Twitter and Facebook
From the day I heard of it, I have never fully understood Twitter. “Its essentially microblogging” I am told. When I first started an account I followed some celebrities, and actually quite liked it. It was interesting to see what people I admire and respect were doing, and to know that it was actually them posting the updates.
At some point (Probably during one of my many phone changes) I forgot about Twitter and didn’t log on for a long time. Over the last few months it seems to have become a big thing with my friends so I decided to try to give it another go. While it does look a bit different, and I’m sure there are some new features, it is mostly the same as I remember it. You can post 140 characters, you can tag someone you are following in to a post so it will appear on their page. All features which could be useful.
COULD be useful.
Unfortunately today I have had to stop following most of my friends on Twitter. Not because I don’t like them. Quite the opposite in fact. I like my friends so much that I don’t want to find myself annoyed by them.
See, what my friends do is basically have @ tag conversations on twitter. This fills my home page with numerous tweets which have absolutely no relevance to me, and that I couldn’t be less interested in.
Here is an example of a couple of my friend’s twitter feeds for today (feel free to follow them, they’d probably love that)
jodyburning Jody Loynes @lexbarbie @GKBizzle @ulphy @GeordieMatt lucky you :-) we will be house moving then anyway. Favorite Retweet Reply
jodyburning Jody Loynes @GKBizzle @ulphy @GeordieMatt @lexbarbie yes! We need to find a day we can all get off work!
jodyburning Jody Loynes @ulphy @lexbarbie @GKBizzle you are one bastard AARON! I say yes.
jodyburning Jody Loynes @GKBizzle @ulphy … less busy.
jodyburning Jody Loynes @GKBizzle @ulphy Yeah lets do it! We will be moving house in June so as long as its not around that time! We should do a weekday when it’s..
jodyburning Jody Loynes @ulphy @GKBizzle we should go in the summer!! I’ve never been before.
jodyburning Jody Loynes :-D :-D
Now, as you can see, dear Jody has posted a modest 7 tweets today. Well there is actually an 8th reading “Go tax rebate!” but I had some formatting issues.
Of those 8 tweets, only 2 are actual tweets. 6 of them are replies to an @ conversation with (by the end of it) 4 other people. As you can imagine, I follow these 4 other people, who are also replying. This one seems to of lasted a couple of hours. If Jody posted 6 replies, its fair to assume that the other four people could of posted up to that many. That means in a couple of hours, my home screen was bombarded with between 10 - 30 tweets about something I am entirely uninterested in.
Let me give you another example:
ulphy Aaron Ulph @darylwickham @gkbizzle @jodyburning @geordiematt @lexbarbieJoe Watson is giving me a seatie on his scooter
ulphy Aaron Ulph @jodyburning @lexbarbie @gkbizzle I was joking haha! I’m just waiting for the usual “I COME” from you know who ;)
ulphy Aaron Ulph @lexbarbie @jodyburning @gkbizzle NO
ulphy Aaron Ulph @GKBizzle it’s apparently £13 entry on Friday 13th . . Bit late now to arrange it! Haha
ulphy Aaron Ulph I want to go to Alton Towers
ulphy Aaron Ulph @jaytmek why ask a question when you will get replies and maybe even get a conversation?
ulphy Aaron Ulph @yummymummy1207 one last night was that Mr Bean was prime minister and I was really fucked off about it for some reason! Haha
ulphy Aaron Ulph I have been having some weird dreams recently.
ulphy Aaron Ulph @joewatson1990 did you like lemonparty?
ulphy Aaron Ulph @joewatson1990 I’m going to shove a carrot up your exhaust Joe Watson
ulphy Aaron Ulph The Devils Brigade are awesome. Basically Rancid playing some rockabilly tunes with Matt Freeman on vocals!
»
BreakingNews Breaking News by ulphyClaude Stanley Choules, last known World War I combat veteran, dies in Perth, Australia, at age 110 http://on.msnbc.com/mGPaT7 Favorite Retweet Reply
This one comes from my good friend and fellow blogger Aaron Ulph (http://www.ulphy.com).
Today, Aaron has posted 12 tweets, and as you can see, was part of the same conversation as Jody.
Ulphy is doing slightly better than Jody in terms of not annoying me, but that could be more down to volume of tweets than content.
25% of his tweets today have been part of the uninteresting conversation. Several other DO have @ replies in them, but in my humble opinion they are being used in the way an @reply should be used.
Some of you might be saying “Hey Jason, get of your pedastal and come down here with the rest of us, you miserable shit.”
Firstly, you need to watch your language, and secondly, am I really wrong?
See, all of the people I deleted from twitter I have as a friend on facebook. This of course means that they all use facebook. The difference between facebook and twitter is that facebook offers several different methods of communication with your friends. One being a wall post, one being the private message, another being the comments on a wall post of profile update and yet another is the twitter styled @ tags in statuses.
The private messages can include as many of your friends as you see fit, so would be quite valid for the purposes of the twitter conversation shown above. I should also point out twitter offers private messages, but if my friends are using them then christ knows what they contain.
A wall post would also suffice, as all of the people involved would be able to make comments on the wall post.
What bugs me, is how these people don’t do all of their facebook communication Via @ tags and status updates.
Facebook is a far more useful, and easier method of communication. It organises the posts by age. It isn’t filled with @ tags, and its clearer.
Part of me almost thinks it was DESIGNED to allow the kind of interactions which twitter is clearly not intended for.
Twitter is designed for quick, easy to access updates on the people you care about. Unfortuntately, for me, those updates are buried amougnst pages of drivel and @ tags.
So I have to ask, WHY does everyone feel the need to fill the twitter feed with conversations which would make far less clutter on facebook, and would be easier for everyone to read? It can’t be easy coming back to twitter after a couple of hours and having to scroll through pages of useless tweets to find a conversation you were having.
One might even think that clicking on a notification on facebook and being taken to a dedicated wall post with all of your friends comments listed in chronological order might be easier.
Maybe I’m just crazy like that.
