Oh sorry all… must have had my cursor slip off my twitter account.

That’s kind of the point, isn’t it. Twitter posts are abbreviated and quick, but they allow you to drill down when you’re interested enough to bother.

Incidentally, the post wasn’t actually about tea, but I used my highly-boring-to-other-people obsession with tea as an example of using Twitter to indulge my interests and find other people who share the same. Maybe you’d be more interested in people discussing football scores, or property rights law, or antique cars, or boating accidents in the early 1800s. Or politics!

slknoerr on June 11, 2009 at 11:33 AM

SLK…I’m terribly sorry,but the explanation of WHY Twitter is boring, was boring.

Wow, ten paragraphs about your fascination with tea. If this “exciting” story is an example of Twitter, then may respectfully say, thank God I’m too old and not with it to spend time on something this boring. Honestly, I thought I was going to fall asleep. Sorry.

That’s kind of the point, isn’t it. Twitter posts are abbreviated and quick, but they allow you to drill down when you’re interested enough to bother.

Incidentally, the post wasn’t actually about tea, but I used my highly-boring-to-other-people obsession with tea as an example of using Twitter to indulge my interests and find other people who share the same. Maybe you’d be more interested in people discussing football scores, or property rights law, or antique cars, or boating accidents in the early 1800s. Or politics!

Try tellin’ that to SkyNet! :-)

I just don’t get Twitter, it doesn’t make any sense. I got on there and had no idea what to do with it. Facebook is lame too. I prefer YouTube. I post cute videos of my daughter, it’s easy to use, even for my Dad who, when he was a kid, used to tie two cans together with a string and play “telephone”! haha

Please, keep the Twitter stuff on your PC, guys (mostly you, CNN). Enough!

I wrote one of these 25,000-messages Tweeters and asked if he ever got any business from all his Tweeting of his business. Answer: A few leads, but he is having fun!
I wrote back and asked if he ever thought of spending 5 weeks making real sales calls on the phone and in person instead of trolling for business via Twitter.
No reply. He unfollowed me. :-)

I’m really interested in connoisseur-level tea, and on Twitter I found I could connect up with other people with my niche interest. One can find some extremely knowledgeable writers, many of whom have very intriguing blogs of their own or are involved in the industry in some way. I’ll write– and bear with me, because the example that follows is intended to show how niche interests can find this a good tool. If you find it boring, well, that’s the point, isn’t it? I don’t expect you to be interested in tea. But people who are have found a way of connecting via Twitter.

The example: I open up my Twitter account, using Twhirl software. I find someone “retweeting,” which means republishing, a short note (or tweet) by an Indian tea marketer, who lives in Darjeeling. Darjeeling is a region whose teas intensely interest me, because they are intense, bright, ascerbic, complex, and can be mind-blowing. I then click on this Twitterer’s name to read his tweets for the past few weeks, and I decide to become a follower– a reader of his Twitter publications. He writes about how there is a drought in Darjeeling, which is causing the first-flush teas (the Spring harvest) to be very late. Links to longer comments on his blog.

I strike up a conversation with this man in Darjeeling, India about what he expects from the harvest of teas this year, and he responds back and tells me he expects the first-flush teas to come in (due to the rains that finally have appeared, hallelujah), but in very limited amounts. Buy some while it’s available! Sure enough, I see some of the best, affordable Darjeelings are out of stock already.

So my new Darjeeling friend decides to follow me, as well, to facilitate dialog. Other people who are searching for the term, “tea,” can see the back-and-forth between us and can chime in with ideas and advice. I discover new people who are tea connoisseurs, who can teach and inform me about this obsession of mine.

Eventually, several online tea merchants (including my Indian friend) send me teas, which they would like me to review on my blog. Suddenly, I am drinking absolutely fresh Darjeelings and Chinese Dragon Well teas, and on and on, that have been plucked only weeks ago, and are at their peak.

Also, there is a feedback loop with other forms of social networking and self-publishing. As I mentioned before, I can read short clips of longer blog posts and decide whether I want to follow up and read more. Also, people link to other posts of interest. In addition, Twitter can feed into Facebook. Indeed, Twitter is like the “update” on a Facebook account, but it can be read by anyone, not just your closest friends.

Indeed, as I write this, my Indian friend posted a Tweet (It’s the middle of the day in Darjeeling, though night time here), with a link talking about the brand-new, second-flush teas that are just arriving on the market in Darjeeling but aren’t available yet here in the U.S. (his blog post is, http://www.darjeelingcuppa.com/2009/06/arya-sftgfop1-second-flush-darjeeling-tea-2009/ ) Now i know that my beloved second-flush teas are going to be a bit of a challenge to get this year, as well; and I should get ready to do some early purchasing online to get what I need.

The effect of Internet networking (via Facebook, blogs, corporate and personal Web sites, Twitter, and so on) on the emerging tea culture in the United States and elsewhere is very well written up by “corax” on the Cha Dao web site: http://chadao.blogspot.com/2009/04/tea-and-internet.html

So, that’s one use for Twitter. Connecting up with others who share a niche interest (whether it be tea, technology, or politics, or a particular religious viewpoint) can be facilitated there. It doesn’t all have to be Rosie O’Donnell’s navel gazing.

I had a twitter account for about 26 hours. I couldn’t stand it and deleted it. Why do I care if you are…

busy peeling an apple
painting your toenails
trying to figure out what that lump on your anus is
or if you’re Meghan McCain, DOES HE KNOW WHO I AM?????

It’s all retarded mush. I think twitter is the result of someone that just ran out of ideas.

All the really with it folks are using Flutter.

In addition to adding some “water cooler” chatter for those working at home (read: alone in our bunkers), I’ve found Twitter is in many ways replacing RSS. I find more and more that my Web reading springs from Twitter than from anywhere else.

Sure, there’s a lot of pointless chatter. But there’s a lot of pointless chatter on blogs, newscasts and in newspapers, too. The key is ignoring the noise, just as with anything else.

What’s more, it’s fun.

Twitterphobia.

The Twitter crowd reminds me of nothing so much as a bunch of vapid gray-haired biddies with an old-fashioned party line, with portable handsets on the user end.

Yakkety-yak yabber jabber blah blah llama rama ding dang dong all day long…accomplishing nothing useful whatsoever.

As a now disabled and retired person who lives on the edge of wilderness five miles from the nearest town, you’d think that Twitter would be ideal for me to get that “socializing fix” that seems to be a human necessity.

Nope. I prefer chat forums that are specialized, or live e-mail chats with known friends and acquaintances. Faceless nameless people have always been the bane of Internet life, as I found out about fifteen years ago when some man “befriended” me in an old newsgroup where I used to hang out, back when I had my health and a career.

As with any man at the time attracted to me online, I insisted on slowly building friendship and rapport before any romantic consideration, and only romantic consideration after a -real life- meeting afforded the opportunity for something significant in real life to be sparked.

Turns out that “man” was a woman who also frequented that newsgroup, who thought I was too good to be true, and was determined to get an inventory of e-mails from me to prove I was nothing more than a slut hitting on the men in the group behind the scenes.

Boy, was her face ever red when her determined efforts kept coming up with boots out of my life. Eventually she fessed up and apologized.

I never again trusted seemingly innocent and sincere Internet contacts, and expanded my “real life meeting” rule to include both male and female friendships as well as potential suitors.

Twitter is just another place where things can go terribly wrong between people who have no contact other than text messages. No thanks.