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

[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.