The League

Somebody had to say it

by Will · November 13, 2009

Will

Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.

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E.D. Kain says:

November 13, 2009 at 8:15 am

I never remember to check my twitter page. No matter how hard I try.Report
JosephFM says:

November 13, 2009 at 9:47 am

I suspect it has something to do with how they all have Blackberries and iPhones.Report
- JosephFM in reply to JosephFM says:
  
  November 13, 2009 at 9:48 am
  
  Or Palms or G1s or whatever.Report
John Gee says:

November 13, 2009 at 9:53 am

A lot of people are using twitter the wrong way. As a friend who works in Menlo Park explained to me, it’s intended to be mostly a crowd-sourcing thing. Like a less-focused version of yelp. Specifically, with search functionality you could see what “people” were thinking in the last x minutes, hours, or days. Now, there’s some problems with that model. It may become focused on targeted advertising. It may not make a whole ton of sense from the micro perspective of the user (or at least not right now). But it doesn’t serve a person-to-person or person-to-crowd function. Twitter is a crowd-to-person aggregator, and like anything new, it’s still working itself out.Report
- John Gee in reply to John Gee says:
  
  November 13, 2009 at 11:10 am
  
  Oh, and also here’s Tyler Cowen saying the same thing much better.
  
  http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/in-defense-of-twitter.htmlReport
  - Will in reply to John Gee says:
    
    November 13, 2009 at 12:57 pm
    
    If the conversation wasn’t so limited and superficial (a function of Twitter’s design constraints), I think this argument would be more persuasive. I can accept the social and organizing functions of Twitter as genuinely useful, but I think it’s been over-hyped as some revolutionary new form of communications.Report
    - John Gee in reply to Will says:
      
      November 13, 2009 at 3:32 pm
      
      Absolutely true: 140 characters are not enough – but at some point, maybe a hundred words or so, there’s too much room for the purpose, which is not necessarily to hold “the conversation” on Twitter itself. That function is much better served by people like yourselves at the League (i.e. the blogosphere). I do think, however, that Twitter can help to facilitate conversation by drawing people’s attention to salient articles. It’s almost certainly overhyped, sure. But it’s not “basically useless,” a point on which we seem to agree.Report
Jaybird says:

November 13, 2009 at 11:35 am

Can I change my avatar from green back to something else, now?Report