Who's got twitter?
 

Share your twitter names so i can add you guys!

mine is @bikeforlife55

I'm on there, but I stopped using it. Thought sometimes requires more than 140 keystrokes. But no one in the Twitterverse seems to realize that. Besides, Facebook is enough of a waste of time.

Twittered that for you... :D

Agreed. I could not stand the 140 character limit. As a writer it unnaturally limits me.

Nobody who criticizes Twitter seems to understand that it isn't trying to be the next Facebook or Microsoft Word.

If you're trying to publish your magnum opus via Twitter, you're using the wrong tool for the job. Think of Twitter as a way to send an SMS message to all of your friends simultaneously without having to type on a crappy cellphone keyboard and may make more sense...

I can't think of a situation where I'd have to do that. Heck, I have a hard time thinking of a situation where anyone had to do that.

agreed

It's fine for pithy statements. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a recent essay on the King James translation of the Bible, even that text has certain Twitter-ish moments - "Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward" is a perfect fit.

The problem is that a constant stream of epigrams and quips makes Twitter little more than a snark-pit. A pinch every now and then is fine, but not a constant diet of it.

Fixed for twitter.

You can probably guess that I don't use Teh Twit. Or Facebook. It isn't really the 140 character limit. I don't care very much about the minutea of other peoples' lives, and don't expect them to care about what I had for dinner, either. I'd like to know what's going on in my friends' lives, the stuff they find important. Actually talking to them is a good way to learn about this, share opinions, joke, and so on. I find that social media is actually pretty anti-social; it lets you feel like you have some kind of connection to people you wouldn't otherwise care enough to talk to, but it's a very superficial connection. I find that not having that makes me more likely to pick up the phone, or go visit somebody.

That's fine and all, but when I'm looking to catch up with my friends, I'm really not interested in visiting X number of sites, where X is more than 1. It's dreadful to have to go to a site for people who have less than 140 letters to say, and a completely different site for people who may or may not have more or less than 140 letters to say. As such, I gravitate to the place where both pithy and substantive things can be posted at the same time, and not the place that arbitrarily limits myself to browsing only my friends terse comments on life. It's even worse when said friends decide to post their comments in both places at once, realising that they have incongruous friend lists and absolutely must make sure that everyone everywhere reads what they say, thus wasting my time having to read it twice.


Also, seriously? Complaining about 140 characters now equates to not being able to write magnum opera? A little hyperbolic, you think?


PS: Now. If this post were to be posted on Twitter, you would get a statement with the expressiveness of the statement "I don't like twitter because it doesn't let me type enough to say what I want". Bland, boring, mundane. Now compare to this post. Ah, colorful language. Truly one of the spices of life. :)

That made me literally lol :lol:

I spend enough time on the internet already. I actually deleted my Facebook account when I realized that 95% of my "friends" didn't care about me and I didn't care about them. I gave Google+ a try, but I think I'm burnt out on the "social" networks. I look up groups on meetup.com and go out and meet new and interesting people in real life.

I have never even checked out twitter and have no idea how it works. Don't have a FB account. Never been to MySpace etc. My life is really busy. Have enough trouble coming here once in awhile. I get, I guess, why people FB and Twitter (too much time on their hands if you ask me). What I don't get is why people care if you do. Like am I suppose to sit around and wait for you to "twitter" something?

This is one of the few reasons I am glad to be old. I can use that as an excuse to bow out of the whole social media thing...

I knew there was a reason I like you SF! Priorities in the right place!

Back OT, @psalmb14 but I don't use it too much. At least I don't tweet often, but I do follow others.

And yet, there are millions of people who seem to use and enjoy Twitter! Go figure...

@TrekDen on there as well. Dropped ya a line in Twitterscape also... I follow more than I tweet, but there are some funny gems on there...

On debating twitter's merits:

I use twitter as a news aggregator for niche topics, particularly for things like science news where mainstream media often exaggerates or makes mistakes. The label "social media" can be a bit misleading sometimes.

Millions of people download porn too. Must I indulge in that as well?

I use the twitter. Following folks mostly, sports related. I will tell you what, writers might hate it, but comedians on twitter are great! My favorite by far is TheBillWalton, if you haven't stumbled across him, give him a add.

Some things are for some people, somethings are not. I quiet enjoy my 5 minutes I get from twitter a day.

I do however I hardly ever use it. I use facebook a lot more often. www.facebook.com/mgw189

neil: it might make you less salty! :)

Porn does for sex what Twitter does for thought. :-)

Oh, I agree. My brother, a comedy writer in Chicago, uses it a lot. Jamie's best quip, IMO: "bin Laden's secret demands were withdraw of US from the Middle East and new episodes of Blossom."

Did I say that you had to use Twitter? No. I'm merely suggesting that you stop bashing a service that you clearly don't understand...