Ask YC: Why should I care about Twitter?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182755

by the1pato • 18 years ago

16 51 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are many of our news.YC users also Twitter users? What do you find that you like about Twitter?

senthil_rajasek2• 18 years ago

its a non-intrusive way of sharing statuses.

the1pato• 18 years ago

The status updates are sent to your phone/mobile device, though. Here you are, reading news.YC, and buzz... Stephanie doesn't like what she just had for lunch. That's not a little bit intrusive?

dr1ft• 18 years ago

Ummm...Do you use twitter? That is wrong. If you want updates on your phone then you can turn them on. If you don't then it is trivially easy to turn off all phone updates or set it up so that you only get updates on your phone during certain hours. That doesn't sound intrusive to me.

senthil_rajasek2• 18 years ago

SMS updates to your phone is optional besides as I once "tweeted" - "brevity is the soul of tWITter"

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

And... not only do yu decide if updates come to your phone, you do that on a per-person basis. So you'll only see what that friend is doing If You Want To. That's about as non-intrusive as it gets. It's entirely under YOUR control.

xenoterracide2• 18 years ago

I personally don't think you should. I myself find 'social networking' to be a large waste of time.

people like to play silly games, and change things like mood, or the music they are playing.

the social notice I want? was the phone call I got a 7am a few weeks ago a friend telling me her fiance and my former room-mate had died.

or how about a text saying, "wanna meet for lunch?"

I haven't used twitter, but the whole social thing seems a waste of time. I have better things to be doing, like building a business, or school, or finding a job to help me pay the bills in the mean time.

calvin• 18 years ago

I've found Twitter to be a great aid to me w/ networking. For the most part, I add people I try to add people I meet at business networking events. I've gotten to know several people in the Seattle startup scene by going to real networking events and then continuing to follow up and build the relationships through Twitter.

Speaking of lunch, I've used it for that as well. Once your friends start using Twitter enough, it's easy to shoot them a message and ask if they want to grab lunch especially if they're in the same area.

xenoterracide2• 18 years ago

see this is part of the problem with social networking.

'once your friends start using twitter enough'

it's proprietary and unstandardized, unlike email or phone numbers where it doesn't matter as much what network you are on, you can still make and receive messages. (I know cells are very proprietary, but you can still get calls right?).

cocoy• 18 years ago

i share your distaste for social networking. i hardly check my facebook, just once every couple of weeks. there are just too many people blasting you some game or stuff like that. boring.

but w/twitter... it was different. after you get past certain barriers, it becomes a conversation.

some people use the sms function to blast all their friends "wanna meet for lunch". hey, if you only need to send once, right and pay once?

there are business leaders on twitter and some really smart people. think of twitter as a party that goes on 24/7. you get interesting conversation.

sometimes, some people come in and shouts out that they're on ustream, and hey a couple of people slip out to go to that room. while everyone else keeps the conversation going.

sometimes, you get the really breaking news. other times, you get good links to interesting stuff.

there are times, you just listen in on a conversation between two twitters and you learn stuff.

how do you keep up? you don't. you don't need to keep up. you can miss stuff and that's ok. i use growl on the mac to give me a heads up when someone twitters. that way, i don't have to actually be directly engaged. just think of it as background conversation in the office. And of course you can really turn it off.

just my two cents.

justindz• 18 years ago

Twitter has an extremely low barrier of entry and it's so off-the-cuff that it's a great place to non-blog without cluttering your blog with stuff that's less topically relevant or more random. I find that valuable, though I could live without.

It's not terribly "social" for me yet as only one friend also has an account. People have remarked before that if you live in the valley or work in certain types of companies or communities then you'll get more activity (and, potentially, more disturbance as well).

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

Make new friends. :)

wallflower• 18 years ago

The best description I've read of Twitter..

"ShoeMoney: Sure you follow people you care what they say and then are alerted when they say something. Its a great cross between a instant messenger and a blog."

chuchurocka• 18 years ago

i've been using twitter for a while now. I mainly use it to quickly mine my friends for information, 'anyone know a good designer for cheap?', 'having problems invoking a ruby method from a cron job', 'in LA, need good tacos, and fast'.

axod2• 18 years ago

I just don't get twitter. I saw some idiot who wrote an article using twitter. So of course each paragraph was 140 characters or less.

Just because you can use a tool to do something, doesn't mean you should.

IMHO, IM/IRC/email/blog all work far better for communication.

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

So, you saw one person use Twitter in a certain way, thought that way was silly, drew a generalization to the entire service, and you decided you knew everything abut it?

Someone uses the telephone to do telemarketing to try to sell you carpet and from that you understand what the telephone is "for"?

IM/IRC/email/blog are all different - from each other and from Twitter. As is the telephone. Or SMS. Or...

axod2• 18 years ago

ok. To clarify... I've seen many many articles showing how you can use twitter to do X. When it just seems that there's already a far more suited way to do X.

I'm sure it's sort of useful for some things for some people, but I can't see it going mainstream.

izaidi• 18 years ago

Twitter is well suited to certain kinds of lifestyles, and pretty much useless for others. I don't use it because none of my friends use it, and I find it more cumbersome and limiting than other services, but if you run with a crowd with which it's reached a critical mass it can be a useful tool for quick-hit communication.

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

Some of us find that, as we use Twitter, we make new friends.

Not all of my friends need to be people I see (physically) just as not all of the people, I see (physically) are my friends.

rrival• 18 years ago

We're using twitter as a microblog for the latest info about priceadvance (http://twitter.com/priceadvance). The twitter widget is sitting on priceadvance.com. Easy way to keep users up to date without installing wp or something custom.

scooter53080• 18 years ago

I personally don't. I like to listen to the 'This Week in Tech' podcast, and those guys are obsessed with Twitter. I groan loudly every time the conversation comes back to Twitter which is like every ten minutes or so. It has almost become unbearable. Between that and TechChrunch, I've entered backlash-mode on the service, and I have never even used it.

thomasswift• 18 years ago

it is like a simpler IM

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

Well, I've tried twitter for few weeks and ended up turning most of it off, because honestly, I don't give a damn that you're eating lunch at some new restaurant, or giving your dog a bath, or watching TV with your wife.

I find the service is basically a big giant intrusion into my life. 99% of the crap that pops up I just don't care about. 99% I put into the thing I can guarantee others don't care about either.

I think this social networking stuff has huge scaling problems outside of the navel gazing that happens both in the valley and during one's college years. Most people outside of these zones feel neither the need nor the desire to be that connected to others.

This isn't a knock on twitter as a service, just a general observation. It's going to take a profound change in thinking to create a world that twitter and others can truly exploit. This could also just be this Gen X'er showing his age, so take my comment with a grain of salt.

johns• 18 years ago

And therein lies the brilliance of Twitter. If someone is a navel-gazer or otherwise uninteresting, you don't follow them anymore, end of problem. You have influence over the signal to noise ratio and you consume it on whatever schedule works for you.

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

But again, if You don't care what I am doing, that whatever possessed you to "follow" me? You only follow the people you WANT to follow. You only read what you WANT to read. You turn on SMS (or IM) notifications at YOUR preference. The only way Twitter can be a "big giant intrusion" into your life is if YOU turn that on!

It's like saying, 99% of the stuff on television is crap but failing to realize that you control the tv and you don't have to watch that stuff!

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

No, it's like saying 99% of the stuff on TV is crap, so I don't see the value in having a TV.

Like I said, we're talking personal preferences here, so don't get so emotional about it.

epi0Bauqu• 18 years ago

It just turns out Twitter focuses conversation in a different way than email, IM, blogs, status messages, etc. And if you are interested in that type of conversation, then you should care.

hwork• 18 years ago

AIM Away Messages for Geeks.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

That is EXACTLY what it is. It just pushes AIM away messages around. Just add song lyrics aimed at your ex-girlfriend and you have AOL circa 2002 in a "social network" of high school kids. The only reason I would want to use it is for mass texting, i.e. Want to meet for lunch? type messages. For that a better feature would be grouping on your cell phone.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

The importance of Twitter is hugely overblown in the web/software geeks circles, and virtually no one outside has ever heard of it, and probably will never care.

Facebook encompasses Twitter's functionality too, but no one really uses the status updates like they do with Twitter.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

The problem is Facebook's status updates are not accessible, for either reading or writing, outside of Facebook (at least it used to be true, I deleted my Facebook account a while back). This changes the way people use it.

bchandle• 18 years ago

Try taking a look at part II of this: http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2008/05/twitter-imagined-ident...

(complements of HN a day or two ago)

Personally, I'm still not a user, but the conceptualization of Twitter as more than a simple messaging service significantly raises its value in my eyes.

pierrefar• 18 years ago

It's where the net's pulse is at the moment.

<sidenote>Who knows where the pulse will be in a few months time. Everything changes so quickly.</sidenote>

thorax• 18 years ago

Twitter is micro-LiveJournal.

ardit332• 18 years ago

Twitter reflects the overrall california lifestyle and the shallowness of conections made in here. Comming from the east coast, I can tell there is a huge difference on friends I have in SF, and friends I have in Boston. I know more people, and have more "friends" in california, but for some reason they tend to be more of the "good times" types, while in Boston I had less friends, but more people I could rely on and stronger connections.

So, with twitter, you just broadcast something to a bunch of your "friends", while in the east coast you would just normally text few of your friends directly.

And, there is a good reason they call it "California RSVP". Some people call it shallow, some call it "laid-back", it depends on your point of view, but I have gotten used to it.

rantfoil• 18 years ago

Hm, not exactly sure how a question about Twitter became an indictment against California / Californians. Lets stay on topic.

ardit332• 18 years ago

Honestly, it is not an indictment, just an observation. I actually like having many friends, getting invited to many things, but I also don't like when many people RSVP to things, and they just don't show up. I actually can directly quanitfy and compare this at soccer games. In boston about 80% of yes-es would actually show up at games. In SF about 60%.

I guess, you could also argue that in the east coast, people are less friendly, so you have fewer friends and people have to keep them closer and dearly, or that in SF there is a lot of stuff to do, and people can get easily ditracted.

BTW. I am european, so don't want to transform this in a west coast vs. east coast thing.

When it comes to twitter, I am not sure how much the general crowd would be interested in it. Taking example something like blogs: it has instant appeal in a lot of people, because basically it is an online diary.

A lot of people have diaries, and bringing them online was something natural.

But twitter? I am not sure it solves a need to the general masses, except for the hyperconnected ones.

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

Actually, there are many people in Twitter from Boston. Also the UK, Japan (so many that they've started Twitter Japan), New York, Kansas, Louisiana, and more. Twitter is the web. It's way beyond "California".

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

In fact, according to twitterlocal.net, there are roughly as many twitterers in New York City as San Francisco (on May 6 it was almost even). More in London UK than Los Angeles, CA. Almost as many in Wash. DC as LA. And Tokyo is the Twiteringest city by 3 to 1.

ryanmahoski• 18 years ago

twitter: celebrating character restriction since 2006

xugglybug• 18 years ago

sms: celebrating character restriction since 1992

luct• 18 years ago

You shouldn't care, but if you want to use it, use it. But, with most things, don't put it down until you try it.

paul9290• 18 years ago

At 1st Twitter seems so stupid, but time and users have shown otherwise! It's a substitute txt messenger, a way to instantly survey the crowd, a journal of your life and great for researchers, marketers/branders, as well for emergencies!

mattjung• 18 years ago

Twitter frees Blogs from all unimportant and trivial stuff like "i arrived at SF", "i unpacked my new iPhone", "i'm back from vacation" etc. and thus separates personal stuff from the actual topics of a Blog.

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

Twitter is stories, vignettes, small slices of people lives.

Twitter is a 24-hour come-as-you-are blockparty. People come and go, talk and listen. Some of them already know each other, many of them don't.

Twitter is lifestreaming, 140 characters at a time.

Twitter is quick updates, questions, answers. Twitter is "I've got a 2-hour layover at SFO. Anyone want to grab coffee?"

Twitter is microblogging. Twitter is nanoblogging!

Twitter is writing practice. How much can you say in such a small space?

Twitter is a tool. Use it (or don't use it). As you use it more, you may come to see its value to you. If you don't, that's alright too.

puneetx• 18 years ago

Twitter is like sex - http://michaelmartine.com/2008/04/11/twitter-is-like-sex/

vlbrown11• 18 years ago

Interesting that the question "What do you find that you like about Twitter?" is being answered here as "it's intrusive, you shouldn't use it." This isn't about "personal preferences". It's "Why __should__ I care about Twitter."

girk• 18 years ago

I find myself explaining to people why they should care about Twitter quite often, so I recently wrote up a comprehensive blog post about it.

Twitter-Me This: http://www.gee.ky/blog/2008/05/twitter-me-this.html

My reasons include: Social Network, Keeping in Touch, Minutia Can Be Meaningful, Mobile Chatroom, Information On-The-Go, Privacy Shield, Accessibility, Forced Short-Form Communication, Pulse of the World, Proxy, and Brand-Monitoring.

Ask YC: Why should I care about Twitter?

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