Re: Tweet This: I Don't Care

[security curmudgeon <jericho () attrition org>]

: > In responding to Ferg's post with two words, well below the 140 character
: > limit, you make his point better than he did.
: 
: Indeed?

indeed.

: I find it increasingly ridiculous that whenever a new medium shows up, 

new medium? we're talking about 'Twitter' here, yes? nothing new about the 
medium really. you have MySpace comments meets SMS text restrictions for a 
Web (1.0? 1.5? 2.0?) driven site. forcing users to post comments in under 
140 characters is the only real difference for the web.

: whether temporal or permanent, the old guard rejects it. Then it either 
: moves on like it never existed, gets replaced (succeeded) or "it has 
: always been there".

the old guard tends to reject over-hyped small twists on old ideas, 
especially when they cater to the vapid masses that can't seem to say 
anything worthwhile when given 1000 words and 10 days, let alone 140 
characters and 10 seconds.

count the social networking sites (which this could be classified as) that 
have come and gone. none of us remember them all i would imagine. each one 
comes, has some new small twist or set of features, many flock to it and 
before long, it's empty and people have migrated to the next new thing. 
this hopping from sinking ship to sinking ship doesn't strike me as a new 
medium most of the time.

: At first, it was weird. While I appreciated a place where I could share 
: quick thougts, much like a shoutbox on blogs, it was cold and lonely.
: 
: People you would "follow", would not follow you back, even if you knew 
: them. "What's that all about?" I'd ask. And yet, it was also fun:

see, you strike on a great point that the doe-eyed masses work to forget. 
while someone may have hundreds following them on Twitter, that means that 
a million others opt NOT to follow them. there is a reason for that; even 
the most popular people, the most famous people, are still mundane if you 
turn them into the Truman show.

I see value in Twitter in some cases, where people use it to receive 
specific information, like RSS for SMS where character length may matter. 
having information pushed to you in that fashion is great. knowing what 
Sally had for breakfast and what Joe's insipid thought of the moment is 
every five minutes doesn't seem that useful. further, i think that people 
feel the need to use it, to get a sense that it is valuable, and it forces 
them to have inane conversations they wouldn't otherwise have had. (i say 
this based on 'some' users, certainly not all)

: What it was however, was whatever I made of it.
: 
: 1. People who updated whenever they were off to the bathroom, or eating, 
: we boring. I didn't follow them. If a person twitted too much, she was 
: out of my stream.

out of curiosity, how many people did you end up following after applying 
this criteria? this is the type of "stream" that I refer to above.

: Is it good? Is it evil? I don't know and I don't care.

i don't think any of us should or can rate it as 'good' or 'evil', and i 
don't think that was Ferg's point, and certainly not mine.

: If blogging is good for you, keep blogging. Just don't be an old fart 
: and tell me IM is for young people because email is good `nuff. It makes 
: you not just an old fart, but a silly cranky dork.

Twitter isn't "IM" to me. ICQ, AIM, YIM, Jabber, etc. are "IM". I know 
that Twitter is akin to IM and carried over a different set of protocols 
or technology, but if you consider "IM" means "Instant Message", I 
certainly don't want to get bogged down in the sad restriction that my 
message must be X characters long. Hell, i routinely see URLs that are 
more than 140 characters (another argument, and equally absurd I know).

: Anyway, I thought we were just joking around, Fergie and I.

Didn't come across that way, at least not after Ferg's post. If your 
response was meant to be 'twit-like', then I missed that.

: If you believe I made Fergie's point for him, even though we were just 
: trading jokes, show me your argument, and why it is so. I'll keep an 
: open mind.

Again, you made my argument =) You couldn't have made your argument (and 
thus mine) over Twitter. I guess I have a problem with a 'medium' that 
forbids you to even defend your position on its value or using it in the 
style that you did. it was tempting to reply to this, but only quote the 
first 140 characters, to demonstrate the point:

: I find it increasingly ridiculous that whenever a new medium shows up,
: whether temporal or permanent, the old guard rejects it. Then it

yeah.. glad you used e-mail for this (seriously) =)
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