Toot or Tweet – Social Networking or Just Noise?

Jeff KE9V recently had written how he dropped his Twitter and other Social Networking accounts: Streams of Nugatory Thought

From my comment to his post:

Very much agree that these mini-message services are little more than a “friendly wave” now and then, though unfortunately well lost in a sea of unknown arms waving for “their bit” of attention.

Stilted format, incomplete thoughts, and mostly about as much fun as having people stop by your desk every 90 seconds just to say “hi” while you are deeply committed to real tasks.

I’ve heard a “Tweet” likened to a “Bar Grunt” – well actually it was likened to something more graphic.

My Twitter account goes dorment for months, then I do ocassionally post. I follow almost no one on Twitter, as though I might be interested in a shared hobby passion, there is no way I want to be bothered with their goings on about a ball game or some interest we don’t share.

For what it is worth tweeting “New Blog Post, come and See it Now!” doesn’t change one’s webstats.

Guess the same number of hits are going to happen each day, with a really clever blog post hitting a multiplier that usually doesn’t stick.

As with Texting, Tweeting is not conversational nor compositional – it has a very limited information carrying ability and it is difficult to avoid the noise.

Not worth the time.

Further complicating these mini-messages is governmental interest in using them:

Not happy with wanting to know all about your travels, the UK’s Home Office now wants to monitor your web 2.0 life by requiring social networks such Facebook, Twitter, Skype, MySpace and others, to save data about all conversations. [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/25/social-networking-sites-monitored ]

“We have no way of knowing whether Osama bin Laden is chatting to Abu Hamza on Facebook. Or terrorists could be having a four-way chat on Skype,” he [a spokesman for the Home Office] said.

He said the government was not interested in the contents of the communication: “What we want to monitor is that so-and-so is logged on to that site and spoke to so-and-so. It’s the who, when and where, not the content.”

Looks like time to review your Twitter involvement, as withe governmental interest & archiving of what is supposed to be fleeting mini-messages you might be surprised to find the cost/benefit ratio somewhat negative.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Tagged , ,

One thought on “Toot or Tweet – Social Networking or Just Noise?

  1. Mark Morgan KB9RQZ says:

    personaly I find what time I spend with twitter amsuing and mildly useful I can’t igmagine spending a lot of time of such a system though

    and since I have never realy tackled such things as RSS feeds and such it does get stuff to me i might never see

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.