It's been about a month since i caved and finally joined Twitter after having earlier said that i wouldn't. When i joined Twitter, i said this:
If i like it, i’ll keep using it and i’ll gladly state that i was wrong about the whole thing.
So here it is: i was wrong about the whole thing! Overall, i actually like it a lot and i'd probably find it pretty weird if i had to go back to going without it. But it's not all perfect though. So, this is a list of likes and dislikes that i've noticed after about a month of twitter.
Likes:
- You can get in touch with everyone. You can reply to a tweet by someone 'famous' or that you admire or respect a lot or whatever, and actually get a response back. Well, you're never certain to get a response but it's highly likely that they at least read your reply. Getting a response is like icing on the cake. Likewise, people you've never heard of before will send you tweets to ask you a question, give their opinion on a post you wrote, or just reply to something you said. I often check the person's profile to see if they might be interesting to follow, and indeed, some people i enjoy following have been added to my list that way.
- You can get into really interesting discussions merely by replying to other people's tweets or by asking a question or making a statement. It's a pretty easy way to get some other perspectives on certain topics.
- You can sort of take the pulse of the community. When something happens (like say, a big company cutting the funding for a popular project or a big company releasing yet another train-wreck) you'll immediately know how a lot of people feel about that.
- It's fun! If you follow the right people, tweets can range from insightful, to thought-provoking, to funny, to downright hilarious.
- It's asynchronous communication so you spend time on it when you want to, instead of being interrupted by it (though that might depend based on the notification settings of your particular client). I'm involved in a conversation with 2 people right now, but that's not preventing me from doing something productive (though you could argue that writing posts like this is hardly productive, but hey, it could've been a productive post as well! :p).
Dislikes:
- People can, and will, talk about anything. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad. I've unfollowed a couple of people merely because they talk about politics or religion (or worse: both) too much. Which is too bad because they do have interesting things to say about technical stuff. Obviously, what you want to read on Twitter varies from person to person, and i'm sure people have unfollowed me for not liking the things i talk about as well. I try to restrict my tweets to technical/development topics, but occasionally there will be something else in there. I generally follow (and keep following) people who stick to those same topics.
- The 140 character limit can be pretty frustrating. For regular tweets, it's usually enough but once you get into a conversation it can quickly be a bother. Especially if multiple people are involved because repeating their account names takes up a lot of your 140 characters.
- I wish Twitter would store which Tweets you've already read, or which ones have already been retrieved by your Twitter client(s). I guess i'm in the minority here, but i actually like to go over all of them to make sure i didn't miss anything good. I guess very few people use Twitter this way, but it would definitely make things easier for people who use it like i use it. For instance, i have a twitter client on my iPhone, one on my Mac at home and another on my Windows PC at work. Each of those clients will show tweets that i've read in at least one of the other clients already and i have to manually look for the ones i haven't read yet. It's not a big issue obviously, just a minor inconvenience i guess.
- As interesting as some discussions are, some of them aren't. Even worse, some of them are simply annoying and as far as i know, there's no way to tune out of a conversation if you're following both (or more) of the people involved. This luckily doesn't happen frequently, but when it does it would be nice to have some kind of "hide this conversation" button
It's obviously quite possible that some of the dislikes i mentioned are due to my noobness so if anyone has any tips regarding those issues, i'd love to hear them 