I’ve used Twitter for the last week – my account is here – (primarily through Twitterrific) and it’s been an interesting experience.
I’d looked at Twitter a couple of times before hand, but never really thought it was that interesting. I’m not going to go visit a web site a couple of times a day to see updates, and when I subscribed to the RSS feed of the updates I didn’t like that very much either. It was just additional noise to me.
However, folks I know and respect kept talking and blogging about it so I decided to really dive in and try it for a week.1
So I got set up on Monday with Twitterrific and almost instantly my view of Twitter changed. Twitterrific is the right interface for Twitter. It’s subtle and transient and quick and easy. It’s everything that normal tools aren’t. Once I was up and running on Twitterrific, Twitter was looking a lot more promising to me.
Step two was to go out and add some friends. It was clear right away that some folks posted more often than others. On Tuesday I ended up removing Cote as a friend because I couldn’t figure out a way to opt out of his updates. The man is prolific. Cote – nothing personal ol’ chap, I just couldn’t keep up. 🙂
Having to remove someone as a friend isn’t a great feeling. The choices are very black and white – which is a good thing in some ways and a bad thing in others.
I’ve done a couple of SMS posts but I haven’t activated the IM features. I’ve got a Twitter posting client on my computer already so I don’t see any reason to use the post from IM feature.
One thing I’m not liking in Twitter is one-to-one communications and responses as “tweets”. I find that I don’t care about the vast majority of these, even when they are directed to me. There are already tons of direct communication outlets – I don’t see Twitter as a good tool for this. Though maybe this is something the Twitter tools like Twitterrific can solve (filter them out).
Overall, I’m enjoying it. I’ve added the little “what am I doing?” widget in my blog sidebar at the bottom and I’ll keep using it for a while.
- Steve calls this triangulation. [back]
You’ve hit it, Alex: Twitteriffic is the killer app for Twitter. I don’t update much at work because I have to have IM up to do so—and I may not want to have IM up all the time.
It is possible to “leave” someone without “remove”ing them. Leave just stops you getting the updates – though I suspect that might only affect IM/SMS updates. Possibly something for the twitterific people to improve on?
Sorry ’bout that 😉 As PatrickQG pointed out, you can have someone as a friend by not follow them. But, really, don’t matter. I wouldn’t post so much if I didn’t trust that people would remove me if they were annoyed by the volume.
I’m just glad to see your tweats in there 😉
As far as I can tell, having someone as a friend keeps their updates in your “what you and your friends are doing” list and your RSS feed – regardless of following them or not. That is what Twitterrific uses for its display.
To have your tweets excluded, I had to “remove you as a friend” – everything else that I tried didn’t work.
I don’t get (or want) any IM or SMS updates – so that part isn’t in the equation for me.
I just noticed one of your recent Twits concerning a WordPress plugin which keeps track of your statuses. I was thinking of the same idea – updating Twitter would create the same post somewhere on a WordPress site. Doing so would allow non-Twitter users to respond to your status through the comment form.
I would love it if Twitter supported groups of some kind. Users might want to send different tweets to groups of family versus friends versus co-workers, etc. Right now, users would have to manage multiple Twitter accounts to achieve that.
Groups would solve this problem and, if the groups were configurable, they might also help with the issue mentioned in this article around not wanting to follow all of your “friends” tweets. You could have “friends” in general, but put them into groups that would control what tweets make it to your phone and your email.
Twitteriffic looks great…has anyone found comparable for windows?
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