Anyway

{ 11 } Comments

1. John Cowan | May 21, 2008 at 11:45 am | Permalink

   My tweet says “Work­ing” and always will.

2. Eve M. | May 21, 2008 at 12:38 pm | Permalink

   Really good point about want­ing to refer to links later. I’ve noticed my own propensity to “just tweet” links here and there rather than do the hard work of think­ing up some­thing, any­thing, interesting/value-add to say about those same links on my blog. Maybe it’s a good idea to dis­tin­guish between eph­em­eral or time-sensitive links vs. links-for-the-ages.

   As for tweet­ing only work stuff, I feel like I haven’t figured out my Twit­ter per­son­al­ity (or some­thing like that) yet, but a num­ber of folks have settled into one routine or another. The range of people I fol­low seems to match the range of blogs I fol­low: some per­sonal mus­ings, some tech­nical, some link-whoring (“come to my blog and com­ment on my stuff!”/“I dare you to com­ment on my pro­voc­at­ive post!” ), some polit­ical, some a big mish-mash.

3. John Kemp | May 21, 2008 at 1:23 pm | Permalink

   Per­son­ally, I just try to answer the ques­tion that Twit­ter presents me… and that’s what I like about Twit­ter. It cer­tainly can be per­sonal com­mu­nic­a­tion — a way of feel­ing closer to oth­ers who you know and/or like without being phys­ic­ally co-located.

4. Lauren Wood | May 21, 2008 at 1:48 pm | Permalink

   Eve: it’s tempt­ing to just tweet a link; I may even do it occa­sion­ally when I know I won’t get to blog­ging it until long after the moment has passed when it makes sense. The eph­em­eral links, as you say.
   JohnK: and that’s one reason I fol­low your tweets, since you (and some oth­ers I fol­low) do make it more per­sonal. Maybe there’s a rela­tion to the num­ber of fol­low­ers? The greater the num­ber of fol­low­ers, the greater the tempta­tion to be all pro­fes­sional, all the time?

5. Michael C. Harris | May 22, 2008 at 4:59 pm | Permalink

   It’s inter­est­ing that the major­ity of com­menters on Tim’s post wanted him to tweet the sup­posedly irrel­ev­ant per­sonal tweets. The beauty of Twitter-like ser­vices is that you can get to know someone in a way that isn’t pos­sible with other digital media. People just need to relax, use Twit­ter how they want to use it and stop think­ing about who’s fol­low­ing them. If people unfol­low, they haven’t lost any­thing. The bal­ance between eph­em­era and sub­stance is why a lot of people star­ted fol­low­ing Tim in the first place.

6. Jacob Harris | May 22, 2008 at 8:26 pm | Permalink

   In the mean­time, you could take the RSS feed of your twit­ter sub­scrip­tions. That would give you a little more per­man­ence I think?

7. len | May 23, 2008 at 7:23 am | Permalink

   I’ve not found a use for Twit­ter. I need less com­mu­nic­a­tion but that with higher rel­ev­ance to the task at hand when work­ing, and more humor in the rest.

   The sub­ter­ranean com­mu­nic­a­tions chan­nel of highest value IMO is the com­ments sec­tion on art­icles. Link­ing among these without link­ing to the art­icles is a topo­graphy worth think­ing about.

   @ Eve and Lauren: Here’s some­thing fun to think about.

   http://www.fsu.edu/news/2008/04/20/geometry.music/
   http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/ChordGeometries.html

   BTW: Who fixes your Black­berry? A Black­berry Cobbler.

8. Stephen James | May 23, 2008 at 7:37 am | Permalink

   As a guideline, I only fol­low people that I’ve met in per­son and have a tech­no­logy angle. I try not to tell you mundane things like what I ate for lunch or my cur­rent mood and so I hope those I fol­low do the same.

   I aver­age three or four gen­eral tweets (posts) and five or six dir­ect tweets each day. I view twit­ter as a con­cise pub­lic IRC chat room that we can use to help each other. I try to send use­ful tweets with URLs or ask for help from others–and ever so often try to make a joke.

9. Michael C. Harris | May 23, 2008 at 11:16 pm | Permalink

   Stephen, I strongly dis­agree with the “in per­son” part, but I live in Aus­tralia so don’t get to meet that many people in person.

10. Alex Morega | May 26, 2008 at 3:49 am | Permalink

    Maybe people tend not to pub­lish per­sonal stuff because it feels too pub­lic, esp. when hav­ing many fol­low­ers?
    I ima­gine that a twitter-like ser­vice where you would have to “accept” someone in order for them to see your mes­sages would feel more intim­ate and there­fore allow people to be more relaxed abot what they write.

11. Chris Lott | May 29, 2008 at 11:01 am | Permalink

    Well, you’re cer­tainly not alone in want­ing to see more per­sonal expres­sion in social media! I’m optim­istic on that front simply because I don’t see the eco­nomic con­di­tions that lead to being co-opted being as per­vas­ive (and invit­ing) as they can be in other media.

    But I think there is some­thing to the idea that the scale of our con­nec­tions puts a damper on the per­sonal, informal, and indi­vidual voice. I don’t have that many friends (and what a prob­lem­atic rep­res­ent­a­tion *that* is) or fol­low­ers, but I feel that pres­sure to put the sur­mised major­ity audi­ence first, to stay “on topic” at the expense of free­dom and frivolity. It’s an even more frus­trat­ing than the related pres­sure I felt that ulti­mately caused me to split my “work” and “art” blog­ging apart, rein­for­cing a dis­con­nect and sep­ar­a­tion I’ve never been happy with. I don’t like the feel­ing, but I often for­get to fight it…

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