Drowning in birdsong

[firecat]

How / why do you use Twitter?

Comments

[jenk]

I setup an account to follow various coworkers. I mostly post when I want to do a blog/mini-blog and not near a computer.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I don't, and I'm pretty sure I never will, but I plan to track this post as sort of a sociological study. :-)

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

These days I use Twitter for the occasional short status update and to read celebrity tweets. I'm much more of a celebrity whore on Twitter.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Ambient presence of friends. Cocktail party chitchat, plus or minus the presence of high-volume celebrity guests (sometimes they are disinvited because they hog up a lot of brainwidth).

Weather, traffic, institutional updates.

Presence/activity broadcasts at cons, etc.

Running notes.

More or less in that order.

I got an account and didn't really "get" it. After a while it started making sense. I could live without it. It's like community radio -- sometimes interesting and entertaining, sometimes useful, sometimes aggravating noise, sometimes absent and entirely unmissed for long stretches.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Multiple ways. I got a Twitter account to begin with because I'd been working on a freelance project that discussed them, and I needed to understand the new social medium.

Then I realized that I could use it for all the little observations I tend to forget when it comes time to do an LJ post. A great line in conversation, a fleeting sight -- easily captured on the fly. And I also used it for the train trip to Portland as a running travelogue, which became the framework for my long posts about the trip.

My reading of Tweets is spotty -- I always check what's got @wordweaverlynn in it, and I skim through, but I do not pretend to read all of everyone's tweets. OTOH, it's fun to respond to people with useful facts or repartee, whichever they're looking for.

My professional twitter account (MsLorelei) is for attracting new readers, letting the community know that I have new books or stories for sale, and maintaining contact with others in the scene.

Re: Drowning in birdsong

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

experimentally: i jot down things i've got done (outside of work) so i might feel less like a lazy bum when i look at the aggregate.

i don't follow anyone (well, except dreamwidth because they were handing out codes on twitter, though i'll probably stop that now that i hang out in #dw on IRC instead, and have an account).

i do occasionally send messages to people, when i remember that they might've said something to me, and i check the replies (usually several days later).

[mistdog.livejournal.com]

I joined to see what it was all about, but I'm really none the wiser.

I'll keep an eye on it. Facebook seems to be rapidly deteriorating into a feed of application announcements, which makes me realise what I actually valued about it was the status updates. Since that's what Twitter is all about maybe I'll migrate over one day, if enough of my friends were to go there.

[pachamama.livejournal.com]

Ditto to all of this -- it's kind of like Facebook status updates (which I found vaguely amusing and the only slightly appealing thing on Facebook) minus all the rest of the Facebook crap. But I actually look at Twitter very infrequently (even less often than I check Facebook) and do not use any of the mobile device features.

LiveJournal is still my online community networking space of choice (and large numbers of my Facebook friends and Twitter followers are people I met on LJ)

The only other thing I've used Twitter for is seeing really breaking news that's not anywhere else yet (like "yes, googlemail's central servers are down; it's not just your ISP")

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Yep, this is me too. I'll post two or three times in one day and then forget about it for a week. Also, yeah about the FB thing. I'm really not likeing FB right now.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

You can stop the flood of apps. When you see an app post, hover your cursor over it; this will bring up a button that says "Hide". Click on the button, and it should give you two options: Hide [person], and Hide [app]. Click on the second option, and you'll never see another post from that app again. I've been doing this for several weeks now, and my newsfeed is MUCH more pleasant to read.

[mistdog.livejournal.com]

Fantastic, thank you! Last time I clicked on "Hide", which I'm sure wasn't much over a week ago, the only thing there was to hide the person, not the app. That's so much better now!

[djm4]

When reading it, I actually quite like the 'drowning in birdsong' aspect. It's a cacophony of my friends thoughts, but at times it resembles improvised jazz, and at others a fugue. Even at it's most anarchic, though, I enjoy it. If it's not your thing, I've no intention of trying to convince you that there's any merit to it.

I'll also sometimes follow threads - one person's thoughts, topics or hashtags. Following the hashtag for the Lib Dem conference last month, for example, brought near-instant reaction to conference events from many different points of view. I liked that.

As to what I write - it's mostly small or immediate stuff that I don't feel warrants an entire LJ post to itself. On a purely practical level, I find Twitter a lot easier to update from my phone than LJ is, so unlike LJ I update it when I'm out and about, and I prefer it as a format for liveblogging something. The language geek in me likes the challenge of expressing a thought in 140 characters; the bandwidth conservationist is a lot happier about posting something trivial on Twitter than on LJ.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I like the feeling of greater intimacy with friends. Compared to sites like LJ, where people generally only post when they've got "something to say", it's a better analogue of "just hanging out", where you can bond over really ordinary things.

[eeyorerin]

I post to it a lot when I travel -- things I've noticed or want to write more about later. Or to just make short observations about my day.

I use it to follow celebrity feeds, like Adam Savage and Grant Imahara.

I like seeing people's little snippets of thoughts. I don't feel like people have to keep up with my Twitter feed to know what's going on in my life; if there's something I want a specific person or group to know, I'll make an effort to address them directly.

[ona-tangent.livejournal.com]

As a virtual watercooler.

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

I follow both my Twitter feed and Facebook status updates in an RSS feed. Sometimes i'll turn on my phone to receive a subset of tweets via SMS.

I have a sense of a virtual town plaza, water fountain instead of water cooler, where i can see folks' comings and goings (vacation, hikes, conferences, home with sick kids) and "overhear" the "did you see that link/article/video/movie?"

The local friends i may get via SMS have posted things that have allowed me to meet them in person, so that's made it even doubly like the public plaza where i'm able to say, "Yes, i can come with you for lunch." The SMS messages are synchronous (albeit unreliably so) in a way i find interesting. OTOH, i think i'm wearing out the vibrate motor on my phone. I wish i could assign a special sound to a particular incoming SMS just like i can to an incoming call!

I used Twitter to write porn

[snippy]

Really, I did.

I had a Twitter account for about 3 weeks, and set up another one after the first week just for the porn. The main account I used to keep track of friends.

I didn't like the style of relationship Twitter offers. If I couldn't be connected and paying attention *all* *the* *time*, I'd miss stuff and the opportunity to respond in a timely fashion; at the same time, a lot of what is posted through Twitter is inane. I'm not the kind of person to be constantly sharing in that way; I felt very narcissistic while trying to come up with a short update that wasn't just "I had pie!" (and of course that's a judgment right there, that "I had pie" isn't worth sharing).

I prefer the asynchronous style of [LJ/email/blogging/UseNET] and more meaningful conversation, even if it's still "I had pie!" Because it'll be more like "I had the best pie I've ever had. It was marionberry and the crust was perfect. My local bakery made it, it's take-and-bake (frozen) and cooks in under 2 hours. I'm *so* getting that again!"

I think I just don't like telegraph-style conversations.

Re: I used Twitter to write porn

[snippy]

And actually, it worked great for the porn.

Re: I used Twitter to write porn

[daze39.livejournal.com]

What you said about liking the asynchronous style - that's what I like about the things you mentioned, that they let you say something and come back later and read replies... the "short attention span" aspect is sort of what I like least about Facebook, and I suspect that I'd feel the same way about Twitter, perhaps more so. I don't like trying to type on a telephone dial, and (having been brought up to express my verbal thoughts in complete sentences), I'd find the telegraphic style enforced by the short text buffer would be rather annoying. (Cell phone messaging and web-mail interfaces are undoing the revival of social literacy that e-mail seemed on the verge of bringing about...)

I guess I'm just not used to posting status updates all the time as a method of pinging for social interaction - although describing it like that, maybe I should be?

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

i don't twitter, it's an inferior technology to irc.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

I started using it because I just got an iPhone, and had been feeling the pull of peer pressure.

I use it to post occasional notions and one-liners, and to update on my nightly adventures at the poker table. One immediate benefit: the other night when I was having a hard night, a celebrity poker pro -- Daniel Negreanu, a.k.a. @RealKidPoker -- whom I follow was having a *terrible* night, two orders of magnitude worse than mine, and it helped me keep perspective (Following Daniel isn't 100% fanboy celebrity chasing; I've known him since, back in the day, he was on Usenet.)

[dr-brat.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I use Twitter to keep up with the Pig, who disappears from everywhere else for months but tweets several times a day. Some other people show up there, as well.