Twitter Questions
 

I admit I am not very trendy. I was against the cell phone, the mp3 player, the laptop, you name it and obviously I now use all of these things. But I have a question about Twitter. Even though it holds no interest to me personally I could see somebody wanting to follow what Brad Pitt is doing or a politician giving them updates from the house floor, I could even see me following a buddy on there who lives across the country “I played Super Tecmo last night as the Colts and won the Super Bowl” But why is it limited to a small amount of characters? Why is it any different than myspace or facebook or a blog? And most importantly why would anyone ever follow the local weatherman or espn.com or cnn? I assume you have to go on the interent to get twitter, so why not just visit those pages? Are we really getting this lazy as a society?

I would guess the character limit is due to cell phone text messaging. I believe you can get the updates sent to your phone... so you wouldn't want an essay split up in 1000 text messages.

To keep it from turning into a blog. Those already exist. It is to encourage conciseness, which is what makes it effective. Concise updates from lots of people, instead of indulgent wanna-be authorship from a few people.

Yes, the limit is meant to distinguish it from a blog, I think. There's a veyr different feel to these kind of status updates, and it means you can browse through them quickly and get a feel for what's going on among your friends/connections.

As for why you would connect to various people, it just depends what you like. There's one account I connect to that posts about interesting things happening in the nearby city and tends to find the sort of things I'm interested in. so that's handy. I would never bother looking up her blog or Web page but I've learned about some good things through it.

I was unaware they were sent to your phone. Again something I am not interested in but I guess I could see someone with an unlimited texting plan not miding continual updates from the local weather guy. Makes more sense, still seems lazy though.

My understanding was the text messaging thing that MikeVic mentioned. You are able to update you Twitter right from your phone by sending a text, as well as getting updates to your phone if you want, and 140 is the limit on a text message.

And it has interesting results when government representatives don't think before posting. Saw this on a friend's "tweet" this morning:

Freakin hilarious: http://is.gd/14SHi backstory here: http://is.gd/14SHh

I hate the limit. I'm always struggling to find a way to write what I want within the limit. I think a limit of 500 would have been more appropriate, you'd still be limited to small thoughts and not blogs, but you could express yourself in a more unique way.

Also, I think my cellphone can send 1000 characters in a text?

See that seems to be another angle that people just don't understand. I am not trendy so I don't go to trendy clubs. Some of these politicians need to stay away from stuff like twitter it does way more harm than good.

I like the limit. As stated above, people need to stop rambling and say what they're going to say. I don't like people who tweet four or five times to get a thought across.

Then again, limiting the number of characters is not necessarily good for the person who can't express themselves concisely (no offense). Most tweets become inconsequential or uninteresting as a result.

Twitter has actually got me into more sites, helped me discover more places to go on the web. I follow the Dynamo players and a couple Packers, but most of who I follow are guys who are not like that. A couple guys do blogs on US soccer which I didn't know about until I started following them on Twitter. Why not only follow their blog now? Because what is on their blog is different, it's an op-ed piece. On Twitter they are posting things as they happen in games, or post about stuff not even related to their blog, you interact with them in a different way.

Plus I find it a nice way to get updates about things all in one place. Press Gazette has a couple new stories about the Packers up, this guy's blog has a new post, this youth coach in Canada raises alpacas, Dynamo front office guy mentioned something about a new stadium, this irregular podcast has a new posting. Then all these same people may re-tweet someone else's post I never would have seen, and that leads me somewhere I never would have been. It's very useful to me, the way I use it to suit what I want out of it.

No offense taken, I am verbose, it's who I am. I like to phrase things in specific ways, ways which I believe add humor or make things more interesting, and Twitter just craps all over that. I'd say about half my tweets are never twat because I can't find a way I would like to form them.

It's not really to stop the yammering. It's because 140 characters is the character limit of text messages. Lack of rambling is just a fortunate side benefit.

And I'm limited to 160 characters.