I've been seeing loads of references to social networking/microblogging site Twitter for ages and finally signed up this lunchtime to see what it had to offer.
I'm not entirely sure how much use I'll get out of it (or it out of me) as it seems to focus on individuals with lots of friends. It also requires a lot of input to get the best out of it, assuming anyone's actually following your twittering, and do you really want to microblog your life?
Where it seems to fail, in my opinion, is the lack of any search facilities. I mean how can you use it to meet new people or reply to topics of interest if you can't actually find any of them? You can add people to your ring of friends by letting it search for existing users from your e-mail account contacts or you can just send someone an invite if you already know their address but that's it unless you choose to "follow" someone.
There's a Public Timeline so you can follow public posts for a bit but you need to subscribe to the RSS feed to get much more than a few entries and those whizz by very rapidly. Searching can be accomplished, in a fairly restrictive way if you ask me, using Twitter's new tracking feature, where you can track any word or concept on Twitter, and have the updates sent to your phone or IM. Why not on your web account? I don't use IM services and have no desire to give them my mobile number so they can fire lots of texts at me at my expense.
If I can't find anyone or anything on Twitter, then how would anyone find me or my posts? I'll give it a few weeks to see if it's any use so, if you're a Twitter user, then you can follow me on http://twitter.com/macindog
I'm not entirely sure how much use I'll get out of it (or it out of me) as it seems to focus on individuals with lots of friends. It also requires a lot of input to get the best out of it, assuming anyone's actually following your twittering, and do you really want to microblog your life?
Where it seems to fail, in my opinion, is the lack of any search facilities. I mean how can you use it to meet new people or reply to topics of interest if you can't actually find any of them? You can add people to your ring of friends by letting it search for existing users from your e-mail account contacts or you can just send someone an invite if you already know their address but that's it unless you choose to "follow" someone.
There's a Public Timeline so you can follow public posts for a bit but you need to subscribe to the RSS feed to get much more than a few entries and those whizz by very rapidly. Searching can be accomplished, in a fairly restrictive way if you ask me, using Twitter's new tracking feature, where you can track any word or concept on Twitter, and have the updates sent to your phone or IM. Why not on your web account? I don't use IM services and have no desire to give them my mobile number so they can fire lots of texts at me at my expense.
If I can't find anyone or anything on Twitter, then how would anyone find me or my posts? I'll give it a few weeks to see if it's any use so, if you're a Twitter user, then you can follow me on http://twitter.com/macindog
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