The Strain of Gaiety » Technology

In Defense of Twitter in 140+

Danforth — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:07:01 +0000

First read Meghan Daum’s op-ed piece on Twitter from the LA Times.

Then read this email I sent her.

Meghan,

Meghan, oh Meghan. I am disappointed. You’ve contributed another eye-rolling, get-a-load-of-this-crazy-thing editorial on Twitter that completely misses the point. But first, what you get right:

Yes, there is a lot of inanity on Twitter. Certainly. Before going any further, I’ll concede that with my head held high and without breaking eye contact in shame. And yes, the Ashton Kutcher phenomenon is pretty much a low point in Twitter’s short history. (I mean, who cares?)

That said, you’ve missed the point and the real efficacy of Twitter. In the second paragraph of your op-ed you ask if any of your first-paragraph tweet-like trivialities were interesting. And you were right, they weren’t. But I don’t know you. You’re a stranger and the minutiae of your life won’t be compelling to me unless you have the sense of humor or wherewithal to tweet the mundane in an amusing way.

In your column, you, as well as so many other opinion-makers who feel required to come down on Twitter one way or the other without actually using it, suppose Twitter is all about narcissism. That it’s all about tweeting what I had for lunch today, or that I hate Mondays. This forgets that a large component of Twitter is following other people, taking an interest in what their friends are doing, what they have to say. Are you suggesting that none of your good friends would have anything interesting so say if, heaven forbid, they became Twits themselves? Twitter isn’t a soapbox, it’s a cocktail party.

By concentrating on the mainstream slant of Twitter, of course it’s going to seem as broadcasty and as meaningless as television or commercial radio. The point of Twitter is every user defines what Twitter is for them. They get to pick and choose their experience. It’s personal, tailorable and completely customized.

On Twitter, I follow people I know in real life and creative people whom I find interesting. (Notice I didn’t say celebrities.) By employing some simple selectiveness, I keep my Twitter meaningful and interesting to me.

Lately I’ve been using Twitter to follow Time Warner Cable’s recent PR failings as they planned to roll-out tiered pricing by sharing with not only other dissatisfied customers, but also complaining straight to the TWC representatives who use Twitter. It’s ever so less a waste of time than calling TWC and waiting on hold to speak to a minimum wage-earning call center drone. There’s a conversation of activism going on (140 characters at a time) between me, TWC’s Director of Digital Communication, Congressman Eric Massa, and someone called TWCsucks, who compiles the angry tweets of TWC customers. Earlier this week, TWC announced they were rescinding their tiered pricing plan and, for me, Twitter made the fight all the easier.

Twitter doesn’t isolate people or erode face-to-face communication, it facilitates it. Think of it as a pre-interview. When I run into Betsy at the Starbucks, “What’s new?” has been replaced with, “I saw on Twitter your art show was a success” or “Congratulations, I saw the pictures of your new house on Twitter” or “So, that band you saw really sucks, live, huh?” We’re caught-up, we’re informed about things that are happening in each other’s lives. Then Betsy says, “Your noisy neighbors still giving you trouble?”

I get tweets straight from authors letting their followers know when they are going to be interviewed on TV and radio, or from scientists sharing new and interesting news and links. Producers of live comedy shows and bar owners tweet me when their lineup changes or when tickets go on sale, or when $2 drink specials go into effect. Useful!

And lastly, if you and most of your Twitter friends are comedians and writers, 140 characters is the perfect length for some really, really funny jokes.

Signed,
@danforthfrance

And I also took a swipe at this dork.

Maybe you should have turned off device updates. I use TwitterBerry and I only get tweets when I open the application and choose to scroll through them. It’s like you just took a car for a test drive with the parking brake on and then complained about what a shitty car it was.

Needless to say, I am really fed up with these knuckleheads.

I’ve Been a Damned Fool

Danforth — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:15:57 +0000

Why didn’t I see it? It was so obvious. Facebook’s new redesign wasn’t some blunder on Facebook’s part. It wasn’t some clumsy misstep. It was the watershed moment, the jump-the-shark moment, where Facebook declared its serious intention to service Facebook’s advertisers and business partners over its users.

Any Facebook user surely has noticed the sudden crush of quiz results in their chunky, Fisher-Price-style “stream” over the weeks since the redesign. People groused, because it was annoyingly uninteresting to know where some dumb, time-wasting quiz had plotted what city your friends should live in. If you were like me, you tried to sniff out where in the new Facebook configuration you could turn off getting quiz updates. There was no such place. Here’s why.

Facebook needed to promise advertisers that use of certain third-party apps would be updated — no, advertised — to all of their friends by means of an automatic and mandatory status update stream, with no possibility of opting-out. Facebook needed to promise advertisers and its business partners (Facebook Connect enabled companies like Netflix) that if one friend used their service, all of their friends were going to know about it.

I wondered why the Facebook design was simpler than the previous stage, why so much functionality had been stripped away. I now have a dreadful suspicion it’s to hold you and all of your Facebook friends hostage, making you a captive audience for the surge of tacit user endorsements of Facebook apps and third-party services. If I was one such business partner, my first question to Facebook would be, “Is there a chance the users would change their settings so that our ads won’t get through?” Facebook’s response, “We’ll fix that.”

I had wanted a thing like Facebook to come along for a long time. As I was using the web over the years, I gave up on hosting all of my own content at my personal web site and scattered my stuff to sites that made it easy to post pictures, videos and blogs for my friends to see (flick, YouTube and MySpace respectively). Rather than use Facebook’s apps for my favorite movies and books, I waited for sites like Goodreads (where the books I was currently and just recently read had already been painstakingly entered with care) to somehow dovetail with Facebook automatically, so when I updated one site, it would update on Facebook. How clever that will be! I thought.

Same with Netflix. I’d been using Netflix for years, so I eschewed the Facebook apps where I could list favorite DVDs I owned and rate them. Why not just have a thing where Facebook knows my Netflix account already? I thought. Netflix has finally made its site enabled with Facebook Connect — just such a service — where any time I rate a movie on Netflix, my rating is automatically sent into the stream of every one of my Facebook friends. I gave it a dry run this morning, rating a recent Hemingway doc I had watched, then went to Facebook to watch it magically appear. When it did, I was depressed to see that my rating looked just as annoying and unnecessary as so many friends’ dumb quiz results.

Time was my rating might have gone to my Wall and sat there quietly, unobtrusively, noticeable only to someone who bothered to click on my profile and see what I was up to. But now, just like so much quiz fluff, it’s shoveled into Facebook’s new stream indiscriminately, rendered in the same large, childish font as my last status update, one more block of… nothing. Of crap.

This is where Facebook has let us down. In promising this busy stream of updates, they’ve assigned the same importance to my click of three stars for Hemingway with anything else I do on Facebook. The app that will publish this blog to Facebook gets exactly the same screen time as that one click to say “I Liked It.” With no ability to tailor, prioritize or emphasize content, the stream becomes a dull, dreary continuum of noise. The stream becomes a wash. It becomes all colors all the time, and that doesn’t paint a picture, it paints a ever-growing rectangle of blackish-brown.

In fashioning itself to please its business partners, Facebook has removed the configurable connectivity so many of its users cherished. The experience they claim to foster and respect has taken a backseat to their business model. By putting their business interests first they have diminished their user’s experience and they know it. But they don’t care. They’ll pretend they are listening to your feedback, but they won’t be. They’ll be cramming advertising down your throat. And I will have cheered them on all the way.

Guess I’ll have to try spending time with my friends in the real world again. Who wants to get a coffee?