Twitter, yes, and more precisely: what’s the use of it !?
I have been on Twitter for little over a year now, slowly expanding the number of people/sites I follow, and slowly building a following to a modest 220 now. Not bad considering I am anything but a celebrity. I now even have one of these Smartphones so I can follow/tweet when out of the house too. Don’t use it much.
The question I am asking myself however is ‘should I continue using it’? The reason for that is that before, when I followed some 30 or 50 people, I could still READ what they were on about, and maybe react or re-tweet. But with now following over 350 already (and I see people following 10,000 !!!), that has become impossible. When I go to the kitchen to make me a coffee I have a backlog of over 200 tweets on returning.
That’s insane….. and not useful.
So I think this particular medium is NOT social, and basically a one-way street. People just tweet or re-tweet and forget about it. Just swamping others with their ‘advertising’ basically. The question then is clearly how useful this Twitter still is? Only for the poor sods that only follow a few people?
Or, hang on, should we use it the OTHER way, that I am slowly getting into now. I am talking about using it as ‘automated input’ for collecting programs such as Paper.li or Kurat.com, where the tweets are selected upon keywords, subject and other criteria to be included in an on-line ‘newspaper’ of sorts.
I am now running one on Motorcycle (related) topics, and one on Flightsim (related) topics. So far, it looks interesting, although by no means perfect yet. In my ideal publishing world I would need much more control over what gets posted in there and what not, including ads! But, it is a start and a much better use of Twitter tweets than trying to read them separately!
Another such program is Kurat, that I am experimenting with now. This has more control over what gets selected to be posted, but also requires more manual input. I don’t have the hang of it entirely yet.
The NEXT PROBLEM of course is that these things become more popular, enhanced by articles such as this one, and there are just too many ‘newspapers’ to follow again! I guess that’s part of the data overflow we encounter in our lives these days and we’ll have to find a way to cope with it.
