Back in January I first saw this Robert Scoble interview with Guy Kawasaki, the startup guru. Now, I loved Guy's book (as does everyone else, btw) The Art of the Start, and after watching this interview, I was convinced by his "Twitter is a weapon" speech to try the service out myself.
My main problem with Twitter thus far is twofold:
1) It overlaps a lot with the facebook status update, which I totally love, and in fact works with it. However, the fact that it is wholly public causes me to bite my lip a little more and show restraint. This would be fine in theory, but the truth is that it's not really practical for me to both Twitter on the regular and maintain a healthy Facebook habit. Splitting my time between the two makes me feel less satisfied than before. Of course, this could simply be because I don't have critical mass of followers/friends (~40) on Twitter as I do on Facebook (~650);
2) I don't like the URL compression that Twitter does. TinyURL.com, Bit.ly etc. clearly serve a purpose, however, I hate not being able to discern the link destination before I click on it. I want to know if I'm heading off to a random blog post, a flickr photo or a PDF file from NYTimes.com. The link address contains valuable information. I don't like not having that.
All that said, I'm still learning. Thoughts?
I saw the first 12 minutes of this interview and found it to be rather “fanboyish.” That said, I did start to use Twitter quite a bit more afterwards.
Re: your assertion that Twitter and Faecbook are cannibalizing each other for your social media time, I would suggest adding the Twitter app to Facebook if you haven’t already, then your updates become part of your minifeed. In this way 800 more people have instantly been added to my Twitter network.
Also, a Twitter API such as Tweetdeck allows you to bypass the clunky Twitter interface and arrange tweets however you like. I don’t know how many of these techniques you already employ, but taken together they help me use Twitter as an unobtrusive journalistic tool, maybe even a weapon sometimes.
I saw the first 12 minutes of this interview and found it to be rather “fanboyish.” That said, I did start to use Twitter quite a bit more afterwards.
Re: your assertion that Twitter and Faecbook are cannibalizing each other for your social media time, I would suggest adding the Twitter app to Facebook if you haven’t already, then your updates become part of your minifeed. In this way 800 more people have instantly been added to my Twitter network.
Also, a Twitter API such as Tweetdeck allows you to bypass the clunky Twitter interface and arrange tweets however you like. I don’t know how many of these techniques you already employ, but taken together they help me use Twitter as an unobtrusive journalistic tool, maybe even a weapon sometimes.