Twitter Telephone April 20, 2009
Posted by Realitybypass in Life, Musings.Tags: facebook, networking, Twitter
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I admit when it comes to social networking sites I’ve been a bit behind the curve, but I finally folded. I studied MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other places and decided that Facebook and Twitter seemed to be the most interesting to me. So I signed up on both and started poking around. Facebook was first, and I love it because it’s a good place to keep up with friends, relatives, authors, agents, all kinds of people and the pace is pretty slow. I can pop around as I like and I can playMafia Wars in pleasant 10 minute bursts. So color me happy.
Then I tried Twitter and I’m not so sure what I think. I’m an IM fan from way back, ICQ, Trillian, MSN, YIM, BBS, forums…I’ve used them all and tend to have 5-6 IMs open most of the time. Based on that I figured I’d like Twitter. But the problem is Twitter is like being dropped into the middle of Grand Central Station and having to claw your way through what is just noise and what are conversations you want to pay attention to. There are some great threads that happen on Twitter and it’s a great place to gather links and keep up with industry news, but it is spazzmodic and keeping up nearly impossible.
The other problem I have with Twitter is the way the telephone game works there. For those who never played the telephone game as children, I will explain. If you know what it is skip this bit! 
The telephone game was one of those games I played at slumber parties as a child. Everyone sits in a circle and the first person whispers a message to the person on their right, who whispers it to the person on their right, on and on around the circle. Then the very last person announces what they heard and it’s compared to what it started out as. The results are usually hysterical. Chocolate pancakes becomes chicken spankings or such. Great game.
So applied to Twitter there is a phenominon called retweeting. When you can just cut and retweet the whole message retweeting is a nice thing. It helps some of us who couldn’t be in the conversation earlier catch up on vital bits, however…there is a 140 character limit on Twitter so if the person doing the retweeting wants to add an opinion then often the initial tweet gets ‘edited’. Sometimes the editing doesn’t make any difference, but other times it completely changes what was meant and now the conversation goes in an unexpected way and gets confusing. When you’re the one who put out the original tweet and you see what it’s become and what it’s lead to it can be disconcerting. It’s particularly alarming when this leads to private messages berating you for something which you never actually said. Yeah, I’m speaking from experience and no little annoyance, but I’m not going to get into the details. Maybe in another post.
So all in all will I stay on both sites? Will I get a MySpace page? Or whatever comes next?
Yes, no, maybe. I think the good out weighs the bad for the most part as long as I can balance how much time I spend on any one site and avoid the Twitter Telephone.
Jana
