What I still don't understand is how people who use Twitter use it at all? I mean, you can't give much information in 140 chars. So I guess most people post links. Now, if they post links, more than that, shortened links, the only way to follow people is to click on every 140 char message. Which means you don't read, you click and click and you don't even know what you're supposed to get before you click. It's hard to understand for me that people actually do this regularly and why do they bother to actually "follow" the tweets?
Can anybody explain me what's that that I don't understand?
Twitter is great for five things: Links to long reads, breaking news, short-form comedy, status updates, and contacting interesting strangers. Most people start using Twitter for just one of those five things and discover the other ones later. For me, the first thing was breaking news. I started following individuals on the ground in the early days of the Arab Spring, and Twitter blew all of the traditional news sources out of the water.
That's not quite fair: on Twitter you choose who to follow, so there's still a filter. In fact in some ways a superior filter -- I can't select which votes I want to count on HN, but I effectively can on Twitter (or could, if I used it actively).
* Serendipity of content. I follow a stack of interesting folk. They tweet about interesting stuff. If I have some downtime that I want to fill with something interesting to read I can find something (NOTE: this does not mean I go to twitter every time I have a quiet time. I like quiet time. I have books and shit too ;-)
* Serendipity of people. I've met people in RL via twitter. Folk have come up to me at conferences and events and said "Hi - I follow you on twitter". I've done the reverse. It's been a great ice breaker in meeting new people. For me Facebook is something for the people I already know. Twitter is something that has let me meet new people.
* It's got me work. I talk about the stuff I'm passionate about. People see that passion and start a conversation.
* You can fit a surprising amount into 140 characters. In fact the discipline of getting useful info into 140 characters is a great one to acquire. It's a crash course in headline/lede writing.
* It's a place to talk to some of my friends. I live in a fairly rural area of the UK at the moment. A bunch of my "real" friends are not local. The ones who are not on facebook, or email, tend to be on twitter.
[Edit: Oh yes. One more. Access to smart people. For example a couple of weeks back I couldn't remember the term "Reification". Took my twitter followers about ten minutes to go from my dumb "What's that word for things that aren't things (e.g. the Economy)" to "Reification Fallacy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) which was what I was trying to remember]
Sorry, I still don't understand. I checked your profile, visited your twitter profile, found out that you're following around 2100 people. How many "tweets" is that per day? Do you really read them all? I feel I'd go insane doing so much "context switches of mind" to read 140-char messages of 2100 different people.
I also tried to see some random samples of the tweets from the people you follow. My impression: most of them have the form:
"@somebody: yeah right" "@somebodyelse: no, I don't" "mumble mumble sil.ly/asdasdew" etc.
I know, such "substantial" messages are not only twitter-specific. I believe you that you enjoy the whole experience. I just don't understand what's in there for me, from the people like you who like it I get the impression that I'm missing something and it frustrates me still that I can't "get" what that is. Thanks.
Ha! No. Not even remotely. Neither do I read every HN comment or every HN post.
I don't drink the river. I dip in a cup occasionally.
I do read anything that's directed at me as an individual.
I have a couple of twitter lists that friends are on that I pay a little bit more attention to (twitter lists are ways of grouping people in twitter - think Google Circles with an even worse UX ;-).
I have a computationally generated twitter list of folk I've 'talked' to recently (via http://conversationlist.com/).
I have a couple of topic-specific lists I glance a weather eye over every day or so to see if anything interesting pops up.
Otherwise it's just serendipitous access when I feel the need for brain popcorn.
I hear this a lot and while true, brevity also encourages people to be glib and repels context. I stopped checking Twitter and haven't looked back because I realized that for many if not most users (myself included), it is at best a way of wasting time and at worst an outlet for what I'll call 'nerd rage'. This is reflected in the "debates" that spring up over things like sexism -- everyone is talking, no one is listening.
That someone could take the above paragraph and argue that had I used fewer words I would have "saved [them] time" is baffling to me. Then again I still associate the quality of tweets with the kind of stuff we used to (and still do) leave as our IM client status. Things that reflect the kind of day you're having or why you're not at the computer; now you take your computer with you so you can read about and set your status before, during, and after everything.
I use it as a super wire service, I follow thousands of news organizations organized by lists, it's pretty cool for news junkies and journalists. I never tweet anything though, I don't see the point.
Can anybody explain me what's that that I don't understand?