4.23.2008

The thin line

...between love and hate. My newest thing is Twitter. What the hell is Twitter? Good question. The two word answer is 'microblogging tool.' The long answer is that it's a combination of public Instant messaging, social media and blogging. Basically, you sign up for an account, choose some people you want to follow (see their messages or tweets). People subscribe to you, and fun ensues. Stop. Check that, and go here if you're truly interested and see what someone smarter than I has to say. Incidentally, you can follow me here by clicking follow.

So, to no one in particular, here are some beefs I have with Twitter.


  • When you follow someone, you can't tell them why. I follow all kinds of people that I don't personally know. They see my sign up and have no clue why I'm following. You should be able to send a one time direct message to them so they know who you are.
  • I'm irrationally annoyed at spammers. I have followers who are clearly just trying to make money without adding anything of value (the ultimate site for cat stuff?).
  • The conversations are not threaded. There is an attempt at this via Quotably but it's not good enough. I want to be able to click on a single button in my Twitter client and see the entire back and forth conversation. That's just not possible now. Today I made several comments, and at one point someone responded to one of them. I have no idea which one.
  • I'd like communities available. This may make no sense to anyone but me. But I follow people because they are bloggers or SEOs or web-ebrities. But they're fairly distinct. I would like groups available that people can subscribe to and easily see and communicate with other memberships.
  • Integrate with Facebook. I would love to automatically follow my Facebook friends and have them follow me.
  • Don't like the fact that I can't easily put my Twitter ID AND my blog URL in comments. I may be the only person who thinks like this. But they are different entities, and I don't think I should have to choose one or the other.
  • Also, if you sign up make SURE you track your own ID. That's the only way you'll see if people you aren't following are trying to communicate with you.
Ok, back to regularly scheduled programming.