Wondering about twitter

[redbird]

Every so often, I get email telling me that someone is now following me on twitter. Presumably they did a search, since I haven't actually been using the account.

What I'm wondering is, for those of you who do use it, what about it do you find useful? Not "What, in the abstract, can it do?" but "What do you, someone I know who also finds LiveJournal at least somewhat useful or appealing, like about twitter?"

Also, how much time do you spend following people, and how often do you find it necessary to check in? (We'll get into questions of appropriate tools for posting and/or following later, if I decide I want to do either/both of those things.)

Comments

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

I like it for micro-updates, and use it effectively as my status updater on Facebook as well. Anything that can't be said just as well in 140 characters goes to LJ. It's almost always a mood status as much as anything else. Occasionally I link to articles when I don't feel much to say beyond "here, look at this" is needed. Small jokes are good there too.

I don't send my tweets to LiveJournal, and prefer that others don't either.

I use twitterfox, which pops new tweets up while I am online, and I glance at them. If something requires following links or following back conversations, and I'm interested, it takes a few minutes.

[calieber.livejournal.com]

Same as beetiger: I keep my incomplete thoughts to myself, but the complete but concise thoughts—and I'm a journalist at heart—go on Twitter and then to LJ in a lump.

Also, Twitter is much easier to update when I'm not at a computer.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

This is not quite an answer to what you asked, but you might find it useful. There's someone who was on rasff who is seriously ill and now only uses twitter. I have a link to their feed and check in every other day or so to see if there's new posts. (This is sort of a variation of my post-every-day-on-LJ, except the poster isn't doing the notification.)

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

See, if I knew that person I would follow them on Twitter.

As with Facebook, I use it to keep up with my friends' lives, however each friend cares to share it.

Also, Facebook and Twitter both encourage brevity, which I can handle pretty much any time. I can respond or not, as whim determines. On the other hand, LJ usually requires actual thought, often in trains requiring dedicated minutes. When you have little brain, that's something of a commitment.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

This person is very active on twitter and I don't really want to read everything they put there. I just want to check in every other day or so to make sure things are all right.

[redbird]

Ah. I find that I do better when the person I'm reading provides the connection, rather than it being "thing" "thing" "thing" "now this..."

But I tend to sympathize with "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lacked the time to make it shorter."

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

I get follow requests all the time from people I don't know. I think they are treating twitter like MySpace where having the most "friends" is part of the social ranking system.

[redbird]

It's certainly possible that some of mine were like that; on the other hand, the most recent was from PNH and I'm fairly sure he knew that it was me.

[avram]

I actually don't find it that useful. I grabbed an account back when I first heard about it because they were free, and my usual strategy for such things (since someone else got to be "avram" on LiveJournal) is to grab an account under my usual user name on the off chance that it might one day become useful and stash the password info in my Palm.

I'd probably post more often if I had a modern cell phone. (I think of Twitter as "blogging for phones".)

If I still worked near Fifth Ave and 18th St, I'd subscribe to the City Bakery's Twitter feed, where they announce what's just come out of the oven.

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Chirp!

[liv]

For me, twitter is a place where I put one-liners. They could go on LJ and I don't think people would mind, but I have a problem that when I sit down to type something on LJ it usually gets long.

I occasionally use it when I'm travelling and have a mobile phone that can send texts but not easy access to the internet. That situation is getting a lot rarer these days; the main case where it was useful was when I was taking a cruise across the Baltic.

Outside the US, it no longer sends text message or IM updates about your friends (and I think it isn't fully functional even in the States). So the aspect where you have instant access to your friends' day-to-day lives doesn't really work any more. Unless of course you have a mobile device that runs an internet browser, in which case twitter is sort of obsolete anyway!

For me, reading a webpage with an archive of past tweets is a poor way to keep in touch with anyone. Without the real-time aspect, it's obviously inferior to LJ or even FaceBook. I do check a couple of times a week, if I'm procrastinating and have run out of interesting reading matter, but I must admit I don't find it the most thrilling or useful thing on the internet.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I like conversations comprised of single sentences, blurted out over time.

I can haz LOL tweet.

Pointillism crosses realism.

Posting is hard, let's tweet!