Been Playing on Twitter

I've been playing with my Twitter account a bit. I turned to it as an alternative to Facebook, which seems to be largely a cesspool of stupid non-authoritative "quizzes" and little games that you play and brag about how many jewels you've accumulated or how your virtual garden is doing instead of actually growing vegetables in the real world. The one thing I did enjoy doing...getting updates on people I've lost touch with...becomes overshadowed by crap.
I've been playing with my Twitter account a bit. I turned to it as an alternative to Facebook, which seems to be largely a cesspool of stupid non-authoritative "quizzes" and little games that you play and brag about how many jewels you've accumulated or how your virtual garden is doing instead of actually growing vegetables in the real world. The one thing I did enjoy doing...getting updates on people I've lost touch with...becomes overshadowed by crap.

Before this goes too far off base, I started using Twitter. Here are some observations:

Bots are remarkably prevalent on Twitter. And they get shut down really fast. I was followed within minutes when I created an account by two "hot babes" that wanted to have me "get to know them better". Periodically I'm still being followed by bots. The accounts are shut down almost immediately though.

Some people really like using their celebrity status to advertise. Constantly. One person I respected as an actor kept plugging a product every other tweet. I no longer respect him so much.

I've yet to really find a compelling reason to use Twitter for an actual purpose. It's very possible that I'm simply the most boring person in the world. I hear people like Mur Lafferty and Jeff Atwood say they'll post a question on Twitter and within minutes they get replies. This leads me to suspect that Twitter is a really useful thing if you already have a small army of followers. For people like me...not so much.

I try using it to kind of keep tabs on my day. So far only my wife reads it. My own reader is kind of a pain because many of them apparently don't archive the tweets well or sort them very well. At least blog readers have archives and search.

I do get the occasional useful link or story. There one that Mur posted about that I started following because the woman literally posts new tips for writers every half hour. The problem is the previously mentioned issue with keeping up with the tweets to sort out the useful stuff after being out and about for the day.

Twitter for me seems to be like my blog only on a far more massive scale. While this blog is a small splash in an olympic pool, a tiny little ripple, Twitter is like someone peeing in the ocean. If I'm barely keeping my head above water out here on the blogosphere, Twitter drowns your voice clear out.

On the other hand, I do like some of the things I can find out there. It's a balancing act not to get inundated with information but there are good tidbits to dig out. I'm simply a little disappointed that I'm not a good producer of interesting content.

So is it that Twitter is simply littered with a lot of mind droppings from tweens and people who can't spell until the signal to noise ratio is simply too high to reasonably use if you don

Before this goes too far off base, I started using Twitter. Here are some observations:

Bots are remarkably prevalent on Twitter. And they get shut down really fast. I was followed within minutes when I created an account by two "hot babes" that wanted to have me "get to know them better". Periodically I'm still being followed by bots. The accounts are shut down almost immediately though.

Some people really like using their celebrity status to advertise. Constantly. One person I respected as an actor kept plugging a product every other tweet. I no longer respect him so much.

I've yet to really find a compelling reason to use Twitter for an actual purpose. It's very possible that I'm simply the most boring person in the world. I hear people like Mur Lafferty and Jeff Atwood say they'll post a question on Twitter and within minutes they get replies. This leads me to suspect that Twitter is a really useful thing if you already have a small army of followers. For people like me...not so much.

I try using it to kind of keep tabs on my day. So far only my wife reads it. My own reader is kind of a pain because many of them apparently don't archive the tweets well or sort them very well. At least blog readers have archives and search.

I do get the occasional useful link or story. There one that Mur posted about that I started following because the woman literally posts new tips for writers every half hour. The problem is the previously mentioned issue with keeping up with the tweets to sort out the useful stuff after being out and about for the day.

Twitter for me seems to be like my blog only on a far more massive scale. While this blog is a small splash in an olympic pool, a tiny little ripple, Twitter is like someone peeing in the ocean. If I'm barely keeping my head above water out here on the blogosphere, Twitter drowns your voice clear out.

On the other hand, I do like some of the things I can find out there. It's a balancing act not to get inundated with information but there are good tidbits to dig out. I'm simply a little disappointed that I'm not a good producer of interesting content.

So is it that Twitter is simply littered with a lot of mind droppings from tweens and people who can't spell until the signal to noise ratio is simply too high to reasonably use if you don't already have an audience? Or is the blame squarely on the twitter user if they're not interesting enough to gain an audience of anything that isn't a bot?