout up and I will do! *forcibly drags you into conversation* :-)