Re:Ask YC: What makes Twitter so special?
by aheilbut on Friday May 23, 2008 @12:01AM
(#197766)
I also didn't get it at all at first, but am now quite addicted.
Twitter feels a bit like a 24/7 cocktail party full of intelligent and interesting people, where you can chose who to listen to. I think they've also evolved (or perhaps resurrected) a cultural norm of openness where you can listen to and engage in conversations with anyone. I think that, along with the asynchrony and discoverability, is what makes it slightly magical.
That being said, it has problems:
- It can definitely be a waste of time.
- There aren't good tools for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing the feed.
- There's an excessive density of 'professional' social-media types who seem to spend all day twitterring about nothing but Twitter.
- I don't understand the appeal of the IM-type clients at all. They look pretty, but I can't imagine anything worse than being constantly interrupted by windows popping up all over my screen with random, disconnected tweets.
Twitter feels a bit like a 24/7 cocktail party full of intelligent and interesting people, where you can chose who to listen to. I think they've also evolved (or perhaps resurrected) a cultural norm of openness where you can listen to and engage in conversations with anyone. I think that, along with the asynchrony and discoverability, is what makes it slightly magical.
That being said, it has problems: - It can definitely be a waste of time.
- There aren't good tools for filtering, prioritizing, and contextualizing the feed.
- There's an excessive density of 'professional' social-media types who seem to spend all day twitterring about nothing but Twitter.
- I don't understand the appeal of the IM-type clients at all. They look pretty, but I can't imagine anything worse than being constantly interrupted by windows popping up all over my screen with random, disconnected tweets.