I don't agree with this, just because twitter can be filtered in the same way Hubski can. It's about following people. That being said, my current problem with twitter is that, though it's a mobile platform, I only use twitter when I'm not doing things. I don't tweet as things are happening because I'm too busy experiencing them. Then I forget to tweet about them afterwards. But I do agree with the fact that if you go to Twitter for serious discussion, you're in for a bad time. 140 characters does not for any sort of in-depth conversation make.
I have a twitter. I think I've said like 3 thing on it. I don't understand the appeal, not really. When I want to talk to people, I just get their number and text them, and if I want to talk to a lot of people that I know, I send out a group text. If I need to organize an even or send a link, well, I have e-mail or facebook, even if I rarely use it. I follow people I think are interesting but overall I just get snippets of a conversation I'm not a part of, I have no context for their jokes and since I listen to the giantbombcast I hear all the best stuff from their twitter anyway. So why do regular ass human beings use it? I understand the need for a PR platform that let's you put out small messages, but that's not useful for a regular human being. What's the deal, other people?
Twitter takes the idea that "if the service is free, you're not the customer, you're the product" to the extreme. Where you might complain about reddit or facebook that they're time-wasters or that the content quality is not as good as you might like, their purpose for end users is clear enough on its own. There are Twitter users who seem to enjoy it without it occurring to them to constantly question its purpose though: they're the users who enjoy feeling plugged into... other users who want to feel plugged into users who feel plugged into... It's sort of the online informational equivalent of bland pop music and summer blockbusters that no one takes in for the artistic merit but that you can reliably make conversation about. I'll bet there's a spectrum from reddit to facebook to twitter users that maps pretty directly to how much extraversion is a part of someone's personality. Reddit is there for those of us who want to hyper-rationally compartmentalize, analyze and dissect everything at length, while those of us that are more concenred about cultivating a presentable real-life persona can take in quick sound bites and easily stay plugged into whatever the mass media machine and popular sentiment thinks is hot on Twitter.
100% agree. I think, however, that most people on follow not just the wrong people, but too many people. When it comes to Twitter, and indeed to Hubski, many people forget that you are your own curator. You see what you have signed up to see whether by following tags or people. To the Author and interviewees, i say your Twitter feeds are bad because, for the most part, you have made them that way. Don't blame the service (though as it begins to include more advertisements and tweets from people you don't follow, this will change), you can only blame the person in the mirror.I don't agree with this, just because twitter can be filtered in the same way Hubski can. It's about following people.