Twitter

[oselle]

See, this is what I don't get about Twitter. You can't have an actual conversation there like you can here. What's the point of that? Or am I missing something?

Comments

[amber1960.livejournal.com]

Nope, you are not missing anything. It is a weird medium. Kind of like you are just throwing stuff out there into a void which occasionally talks back.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I know you can do Twitter chat (we've sponsored "Twitter parties" at work) but you have to open a chatroom to do that. You can't have that back-and-forth conversation right on your account.

[tazical.livejournal.com]

I pretty much only use Twitter to stalk con hashtags when epic shit's happening on the Internet. Otherwise I find it a really disjointed and shallow form of communication. And I only use Tumblr to keep track of a few art and fandom blogs but jeez, that's even worse. I can't even figure out how to open something in a new tab half the time. How can I be 31 and feel so old?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Well, in the social community, 31 is ancient. Jared's not even 30 and even he said he'd have to figure out how Twitter worked. But it's so stupid! I like people to respond to what I say, I don't want to have to wait around for a frigging reTweet or some shit.

[mulder200.livejournal.com]

It's not just you! I never got the appeal either.

Now Tumblr on the other hand, I get.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Oh Christ. That's something else I haven't delved into. Who has time for all this stuff? I can't even keep up with LJ!

[mulder200.livejournal.com]

http://fuckyeahdeancas.tumblr.com/

That's about the only site I religiously check out.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Once again, I don't really get this. It seems so...blurby. Just these little bursts of words and pictures. Who can post to that? Do you belong to it, like an LJ comm? Who set it up?

I did dig all the Dean/Doctor Who crossover stuff though. God, wouldn't the Doctor just adore Dean?

[ancalime8301]

Sure you can. If you are responding to someone else's statement, you reply by starting your message with their username (e.g. @calimae -my account) then saying whatever it is you want to say. Then they reply back by starting their message with your username, and so forth. You can have a conversation with more than two people, too -just include every person's username in the message so they see what you're saying.

If you're both following each other, you can converse privately by sending direct messages to one another (like a short email, or LJ messages).

Of course, the 140-character limit does make it a little more challenging to express what you want to say. ;)

It's certainly different than a blog, though. People don't feel compelled to respond to everything said by the people they follow. Twitter is geared more toward news dissemination (and things like that) than it is toward blog-like conversations.

[caoil.livejournal.com]

^agree with this last sentence. I turn to Twitter to follow news that is changing quickly (like Egypt, or Japan's earthquake) and then silly tweets from some of the celebs I like. I'm not always on, though, so I don't have the opportunity to 'talk' back and forth much.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

But if you tweeted something, I couldn't respond directly to you in your Twitter, right? I'd have to respond in my OWN Twitter, using the method you just described. Is that what they call a retweet? How on earth would you ever know I responded? Do you get an alert or something? It seems like a lot of work.

[caoil.livejournal.com]

Your message to me (@myname) should show up in my timeline. So if I'm watching, periodically it will say "3 new tweets" or whatever, and I click it, and it displays the new ones. If you say something to me and I am not logged on, I can always look in my "@mentions" tab and it'll be there. Or if you messaged me directly then that is more like an inbox & it'll sit there until picked up.

Took me a while to get the hang of it. I'm not the most thrilling tweeter (I do a lot of retweeting things from other people, mostly) but if you want some practice you can add me (@kiranmartin).

[oselle.livejournal.com]

You know, I've been meaning to start a Twitter just because I sort of need to know the logistics for work. This craziness is starting to turn up on job interviews. I was actually asked in an interview "How many times a day do you tweet?" Boy, I can remember when companies wouldn't have wanted an employee who spent all their time online, now they want someone who does. Brave new stupid world.

[caoil.livejournal.com]

What kind of an interview question is that?! *boggles*

[oselle.livejournal.com]

They wanted to know if I knew my way around Twitter. I guess it's a legitimate question, but I hardly consider the ability to tweet and retweet a skill.

[ancalime8301]

I do Twitter as part of my job (I run my library's main account), but it certainly wasn't part of the job description or interview!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Well, you can. You just have to do it in very short sentences or phrases!

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Oh well, that's never going to work for me. How on earth am I supposed to shred an episode of SPN in 140 characters?

[samaranth.livejournal.com]

How many times a day do you tweet?"

Bizarre, isn't it? Not only that, my work performance is now being measured by how many times I tweet per day. And also update Facebook. Unbelievable. The long name is 'implementing a social media engagement strategy'. The practical effect is sitting on Twitter/FB all day and watching the gossip. (In between doing my real job.)

It is possible to have a conversation on Twitter. It's a bit like IM, but slightly disjointed. But mostly I just read...in my personal account I follow heaps of journalists, and that's interesting. It's a bit like eavesdropping on conversations in a big room. Shouted conversations.

A retweet is when you read something in your timeline that you think is interesting, and so you RT it out to all of your followers so they can read it too. It's not the same things as an @reply

(I'm @aramonrose on Twitter.)

[oselle.livejournal.com]

The long name is 'implementing a social media engagement strategy'.

As someone in marketing, I find all of this social networking intensely dull and uninspiring, with little to no room for real creativity. I build it into proposals and then let the web people handle the execution.

It's a bit like IM, but slightly disjointed.

Every time I've explored Twitter, it's that "disjointed" quality that turns me off. Oh, I have to check here and there and elsewhere to see if anyone retweeted me or replied? No thanks. It all just feels like overlapping babble.

[twirlycurls.livejournal.com]

No idea what you can or can't do with it and I'm not interested enough to figure it out. It seems like every year the Internet provides even more dumbed-down ways for people to "connect." LJ is pretty awesome, Facebook is stupid, and Twitter is just annoying. What's next, a huge social networking site where we communicate through emoticons only?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

It seems like every year the Internet provides even more dumbed-down ways for people to "connect."

I love LJ and I hope to God it never goes away. There is simply no other format to replace it and to me, this is where fandom happens, this is where fandom lives. I checked out a Dean/Cas Tumblr site last night and...there was some nice stuff there, but it just felt like a big anonymous bulletin board where people tacked things up. There was no back-and-forth, absolutely no feeling of "community," not even in the virtual sense. And you couldn't even comment on anything, you could just say that you "liked" it. No wonder I don't get that many comments on my stories. People just want to click a "like" button and take off. Everyone acts like this social networking is so dynamic but it's not, it's just real fast and real stupid.

[sixth-queen.livejournal.com]

You're not supposed to have a "conversation" on Twitter. Twitter is one-way medium by which the tweeter broadcasts enlightenment outward from his supreme self to his loyal followers. Tweetees are meant to accept the tweeter's sage advice with gratitude and without question, and are allowed respond to tweets the same way that they respond to Moses's Stone Tablets.

geez, get with the program.


(yes I'm being snarky :-) )

[oselle.livejournal.com]

You can have quasi-conversations on Twitter (it also has a separate chat function, which is essentially no different from any chatroom), but it's all so sprawling that most tweets don't inspire any conversation, they just sit there. Besides, how much conversation can you really have in 140-character bursts?