Thinking inside the box

[hatmandu]

vigornian has made some good comments about the whole social media/malarkey. Having engaged in the debate on Facebook he mentions, and tried very drunkenly and probably unsuccessfully to explain Twitter to Paul and Craig last week, I feel the urge to explain why I like it so much

Comments

[jvvw]

Search is megaimportant if you are at an event and want to follow or join in the backchannel.

The thing I like about twitter is that you can just get to the point. You don't have to do smalltalk type stuff first because everybody knows you've only got 140 characters. So for instance, if you want to ask a question, you just ask it without having to spend time on niceties first.

I've used it for probably a year now mostly with folk at work or elsewhere but related to work and I really like it as a way to know what's happening around the OU. I've also got to know people I knew only slightly much better as a result of it. Though now more of my friends are using it, I might have to stop the 'anybody going for lunch?' type tweets :)

[hatmandu]

Yes, I do think the one drawback is no immediate filtering mechanism to distinguish between different types of tweet. TweetDeck lets you set up groups, which solves the problem - I just don't like its interface very much. There may be others I haven't seen.

[jvvw]

I think there should be some way of saying 'I don't want to see tweets with the following hashtags'. It wouldn't totally solve the problem but would be a fairly simple way to make it much manageable.

[hatmandu]

I guess a big thing with Twitter is that the service they provide is very pure and simple, and we rely on third party apps or clients to add a meta-layer of functionality.

[sillage]

Can you run me past it again - I fear I was very drunk at the time...

[hatmandu]

Your 'Bridget Jones' reports are very Twitter!