Having already disrespected mailing lists, I might as well get all my ranting about old staple communication techniques out of my system, by admitting that I’ve never really liked IRC.
There’s nothing wrong with it per se, particularly as a casual social tool, but I just can’t say I’ve ever received any great value from it in a project sense, primarily because of it’s real-time and unfocussed nature. As a user of a project, I’ve frequently found that the people that are able to answer my questions are not online at the same time as I am. Secondly, even when those people are online, they tend to get mobbed by everyone, and anything more than one or two active discussions turn the channel quickly to a confusing mess. As a project lead, I always dreaded going on IRC precisely because of this “mobbing effect”; the usual outcome was for me to lose a couple of hours answering a ton of questions – which was not an unpleasant activity, it’s nice to talk to your users, but at the same time it’s a terrible time-sink, and unlike some people I’m incapable of multitasking real-time discussions with coding, at least not on anything remotely complex. As such, my IRC attendance slowly dropped off and I now rarely go on any more; I felt a bit guilty about that, but figured the community would rather I got more done than spend time talking.
I realised recently that Twitter has now settled into my life as a more effective replacement for the times when I might have previously found IRC somewhat useful, despite the noise. It’s as close to real-time as matters, but at the same time it’s not a chat system, which for me is a good thing, since it sidesteps by design the major downsides of an open chat system – the tendency for real-time discussions to ramble on, and the implied expectation of a real-time response. You often get that, of course, but there’s no perception that it’s an affront if there’s a delay, even of many hours. As a system that needs to sit alongside ‘real’ work, it’s a lot more practical in its utility. Also, as primarily a ‘pull system’ (you choose to follow people), the signal-to-noise ratio is far higher. People can reply to your posts, and you can reply to theirs, so the same kinds of discussions as IRC tend to spring up, but they tend to be more useful, because they’re among peers more often than IRC was. Sure, other people can @user you in an unsolicited fashion too, unconnected to your feed, but that’s generally considered impolite so it’s rare. There are also no ‘channels’ so I don’t have to be watching many places depending on the subject, channels simply form naturally based on individuals and subject tags. Finally,the 140 character limit does tend to waste less time for the reader – although for the writer time can sometimes be lost trying to shoehorn a coherent point into that space.
As a result, I find I have all of the benefits of IRC (in a project rather than casual social sense), with few or none of the downsides. I have many semi-real time, compact and most importantly useful exchanges with people on the service, all in a very convenient package (after trying a few clients, I settled on TweetDeck to organise things).
This might come across as me wanting to wall myself off from the ‘n00bs’ in my community. That’s not true, it’s just that time is my most valuable asset, and it’s finite; crushingly so. I’m happy to answer questions on the forum – where I can dedicate a known amount of time and tackle as much as possible, regardless of whether the person is currently online or not, and Twitter fills in the more social & real-time aspects without being a burden. IRC by contrast is high maintenance and extremely wasteful with time for the same purpose, and I just can’t justify it.
So farewell IRC, I really won’t miss you very much.
February 24th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
It’s a real shame you choose to isolate your presence inside a locked-down corporate walled garden. I wonder what happened to the Steve that wrote this? http://www.stevestreeting.com/2008/05/12/re-democratising-the-internet/
February 24th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
“locked-down corporate walled garden”??? A bizarre interpretation of what I just said. I’m as open as I ever was, I just find IRC an incredibly inefficient channel for that openness – hence why I’ve found others. If I was in a walled garden I wouldn’t use anything.
[edit]NM, I just realised you’re referring to Twitter as that walled garden, doh.
I haven’t changed my mind about that previous post, but the difference is that Twitter isn’t a repository of information, it’s just a channel (IMO). All data in it degrades in value rapidly and therefore it’s not bound to it in quite the same way as a place where you store your family photos and other personal data. Thus I don’t have as many issues with it in practice, as a transient medium only.
February 24th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Fair point. However, by using a proprietary platform as your channel you are basically telling everyone else that if they want to hear what you have to say they have to choose the same proprietary platform as you. And, when someone influential like yourself does that you perpetuate the use of the closed system.
I have the same feelings about open-source developers who use (and therefore cause others to use) closed-source GitHub.
Still, I find open-this-or-that zealots quite tedious for the most part, so I’ll stop being one and leave it at that.
February 24th, 2010 at 4:34 pm
When it comes to proprietary platforms, the most important thing IMO is whether it justifies itself, and whether it’s easy enough to switch to a competitor. I think Twitter and GitHub both fall into this – they supply useful services, but you’re not locked in, there’s not even very much inertia. So long as you’re there by genuine choice and not because it’s too hard to change to anything else, I don’t see a problem with it. I mostly went with Twitter because Identi.ca has little client support in comparison, but if that improved I could post to both simultaneously with zero work.
I had a major problem with the trend of people entrusting more and more of their personal data to Facebook because moving (and REmoving it) was much more awkward (and sensitive) than moving a code repository or microblog feed. I now use Facebook more than I did, but again only for transient stuff – I wouldn’t really care if I deleted my account tomorrow.
February 25th, 2010 at 8:25 am
For the most part, I have to agree with Steve. Twitter is simply a “style” of service that makes it easy to ignore / delay messages you don’t want to deal with right now, whilst having the immediacy required for a short online conversation. Through the use of unique “#subject” search tags, you can keep up with a conversation on almost anything (I followed politics today via the Aussie #qt tag). And due to the short message lengths required by Twitter’s 140 character limit – it provides a mental barrier for lengthy messages meaning you don’t need to dedicate too much time to processing the night’s list like you do your email.
I can understand the desire to stay away from “lock-in” situations but, the way I see it, Twitter is just a popular “channel” for a style of communication. Now that it is available, should there ever be the threat of them removing/charging for it – you can bet that an open source replacement will rise up quickly.
One thing I do disagree on though is the “rudeness” of using someone’s nick in an ‘@person’ directed message without prior approval. Like an email address, using it to spam someone is, of course, rude & frowned upon, but the simply sending a message is not (at least in the circles I’ve run in) “rude”. Particularly if the two participants have been involved in the same #tag discussions.
That said, knowing Steve/Sinbad is against it – I shall refrain from using it when contacting him
February 25th, 2010 at 10:06 am
@B.Tolputt: Oh, I don’t expect prior approval, the key for me is ‘unconnected to your feed’- although an extra qualifier would also be ‘and we haven’t talked before’. And actually it’s the same kind of level of etiquette associated with email, in that most people should not be emailing me direct in the first instance about their problems, but using the official support channel in the forums. There are always exceptions, but if everyone used @sinbad_ogre to ask their Ogre questions my feed would quickly become overrun, even with a 140-character limit, and that’s the same for my email. However if we’ve already talked about something in the forum, or it’s related to something I’ve mentioned in my feed, or we’ve chatted before anyway, it’s not a problem. I just don’t want to be bombarded by every random Joe and his dog in the first instance.
For the record, for helping me with that memory packing issue you get to @ me whenever you like
February 25th, 2010 at 11:22 am
@Steve: I get the feeling that the Terrain memory packing issue was much more stressful on you than it was me
I get what you mean now about twitter, and I agree with you. There is only so much information one can handle & time in which to do so. Email used to be the mechanism for more personal / targetted conversations, but it got corrupted by SPAM. Twitter would be just as susceptible were it not run by a single organisation with somewhat better safeguards against such abuse.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:16 am
I feel the same way about IRC and big projects.
However, have you looked at Google Wave? It has a forumbot that fixes basically everything wrong with real-time chat and unfocused chat, along with fixing the design of forums, it actually works really well, been using it in the Wave-api chat (the first one they created it for).