I am experiencing an epiphany these days with Twitter, not as a means to, say, broadcast that you’re eating a hotdog when you’re eating a hotdog (although to a fatblogger, I suppose it would be important), but as a more sophisticated not-tethered-to-a-PC one-to-many instant messenger.
I mean, literally, as it seems like I’m able to follow tweets of all kinds of people that I wouldn’t normally know via instant messager. I already talked about the ability to follow public messages and discourse as well that’s kind of cool to a blogger. I’ve added Twitters to my sidebar as well, if you are inclined to know what my past 10 or so thoughts have been.
Anyway, what I’ve found over the past week or so is that Twitter added a manual “follow via IM” feature. That is, by default this is turned *off*, unless you flick the switch it ON someone’s Twitter home page. As a result I’ve actually missed some direct messages from some old friends.
Thanks to everyone who’s added me recently, and if you added me in the past, please send me a direct message to let me know who you are so I can flick the Notifications *ON*. :)
If you still haven’t done so, there’s still time to add me on Twitter via http://twitter.com/tonyhung. I’d love to have a chat some time. :)
November 11th, 2007 at 10:16 pm | Permalink
You’re eating a hot dog?!
I think you are infatuated. I enjoyed it a lot more at first, then wound up agreeing with Matt Cutts that it really is just one more time absorbing mildly amusing whatever rather than something socially profound…
November 11th, 2007 at 11:57 pm | Permalink
Hey Joe,
I think it really depends on how you use it. For example, I was joking about eating hot dogs (although I think you got the joke — it wasn’t funny, I know), but if your list of friends you are following is broad enough, you’ll pick up on interesting conversation and news as it happens.
If you happen to be the kind of person for whom that sort of things is important / interesting then Twitter is a good tool.
If timeliness isn’t … well, the dross to gold ratio just goes up by a few orders of magnitude. ;)
Cheers!
t @ dji
November 12th, 2007 at 12:03 pm | Permalink
Out of all the web 2.0 dealies I’ve dallied with in the past year - for some reason I forge on with Twitter. I can’t explain why. I think because it’s very easy to participate, and 9 times out of ten when I check out what the people I’m following have twittered - there’s at least one fun link to check out.