I love twitter. It is now a vital part of my everyday life. Even when I am out, I check what’s going on in Twitter through my iPhone. But this post is not about my addiction to the 140-characters social network, it is about its latest feature: realtime updates. I find it completely useless and pointless.
Yes, we are living in the era of information and yes, we want to get as much information and as soon as possible, but there is practically no difference if we get this “super crucial” info a minute later with a bunch of other tweets. I am following less than 600 people and yet, having Growl pop up notifications every 5-10 seconds is very counter-productive. I don’t want to know what happens when someone is following thousands of people. Probably his/her screen is always packed with the latest tweets.
When I am on my MacBook, chances are that I am trying to do something important. It may be a project for a university class, a blog post, analyzing some data or simply reading an article. With pop ups coming up all the time, concentrating is almost impossible. I suppose that I am not an exception and that people work on their computers. And if your job description is not “twitter analyst”, then realtime updates are completely useless.
Probably the only case that realtime updates are usefull, is the one of a sporting event. Yes, In NBA Finals realtime updates are priceless, but do we always need realtime updates? In my opinion, no.
I am using Twitter for over 2 years. For those 2 years, I have been tweeting only in English as my followers are not only Greeks. Recently, I decided to start tweeting in Greek as well and just right then I got informed that my replies are only shown in people that follow both of us, me and the person I am replying to. To be honest, I was finding hard to believe it in the first place.
I find it really pointless and I can’t understand why twitter’s developers took that decision. Twitter is a great tool to discover new people, new ways of thinking and other cultures than yours. In my opinion, the best way to do that is through interactions between users. I ‘ll give you an example to make it more clear: Let’s say that I am user A and I am interested in cars. User B is a well known journalist specializing in car news. Of course, I am following user B. If User B starts a very interesting conversation with user C (that I don’t follow) about cars. If I knew that such conversation exist, I will definitely follow it and, why not, I may jump in. Either way, I will start following user C as we have something in common.
But now, Twitter doesn’t allow me to do so because.. I don’t know that these kind of conversations actually exist. And that phenomenon removes much of Twitter’s potential in my opinion. Twitter is about openness and sharing everything with everyone. That’s why timelines are by default public and not private like Facebook. I would really love if someone from Twitter could explain me the reason behind this..
Feel like following me? There’s my username: @dkalo.
I love using Twitter, it’s a great tool both for work and fun. The truth is, that I have met people from all over the world, virtually or in real life, and the best way to communicate and interact with them is by using the English language. However, most of the people I am following are Greeks and they mostly use the Greek language in their tweets.
So, from now on, I will be using both languages in my tweets. Most of my tweets will be in English but those commenting on Greek reality or anything Greece-related will be in Greek. This way, I ‘ll be able to communicate better with the rest of the Greeks and the English speaking people won’t lose time reading tweets that don’t make sense.
If you still wan’t to follow me on twitter, here’s my profile: @dkalo.
That is what Andrew Keen said in The Next Web Conference some days ago. What was also mentioned was that every old-fashioned industry is on its way out. The first victim of the new age that is coming is the music industry. Torrents, Limewire, Rapidshare are some of the reasons that music industry is about to change. iTunes & Amazon MP3 are the most important reasons though.
These e-stores were able to understand the new conditions and they adopted to the new market. They made the right choices that helped them to gain a great market share while offering amazing services to their customers. You are able to download only one song, get all the metadata you want with just one click and the most important, the MP3s you are buying from e-stores are already in the format you want them. Nobody buys nowadays an album and he is not ripping it for his iPod, it is so much easier to already have an mp3 file in the first place.
The next victim is definitely the publishers. The days that the newspaper’s brand name was more important than the journalist are long gone. One of the main characteristics of that new era is that individuals are much more important than their organization. Writers websites are being visited much more than a publishing’s company, their twitter accounts have thousands of followers. People are more important than the brand.
Big publishing companies have no future unless they are able to rewrite their business plan from scratch. Very few magazines & newspapers keep making money the old way. News are traveling very fast thanks to the Internet and, lately, thanks to twitter. Just remember the recent earthquake in Italy, the riots in Greece, the plane in the Hudson river in NY and all these cases. Until now, I have never seen a media corporation to integrate a twitter search in their site. Can you think of a better way to inform your people immediately? You don’t need money to send your reporter on site, you don’t need somebody searching twitter, you only need a twitter script. It is FREE, DIRECT content, give me a reason not to want it on your website.
What else is really important is trusting the media. Come on, let’s be honest, do you totally trust news corporation? Because I don’t. In the other hand, I almost fully trust bloggers and twitter-ers. Of course I don’t mean that I trust social media personas with one blog post or one twit, but you get my point.. As Chris Sacca said, Twitter makes us more honest, and that’s the greatest advantage of all. Individuals have already risen above their companies, we are probably in the start of the individual’s age.. Think about Obama, do you believe that majority of people out of the US know whether if Obama is in the Democratic or Republican party..?
[photo via flickr.com, user: tayseerh]
