Re:Ask YC: What makes Twitter so special?
by mechanical_fish on Thursday May 22, 2008 @07:46PM
(#197665)
actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.
Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity.
Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent -- we should all stop writing paragraphs and concentrate all our energy on writing decent titles and headlines. Well, Twitter is a machine for forcing people to write good headlines and nothing else. As a result, I find it wastes far less of the reader's time than any other web technology to date.
Re:Ask YC: What makes Twitter so special?
by mattmaroon on Thursday May 22, 2008 @11:00PM
(#197752)
Kind of makes me shudder to think that that is where we're headed. ADHD to the max.
Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A small circle of people dominate the crowd's attention, largely by talking voluminously among themselves. You might be able to learn something new, but you'll have to filter out a lot of noise. And you're probably better served by finding a person or two and having an actual conversation, or writing an essay, or actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.