I’m a bit of a grump when it comes to a lot of the Web 2.0 startups of recent years. I still dislike Facebook – originally it was just an in-principle reaction based on their rather irritating child-CEO and his ability to attract vast amounts of investment based on a business plan made entirely of arm-waving and wet tissue paper, but now having used it for a while, I dislike it on its own merits. Even with my relatively small friends list it seems dedicated to the task of swamping me with as much useless information, stupid applications, and other such nonsense as it possibly can. Occasionally there will be a nugget of something in there, but it’s drowned in so much crap it’s hardly worth the effort to filter it. Sure, it allows me to keep up with the activities of ‘friends’, but in a much more shallow and sterile way than actually meeting them or talking on the phone/skype/in-game chat. Anyone who thinks Facebook is a good way to develop actual friendships is deluded. As a supplement for real-world or voice meetings (e.g. arranging get-togethers, sharing photos etc), I can see the utility, but I attest that it’s really not even the most efficient way to do that, what with all the junk on there. So generally, pass.
LinkedIn I like, because it sticks to the point. Every business person needs their Rolodex, and that’s what LinkedIn is – a business tool. It doesn’t claim to be central to your life, or that you can build / sustain real friendships there or other such twaddle. The focussed nature of it means there’s less noise, so it’s easier and quicker to get what you need. Contacts there are not personal, they’re a reference for it you’re looking for work, a contractor, a partner etc – which is appropriate for the medium in a way that personal relationships are not. I don’t feel the need to constantly update it or prod my contacts, or keep track of all their statuses; it just does what I need and gets out of the way.
I’ve avoided Twitter because again, it just looked like a way to pour time down the toilet. It seemed like blogging without the in-built filter that says ‘is this worth blogging about’?. Besides, I already actively participate in forums, mailing lists, blogs etc – I really didn’t feel I needed yet another dimension to have online discussions in. And I don’t really want to tell the entire world what I’m doing at any one time – I strain out the small number of actually interesting things already and post them up on this blog, and the rest of the minutae rapidly decreases in value the more degrees of separation away from me you get; so in fact real-world communication works far better as a filtering mechanism for that. Clay Shirky described why information filters in the real world have historically done a much better job with these kinds of things.
However, I decided to open a Twitter account anyway, but only for a very narrow subset of ‘what I’m doing’ – that is, what I’m currently doing in core Ogre. Obviously I blog about that sometimes, and I post in the forum for things that people need to know about, and keep the roadmap on the wiki up to date, but sometimes there are low-level things that don’t warrant that, but people are still interested in. I used to use IRC for this, but over the years drifted away from it, as it was too time consuming to loiter in channels for extended periods looking for topics in real-time, and people just bombarded me with questions all the time anyway so it was a little too much like hard work. So, for things that don’t warrant a blog or forum posting, I’m going to try to keep Twitter informed. There’s also a widget on the right there.
The focus will be kept deliberately very tight – so nothing about my other work commitments, personal life etc are going on there. If any of those things merit comment, they’ll get a more considered entry in my blog. Consider this a sort of ‘pre commit log’ of sorts! If I continue with it, anyway…
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Good decission…I started micro-blogging for similar reasons. What keeps me wondering is why you picked Twitter over open solutions like Identi.ca (http://identi.ca).
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I dislike facebook (or the alternative we use here in Austria, studivz.net) as well, but it doesn’t really seem to be useless, and I disagree to your “Anyone who thinks Facebook is a good way to develop actual friendships is deluded”: I know some people who moved here to vienna and built up a whole new life (apartement, job etc) and found real, new friends in record time with the help of this website
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
+1 for identi.ca, or any other option based on open standards and open source.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:52 pm
@Martin: mainly because I hadn’t heard of Identi.ca
Had I known I probably would have used it, especially since I’m rather bored of the ‘Twitter is over capacity’ message when I try to add a picture.
@niko: Ok, I’m sure some people find it useful in that regard, particularly when moving to a new location when you have no existing physical social circle. But I bet it only serves as a trigger. Once you have the contacts, barring organisational support for real-world meetings it’s not a good way to develop relationships. That’s not Facebook per se, just the restrictions of written communication.
Most people have a relatively small circle of ‘real’ friends, and they usually see them in person. If they can’t do that (say they’ve moved), I bet that a phone/Skype call, video chat etc is FAR more valuable than any written correspondence, particularly when that information is shared with your ‘friends’ list (only a small number of which you are close to). I just think Facebook pretends to be (and is used for) something it’s not a lot of the time – a good way to communicate personal things. It’s not bad as a way to organise ways to make / meet with real friends, but I find it massively cluttered with rubbish and find firing an email / phone call much more efficient.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
A crime I know, but I’ve not looked at Ogre for a few years now. I have a twitter myself, but it’s all over the place with random thoughts.
The way you are using twitter makes me wonder if there are any continious integration build systems for open project that are automatically tweeting things
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Interesting Development Sinbad, I already subscribe to your blogs RSS in my google reader, but I added the twitter feed alongside with Neil Gaimans, Elasticservers and the Natural Selection 2 team, I think it’s a really good way to get insight into the workflow and day to day events of different projects, Or at the very least, to get notified of interesting stuff by people who blog a lot less often than you.
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
@Paul: yeah – we already have a mailing list which contains all the Subversion commits: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ogre-cvsmail . You can also follow the commits at Ohloh: http://www.ohloh.net/p/ogre/commits – but they tend to lag a bit. I’ve added us to CIA.vc now too, which gets updated immediately in a post-hook: http://cia.vc/stats/project/ogre – but of course since it’s brand new it doesn’t show previous commits. There are post-commit hooks to post to Twitter too, but the 140 char limit means it’s not as useful for automatically generated content.
January 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
Though very plain the twitter log seems informative n well what u are doing. So it serves the purpose like linkedin. Though I see the same use of facebook as niko pointed out. But it is not the great friend, dating, friendship, contact buzz it claims to be.
Blogspot though is good for blogging for those who does not have personal servers or website, etc. And there are better dating and matchmaking sites.
I will call facebook the arrange-a-meeting book though practically.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
[...] the latest fads bandwagon, but here it goes – I added a Twitter widget here on the sidebar. I blame Steve Streeting for pushing me over the [...]
December 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
[...] now almost a year since I decided to try using Twitter, specifically to post about Ogre development work I’m doing and other Ogre-related things [...]