How NOT to use Twitter

I'm beginning to see more and more people using Twitter like IRC or a chat room, with messages like this -

Username: @Whoever: Agreed, I thought the same thing

Now unless I'm also following 'Whoever' I don't have a clue what 'Username' is talking about and even if I did this isn't a chat room..... it's not for conversation... it's for stream of consciousness thoughts or status reports. Yes, I could of course just stop following the people who do that but better to first try instilling an appropriate netiquette for the new medium.


Technorati Tags: twitter

Comments

[Robin Blandford]

true story.

[Tom Morris]

Hands up - I'm guilty of this. I should really use direct messaging. I wish Twitter would introduce a way to send a "public direct" message - meaning that it would be sent direct to the person but also could be seen by anyone who is a friend of both you and them. That way, people who are just friends of one participant in a conversation don't get bothered with the updates.

Twitter really is the start of something big - I wish they had groups and all sorts of other things. At the BBC Backstage Christmas party, someone managed to get the Twitterstream to show live on a big monitor, but it was just the whole stream. It'd be cool if they could set it up so that it was just the people in the room - so when you got there, you'd text "group bbcbackstageparty on" or something, and then start texting in updates.

Now I know that it annoys you, I'll stop doing it and direct respond to Twitters now. The @ thing is a hack, and not a very nice one. Some of the more disciplined people on my contact list do send direct. And Twitter is great if you are looking for an answer - you can just post "I'm stuck on X, help!" and you'll typically get answers within a few minutes.

Perhaps some tiny little credit-card sized printable lingo lists would do the trick. One that tells you all the lingo for IM/web and one for mobile. I know, if there was a small enough one, I'd stick it on the back of my phone or carry it in my wallet with me.

[James Corbett]

Well you weren't the only one I had in mind Tom... but you were *one* ;-)

No worries.... it takes a while to grok the difference between Twitter and other channels and I must admit I've some nerve to tell others how to use it ;-)

You've posted some great ideas there especially that one about ad-hoc groups for conference backchannels... that sure would be cool :)

[Bernie Goldbach]

I feel that some people on Twitter never leave their keyboards because they would never survive the barrage of nudges they send over SMS when twittering as verbosely as they do.

[Tom Morris]

Bernie: I do most of my Twittering from my computer, because I spend most of my time in front of a keyboard. I'm sure that if I was a normal person (ie. not a blogger and not a developer) that my Twitter use would be more normal.

In fact, I can't seem to get Twitter to send messages to my phone, so it's all a bit moot, to be honest.

[Emmet]

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, James. In general, I don't think software (especially on the web) should try to impose its predetermined usage model on the user at all. If someone finds an innovative way of using a tool, why tell them they're not allowed, or worse, prevent them from being able to?

Lets take the prototypical example of Flickr. It started life as an online game[1], developed into a photo site when that aspect of the game grew to be more popular, and is now used variously as an online backup space, a photoblog, a social network, and no doubt lots more.

If I were one of the Twitter guys, I'd be thanking these "@username" guys for the idea and looking for ways to adapt[2] the software in order to *empower* these users to do what they want to without getting in everyone else's way. (Aside from that, you could get someone to write a Greasemonkey script to parse out all messages that start with and "@" :)

Tom, I say keep using your @ hack until the developers catch up and give you the features you really want!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Neverending
[2] http://blog.thoughtwax.com/?p=156

[James Corbett]

Good points Emmet, though I think the Twitter guys also see it more as a broadcast channel than a chat room. Their tagline is afterall - "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?". In other words, status reports.

Agreed though that one should never dictate the use and instead watch how it is used. It was wrong of me to dictate in that way... but I'll definitely be un-following people who use it as a chat channel. That's a personal choice.

I agree too that they should parse out the @ messages. Notice though that Twitter already has a private messaging feature - 'Direct Messages'. It seems to me that's what people should be using for that purpose.

[Chris Heuer]

I am glad that you came around on this after some considered discussion - in fact, I think the contraint of the question on Dodgeball (where are you and who are you with?) is what prevented more innovative usage from emerging. I think that Twitter will succeed because the question "what are you doing" is more open ended in nature. While you think of it as status reports, others can take a different meaning. For instance, people can be doing things in thier mind as much as they are doing them in the real world. In the blog post I just published on Social Media Club I mentioned Twitter being used as a media annotator, review/feedback mechanism, social bookmarking tool and even a promotional vehicle (as I did with the blog post about Twitter).

I think you are right on here - you unleash the deeper value and possibilities by not thinking of it as a messaging/conversational channel ala traditional IM - in fact, that is why I think of it as a new wave of EM - everywhere messaging. But it could be used as a proxy for IM too - I think you have collected some great ideas for improvements and would love to see someone develop a great set of greasemonkey scripts for Twitter as you suggest.

[James Corbett]

Thanks Chris, there's no doubt but that these blog debates can really help clarify our understandings. I've definitely changed my mind on a lot of this. I'm after reading the post on your own blog too - very interesting stuff!