Back on the silly microblog

[jducoeur]

In case anybody cares: I've gotten myself back onto Twitter again. I've actually had an account there for ages, but haven't checked it since their IM integration broke months ago. (It's been at "we'll fix it Real Soon Now" ever since, and I can't be bothered to go to their website.)

But in my business, Twitter is kind of expected (you're not anybody in social media these days if you're not on the thing), so I finally downloaded a decent client (Twhirl), and I'm up and running again. I still think it's essentially a toy, but it's one of the few services in approximately the same space as CommYou. (That is, easy semi-realtime conversation.) It serves as a good constant reminder to me of what I'm trying to do better.

Anyway: I have my usual handle over there; feel free to friend me...

Comments

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I totally don't get Twitter. I really don't. Whenever I see Twitter feeds in LJ, I skip right over them. Then again, I don't get the point of having multiple blogs either unless you use them for wildly different things. Why have Facebook and LiveJournal and MySpace if you're going to essentially post the same stuff to all of them?

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

I have some friends who are on LJ and some who are on FB. So I need to have both types of accounts. FB provides some useful tools; if all my friends were on both, I would use the FB tools for planning events, for example, and LJ for, well, journaling. I'm hoping that CommYou or some other tool will come along that will make it easier to keep everything in sync and updated.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

At least with MySpace, you can get RSS feeds of posts that you can read on LiveJournal. Can you do the same with Facebook posts? I guess I'm just getting increasingly irritated with the amount of time I need to spend online in various forums if I want to keep up with people.

[jducoeur]

Well, I have three main blogs, but they're all used for very different things. Art of Conversation is a very focused professional blog. My LJ account is where I talk about more or less Everything Else. And Twitter is ideal for those little one-line observations that I don't think are really worth an LJ post. (Also, it's rather more real-time than LJ is.)

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure why Twitter is more real-time, or why it's better for short observations, though. I can post any length to my LJ, and at any time. I guess I'm not understanding their sales pitch.

[laurion]

Much of the more real-time nature is the approach it takes to pushing the posts you make, rather than waiting for people to pull them. Twitter can push direct to your IM account, your cell phone by SMS, or to whatever client you are using, many of which ping the user when new posts show. And the short length leads to more casual two-way conversation. Think of it as a little bit like a chatroom for you and your social network without any of the overhead.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see why I don't get it. I find the thought of having this stuff pushed to me really annoying. I'd rather schedule time to sit down and read blog postings at my convenience. But then again, I don't IM, and I don't text message.

[jducoeur]

Ah -- yeah, if you don't like realtime push, the Twitter is definitely not the tool for you...

[jducoeur]

It's not how you post, it's how other people read those postings. I *receive* Twitter posts almost in realtime: they pop up immediately in my client. While it's not IM (as discussed elsethread), it is fast enough that it has IMish realtime-like feel. The result is a rather different sort of interaction than is typical in LJ.

You don't *have* to do Twitter in realtime, of course -- but at that point, it does start to become useless, IMO...

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

What's the practical difference between Twitter and IM?

Also, even if there is a difference, why do you feel that Twitter is a toy and IM is a tool?

[jducoeur]

What's the practical difference between Twitter and IM?

Friend lists, mostly, but that's an *enormously* important difference, producing a totally different experience.

IM is, by and large, point-to-point. Even when you do group communication in it, you have to define that group in advance, and the group is more or less fixed. IM is, therefore, fairly good to have a *single* conversation, but it's a rotten medium for conversation in the larger and more fluid group sense.

Twitter, OTOH, is more like LJ -- indeed, I would say that it is more like LJ than it is like IM. You *post* messages, you don't *send* them. Who sees the messages is whoever is following you, precisely like the LJ friend list. The result is a single, rather amorphous conversation that follows along social-network lines -- much like LJ.

There are some other differences as well, of course -- in particular, Twitter is "semi-realtime" in exactly the same way as CommYou is. That is, posts are generally fetched by folks in realtime (it's not 100% push, but the effect is much the same), so you see them immediately, but you can easily catch up later. This is different from both the way LJ is usually consumed (strict after-the-fact pull) and IM (strict realtime, with little meaningful history).

So Twitter is essentially LJ, with a 140 character length limit, no comment threads, and extremely coarse-grained privacy. (Your "journal" is either public or locked, period.) Very stripped-down, very lightweight -- limited, but easy to use. Hence my view that it's kind of a toy: it lacks the power-user features I crave. CommYou is trying to do a very similar thing, but with an intense focus on followup conversation, none of the limits, and eventually all the fine-grained tools that LJ provides...

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it's very similar to FB's "Wall", pulled out of context and with even coarser-grained privacy -- and without the multi-media capabilities, but presumably also without the overhead, and with multiple clients to choose from. Hmm. And a lower barrier for entry than FB, I presume.

Meh.

[laurion]

Exactly. The real advantage over the Wall is that twitter is not a walled garden: you can send and receive posts almost anywhere, with a plethora of clients, IM integration, and SMS capability. FB's Wall requires you to go into FB and scroll through everything. It's a Push V. Pull approach.

[jrising.livejournal.com]

After avoiding Twitter without much difficult for quite a while, you piqued my interest with "twitter is expected in social networking circles". That's one of the areas I'm going, so I'm curious how it's used there. Anyway, I'm on now-- jrising.

I don't think I want to juggle another communication client, though. But I think I've found some alternatives: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4 has a Pidgin plugin for using status messages as Twitter statuses, and I'm sure there's a RSS-to-Pidgin plugin somewhere. Alternative, http://code.google.com/p/microblog-purple/ might be replacement for the latter piece or the whole thing.

[jducoeur]

Anyway, I'm on now-- jrising.

Okay, I'm now following you.

Interesting -- I hadn't come across microblog-purple yet, and that might suit me better than the alternatives. The ones that use status messages kind of bug me, actually, because I think it's a misuse: while people talk about Twitter and status in one breath, I don't think it's quite the right paradigm for this. (That is, I find Twitter at its best a bit more conversational and interactive than a status message.)

What I *want* is to treat Twitter as a single IM buddy (much like CommYou's interface with IM). This sounds like it might be along those lines, so I'll have to check it out. I may or may not use it -- Twhirl is quite nice -- but at the least I'd like to see how it works. Thanks for the pointer...

[jrising.livejournal.com]

Tell me if you try microblog-purple-- I haven't yet. My motivation for equating IM status and Twitter was because I have more of a vested interest in reviving an up-to-date IM status life than in a new time sink. But I recognize that they're different-- one of my first reactions to Twitter was, ooh, personal zephyr instances, I've been wanting those.

But I'm reasonably desperate for more integration in these time sinks. I only want to write a status message (or blog entry) once, and the more places it can offer to update the better.

[jducoeur]

Have you checked out friendfeed yet? IIRC, it has some replication capabilities that might suit you in this case...