Saturday, June 15, 2013
How And Why I Don't [& Won't] Use Twitter!

This keeps popping up in conversations… so… time for a blog post.

I have a Twitter account, mainly because nowadays not having one can make life a tad complicated. There are many people and organizations who's Twitter posts are the onlytwitter21[1] real way of staying in the loop with them. But I don't really use Twitter, and I really do not in any way like the service.

What appears on my Twitter page is actually my Facebook activities that get forwarded to Twitter via this brilliant little tool: IFTTT, and I basically log onto the service every once in a very very blue moon. That being said, if I'm following you on Twitter, that means I DO see your posts. How? Well… that's where it gets complicated and here's also one of the major reasons why I don't like Twitter.

You see, Twitter actually has user feeds. Or "had", to be more precise. They were never highly advertised, didn't show up on the user pages and didn't get detected by browsers, but they were active and I generally developed the habit of subscribing to the RSS feeds of the people I follow, and checking their updates on Feedly [or previously GReader], which is what I actually do check pretty frequently. This wasn't working too badly, but a while back, Twitter made some changes to their API which resulted in a change in the general format of the feed address. Major pain, as I had to re-subscribe to all the feeds. Now, as of last week, Twitter has officially retired their REST API 0.1, and with it, their RSS feeds!!

Of course someone already came up with a service to take care of this problem [probably using Google Scripts or something similar], so now you can use "Twitter-RSS" to generate Twitter RSS feeds… well… obviously. But then this also means one more round of re-subscription to _all_ my Twitter contacts, yes, all the 80-something of them.  But the real disaster is of course happening to anyone who ever wrote a piece of code using the V0.1 API…. and from what I've seen, it's a good number of people. Ask me again why I just luuuv Twitter.

So anyway, you can see my Facebook activities on Twitter, and I can see your Tweets via Feedly, which works but is slightly dysfunctional, and a tad ridiculous. So, if you would like to keep in touch / stay in the loop with me, how about just trying my Facebook instead? As much as I'm not a big fan of Facebook, for a long list of reasons, it's what I'm currently actively using. 

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Ahoo "Aasemoon" Pirsoleimani, 1998-2014