HN Explorer

Ask: Why do people need Twitter, anyway?

8 points by henning ↗ HN
People like Dave Winer are getting pissy about Twitter - http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/04/22/howToDecoupleFromTwitterNo.html

"How will we manage without Twitter? Necessity is the mother of invention, imho."

What a bunch of bullshit. 98% of stuff on Twitter, is, as Matt Maroon pointed out, "Going to the gym"/"Ugh, clients are so lame"/"At elitist convention/party/etc you weren't invited to, I am so awesome".

How is this valuable?

It's the information equivalent of sugar water.

34 comments

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rrival
I just started using its embedded feature to manage the "latest news" micro blog on a production site.
kyro
People don't seem to understand the social dynamics behind stuff like this. First, understand that people are becoming increasingly more comfortable with exposing themselves online. Second, people really want to brag and let others know about themselves, despite what they say. They feel their lives are important and want to weave their lives into the entire cloth of social happenings. Third, think of twitter as a widdled down Facebook wall. It provides a mediator to both communicate with close friends with closeness and acquaintances with a comfortable sense of distance. This all compounded with the fact that many people like to feel like they are a part of an extensive community makes understanding sites like Twitter a bit easier.

Twitter is providing a more efficient way of letting people know what you're doing. The same was done using a phone but no one really complained about the garbage spoken over phone lines. Think of it as a less dynamic version of instant messaging.

noodle
twitter takes its value from the people that use it. if you use it as a tool, its useful as a tool. if you use it to bullshit, then what you get out is bullshit - it won't magically change that.

just like, for example, a boat is useful if your profession is fishing or something that requires you to be on the water, but a boat is a hole in the water where you throw your money if you have a boat for recreational purposes.

such is twitter. use it right, and its useful and good. use it for fun or trivial purposes and its kind of silly.

another good analogy for twitter, i think, is the boy who cried wolf. i'll read peoples tweets when they only have one a week or something, because i know its meaningful/profound/etc. and thats the purpose -- to be able to quickly and easily contact a lot of people via a lot of channels. but if you have 30 a day, i won't read a single one.

krschultz
Clearly a man who has never spent time on a boat. If you ever want to find out why Twitter is irrelevent, learn how to sail and disconnect for a week. You will learn a lot about how meaningless Twitter is once you disconnect from email/phone/internet/tv/radio for a week and feel incredibly liberated. If you want to find an idea that will change the world, disconnect from it all for a short period. When you come back the first thing you will do is cancel your Twitter, aim, etc and the next thing you will do is start doing something meaningful to more people than just those who are plugged into the net 24 hours a day.
noodle
ironic that, as a person who clearly spent time on a boat, you're still posting on HN in a twitter thread instead of curing cancer or something.
krschultz
You certainly won't find me on twitter/irc/aim, but I read Hacker News because there are generally intelligent stories. And a "Do you need Twitter' thread is right up my alley. Actually I work on computer vision not cancer, but if it ends up working out cars will drive themselves and some lives will be saved. It probably doesn't pay as well as founding a throw away social networking Web 2.0 whatever, but it is more fulfilling than networking on Twitter all day to see if I can get my noticed for something.
Herring
I'd demand a refund if I were you.
xlnt
If you don't like this yc post, why don't you demand a refund?

Silly argument.

tptacek
Repeat argument for YouTube videos, blogs, IM, SMS, personal web pages, web pages, gopher pages, email, IRC, bulletin board systems. Win.
xenoterracide
It's true... most of these systems are accomplishing the same things in different ways. What annoys me is that everyone expects me to jump on the same boat they're on.
paul
Why do you care?

The reality is that most human conversations are fluff. If you could listen in on everyone's cell phone calls, do you think they would sound very different?

aristus
Doug Adams had a story about that, coincidentally involving birds: Aurthur Dent taught himself the language of birds. It turned out that birds are mostly chattering about the wind, and seeds, and who got whose feathers ruffled, etc.

Humans are crashingly boring. We fart, we scratch, we worry about our hair and our petty insecurities.

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brlewis
Darn it Paul, every technologist has to dream about his or her technology making the world a better place. We want to think the Internet will improve how people communicate. If you were around back then, whoever invented television would have instead gone home sulking.

Of course, you would have been right. And maybe that would be a good thing. But stop raining on our parade anyway!

paul
People communicating with eachother IS making the world a better place. It just doesn't always look impressive.
brlewis
Good point. I should mention my grandparent post should have had a smiley. I meant to make the discussion lively and entertaining, not hostile.
wallflower
Twitter is small talk. As much as I sometimes cringe at the banality of "How are you?", it's important because it is not important.
mechanical_fish
It's the information equivalent of sugar water.

Here's some 2007 numbers, courtesy of Yahoo Finance:

Coca-Cola Company (KO): $6B net profit on $29B revenue

Pepsico (PEP): $5.6B net profit on $39.4B revenue

Google (GOOG): $4.2B net profit on $16.6B revenue

Microsoft (MSFT): $14B net profit on $51.1B revenue

I'd say that, while Microsoft Windows is more profitable than sugar water, the soft drink industry is holding its own. Of course, Pepsi and Coke know how to monetize sugar water...

Paging John Sculley! Where is he when we need him? He wasn't the world's greatest tech CEO, but he sure knew the value of sugar water!

alaskamiller
John! Do you want to peddle sugar water all your life or do you want to make a difference in Web 2.0 technology?!?
mhb
And how's Altria (aka Philip Morris) doing?
mechanical_fish
I would go there, but comparing Twitter to high-fructose corn syrup is already unfair enough. ;)
dawie
It gives Micheal A something to write about...
justindz
Modified quote: "How will people like me who really like Twitter and use it in personally useful ways going to manage without Twitter?"

You might not be that person (note: I'm not), but to assume the other types don't exist or that their reasons for valuing Twitter are mis-guided is a bit grand.

alaskamiller
You're old.

Twitter is in 2008 what checking AIM away messages was back in 1998.

Welcome to the long tail and all that jazz.

99.99% of everything is boring.

Join Second Life if you want something unique.

Internet is just a wasteland.

Web 1.0 was creating the playground for information. Web 2.0 is about sharing more information. Web 3.0 will be about how to extract utility out of information.

I can go on and on about pithy pseudo-analysis but you should just keep listening to Matt Maroon.

sabat
Twitter may not be invaluable in itself, but as a signpost indicating the direction the social world (and the world at large) is heading, it's not bad.
procyon
I think any information is a valuable information even if that means that "twitter-shitter" is talking about poop jokes.

Tools build on top of twitter which will mine the sea of this information, filter out interesting data and the extract some sense out of it will really make the experience better. Don't see too many creative tools build yet, but can't see why they would mature given enough time.

mattmaroon
People who make their livelihood out of writing about the tech industry understandably find it an invaluable tool. The rest of the world does not.

I actually enjoy Twitter, I just don't need it, and I can see why most people would just be annoyed by it.

iamdave
Because you don't see the immediate value of Twitter doesn't negate it's usefulness to others. Personally, I found who could very well be my future business partner through Twitter and Twitter maps. Sure, "going to the gym" might not be so exciting, but I found it incredibly helpful to quickly logon, type "I'm behind Coffee Underground" and a friend was able to find me so we could talk about business.

Furthermore, it's just a good way to keep track of what you need to know from people. Not everyone tells you useful information, but not every author who has a book published is worth reading either. It's a different experience from everyone and that's the beauty of the Internet. There are no archetypes for how you use it

t-dub
Would calling your friend instead of using Twitter been a disaster? It seems like a broadcast medium like Twitter was completely inappropriate to use in that instance. Contacting the one person who you wanted to reach directly would have made a lot more sense. This is the sort of mentality that turns me off to Twitter is that it's the end-all, be-all of communication. Use the right tools for the right purpose.
iamdave
No. However considering I met him on Twitter, and I was already online at the moment, it was convenient. Probably the most overt thing people are missing about Twitter. I know that he checks it regularly, which is less than I can say about his skills at answering a phone call.

It's not a matter of "sense". If I could recount the number of times that people told me Facebook was irrelevant because "email" existed and I could use it for the same reason I use Facebook (to stay in contact with people), we'd be here all day. The fact is, I've connected with lots of people in my industry and area with Twitter, and lots of them if not all have become valuable assets in what I do.

I wouldn't be so crass to quickly dismiss it as THE method of communicating. The marketplace wont let that happen, and social dynamics wont let that happen; and in my opinion I think that is another crucial thing people fail to realize when stacking Twitter up against traditional communication: the social dynamics of how useful it can be.

But again, there's no archetype for how you use this type of service, or any service. It just so happened I was online at the moment, I knew he was online (by virtue of the fact that he had posted a tweet not even 10 minutes earlier) so I alerted him to where I was.

It's really that simple.