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jonny goldstein

I would observe that a lot of spoken communication is essentially meaningless and trivial too.

Nahum Gershon

Jonny, of course- "lot of spoken communication is essentially meaningless and trivial too". However, when you chat in person or over the phone you have some other channels of communications that take place. There is something unique in a written word as compared with a spoken one. I feel that somehow the "meaningless" and the "triviality" stand out more in the written form especially without a dialog- it just stands there. Besides, it is easier to deal with "meaningless" & "trivial" oral communications coming from one person than from a group of people especially when it is considered "cool" to utter "meaninglessly".

But, as I mentioned at the end of the post, there is a value to "meaningless" communications at Twitter- they contribute to the Twitter stream's social buzz- like sitting in a cafe and watching the world going by.

Chris Suspect

Awesome post Nahum. I particularly like the end and I think that is an apt description for Twitter.

Nahum Gershon

Chris, I like the end too. However, I wish there would be a way to separate the 1 big stream into smaller streams sorted by various criteria. This will enable me to closely watch the ones I want and have the other ones on the side. This might actually create an overall picture of the "non-sensical" messages and give them a more integrated meaning.

Bill Cammack

The good thing about Twitter, as I believe LoudMouthMan brought up, is that we make our own networks. If someone's flooding or consistently irrelevant or nonsensical, you just click "unfollow" and that's that. Their updates never show up in your timeline again.

Unfortunately for them, that means that anything INTELLIGENT they might say is lost also, because people stop listening to them because of their surrounding style of self-expression.

I think people need to deterine what their agenda is for using a social media site or app and then stick to that. If you want to be known as the guy that frivolously socializes on an open network, fine. If you want to be someone known for relevance and intelligent or interesting comments and links then focus on that so you can avoid people "throwing out the baby with the bath water".

Nahum Gershon

Bill, thanks. You are right that we have that option to "disconnect" ourselves from those whom we find to have their Tweets not personally interesting. However, people are not always consistent. There are some who have interesting things to say but sometimes they send out tweets that are not interesting to me. I still like to be able to listen to them and get the interesting nuggets from their tweets.

This dilemma will be resolved when the Twitter interface will allow you to filter not just by name but also by area of interest and by time (when somebody broadcasts, for example, a report about a lecture they hear, I would be able to temporarily filter these tweets out). I am interested in interfaces and will talk about it in one of my future posts.

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