Re-Tweet

petegilbert - 29th of Jan, 2009

I agree that Twitter can often be frustrating and time wasting. I hate having to search through people’s Tweets to catch the start of a conversation. But in a way it’s strangely fascinating, like maybe you shouldn’t be reading it…

I do like Friendfeed a lot but find it almost impossible to get my local active group of Twitter people to use it. I post stuff on there and it just goes into a void. No-one follows you on Friendfeed (except yourself, maybe Scoble) and it feels a bit one sided. I want to use it more though so I’m not going to give up.It will catch on more in Europe but it’s going to take time.

Having used Friendfeed intensly for the last two days and through reading this post I believe that twitter is on it’s way out for early adopters for one fundamental reason. The re-tweet. Twitter is over simplified for anything but IRC like conversation and as a result of this for passionate users such as myself we bounce from the walls of twitter without an opportunity to escape it. We see links but know nothing about them. We see retweets but don’t understand them. We get replies of which conversation they were part of and in general twitter is a two message medium. The two message medium is the way I think best illustrates how people use twitter most of the time. Too many people worry about productivity and wasting time and because they feel guilty for having a conversation on twitter they cut it off after two messages on average. As a result the twitter user often feels that they have wasted time. In Friendfeed however you write a message, link to an article and if people like it you see how many people, including you liked the article and you can see the comments. As an effect of seeing their comments you may exchange more messages with them. It doesn’t matter when you join the conversation because the flow is still there. This saves so much time and technology that I am really thinking of moving away from twitter to Friendfeed because it has finally come of age and is more reflective of the way people disseminate and share information for at least a few more weeks. Anyone else feel the same? Let me know.