A bridge to Twitter May 6, 2009 9:12 PM Subscribe
Is there any plan, project or brain storming about bridging MetaFilter with Twitter and/or other instant messaging services?
Not a "feature request" because I have no idea what it could be, but Twitter is becoming my first surface signal toward content on the Web and it would be interesting to bring some Mefi content to this surface.)
There's definitely no mod plan to do anything vis-a-vis Twitter, no. What were you thinking about?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:28 PM on May 6, 2009
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:28 PM on May 6, 2009
The MeFi front page Sideblog is mirrored at the Twitter account MeFi, and then there's the Recent Twitters by MeFites which is made up of people who have added their Twitter account to their profile.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:34 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
posted by pb (staff) at 9:34 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
Oh, and I tune in fairly regularly to searches at Twitter for both MetaFilter and MeFi, and I've found those are a good way to bring some MetaFilter to Twitter.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:45 PM on May 6, 2009
posted by pb (staff) at 9:45 PM on May 6, 2009
I limited myself to only 140 characters here. Nobody seems to have noticed. #fml
posted by allen.spaulding at 9:46 PM on May 6, 2009 [12 favorites]
posted by allen.spaulding at 9:46 PM on May 6, 2009 [12 favorites]
I don't use twitter and I don't really have reason to but, and keep in mind that I'm talking out of my ass right now, would it be possible to do a twitterfeed of the front page? Just the first 130 or so letters of the post title and a tiny url.
I swear I'm not just proposing that so I can play around with post titles so that 130 letters worth says the complete opposite of the full post title.
Not at all.
Nope.
Okay maybe a little.
That last bit could be a lie.
But you gotta admit it would be a ton of fun, right?
Yeah it wouldn't be fair to the Tweeters... Twitters... Twitterers... Twitfolk... what the hell do you call someone who tweets... Twits seems awfully mean-spirited.
I AM TETSUO!
posted by Kattullus at 9:46 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
I swear I'm not just proposing that so I can play around with post titles so that 130 letters worth says the complete opposite of the full post title.
Not at all.
Nope.
Okay maybe a little.
That last bit could be a lie.
But you gotta admit it would be a ton of fun, right?
Yeah it wouldn't be fair to the Tweeters... Twitters... Twitterers... Twitfolk... what the hell do you call someone who tweets... Twits seems awfully mean-spirited.
I AM TETSUO!
posted by Kattullus at 9:46 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
you could call it MetaFlitter.
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:07 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by UbuRoivas at 10:07 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
#mefail
posted by felix betachat at 10:32 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by felix betachat at 10:32 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
TETSUO!!!!!!!!!
posted by grobstein at 10:39 PM on May 6, 2009 [4 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 10:39 PM on May 6, 2009 [4 favorites]
@felix_betachat True. Had title been Bridge to Twitterbithia, would have lol'd. #swineflu #susanboyle
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:12 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by allen.spaulding at 11:12 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]
KANEDA!
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:34 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:34 PM on May 6, 2009 [3 favorites]
Twitter. *shakes head mournfully*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:38 PM on May 6, 2009 [2 favorites]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:38 PM on May 6, 2009 [2 favorites]
RT @allen.spaulding @felix_betachat True. Had title been Bridge to Twitterbithia, would have lol'd. #swineflu #susanboyle
posted by grobstein at 11:44 PM on May 6, 2009
posted by grobstein at 11:44 PM on May 6, 2009
Wow, Twitter is like the new chipotle. Every damn thing has to have twitter in it now. Even people who don't know what the hell it is seem to think so.
posted by Afroblanco at 12:02 AM on May 7, 2009 [6 favorites]
posted by Afroblanco at 12:02 AM on May 7, 2009 [6 favorites]
I was gonna do @ or # "Fuck no" but then I realized because I don't have the twitter, I don't know if that's funny.
posted by klangklangston at 12:49 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
posted by klangklangston at 12:49 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
because I don't have the twitter, I don't know if that's funny
That's exactly why I don't make jokes about anything related to TVs.
You see, I don't have a TV
posted by qvantamon at 12:52 AM on May 7, 2009 [12 favorites]
That's exactly why I don't make jokes about anything related to TVs.
You see, I don't have a TV
posted by qvantamon at 12:52 AM on May 7, 2009 [12 favorites]
I'm pretty sure Matt was going to hand over the username database so existing users would have a twitter account automatically created, then arrange it so the 1st 140 characters of posts are twitted.
As everyone started twitting to explore their first content surface he could eventually turn off the web servers and have mefi totally on that content surface.
I can't imagine anyone having an issue with that plan.
posted by bystander at 1:33 AM on May 7, 2009
As everyone started twitting to explore their first content surface he could eventually turn off the web servers and have mefi totally on that content surface.
I can't imagine anyone having an issue with that plan.
posted by bystander at 1:33 AM on May 7, 2009
I think I do not quite get the hang of Twitter yet.
I tried to join up so that I could share my Tweets with other Twitterers, but everybody I meet who's on Twitter just turns out to be a Twat.
Please advise.
posted by koeselitz at 2:25 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
I tried to join up so that I could share my Tweets with other Twitterers, but everybody I meet who's on Twitter just turns out to be a Twat.
Please advise.
posted by koeselitz at 2:25 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Oh please no. Keep the Twitter out of my anything.
posted by EatTheWeek at 2:31 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by EatTheWeek at 2:31 AM on May 7, 2009
now that I've gotten that stupid snarking out of the way:
bru: Twitter is becoming my first surface signal toward content on the Web
Can you explain this to me? Twitter is the great divider, in that it seems to instantly divide the world into 'people who get it' and 'people who loathe it'. I am one of the latter, but I suspect this is because I just really don't understand in any way, shape or form why Twitter could possibly be useful at all. Really, I'm not snarking anymore; how can a sort of hybrid between an impossibly brief instant-messaging system and a stripped-down ultra-personal blog be a 'first surface signal' for the internet?
Moreover, how can a system whose very structure encourages an irrational degree of instantaneity and minimal substance by delimiting characters actually function as a tool for communication of anything beyond the most superficial and irrelevant data? I am serious; what good do you see in Twitter? Am I really missing something here? This question took me ten times as many characters as I'd be allowed on Twitter, and yet it seems pretty damned brief to me. How can people possibly communicate that way?
posted by koeselitz at 2:37 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
bru: Twitter is becoming my first surface signal toward content on the Web
Can you explain this to me? Twitter is the great divider, in that it seems to instantly divide the world into 'people who get it' and 'people who loathe it'. I am one of the latter, but I suspect this is because I just really don't understand in any way, shape or form why Twitter could possibly be useful at all. Really, I'm not snarking anymore; how can a sort of hybrid between an impossibly brief instant-messaging system and a stripped-down ultra-personal blog be a 'first surface signal' for the internet?
Moreover, how can a system whose very structure encourages an irrational degree of instantaneity and minimal substance by delimiting characters actually function as a tool for communication of anything beyond the most superficial and irrelevant data? I am serious; what good do you see in Twitter? Am I really missing something here? This question took me ten times as many characters as I'd be allowed on Twitter, and yet it seems pretty damned brief to me. How can people possibly communicate that way?
posted by koeselitz at 2:37 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
I mean, it keeps turning out that people I actually respect are on Twitter; so I'm having to go through the painful process of accepting that there's something grand and fantastic about Twitter that I just don't understand. Who here is on Twitter? Why? What am I not getting?
posted by koeselitz at 2:38 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by koeselitz at 2:38 AM on May 7, 2009
You know what we need? Another thread where people who don't like Twitter get to use the same lines they used in 1997 to describe the internet and 2002 to describe blogs.
posted by Plutor at 3:44 AM on May 7, 2009 [14 favorites]
posted by Plutor at 3:44 AM on May 7, 2009 [14 favorites]
koeselitz - a friend of mine offered to set up a twitter account for me when gustav was preparing to blow through the gulf coast. it was a way to let a lot of people know how & where i was when phone towers go out. [natural disaster note: if voice/call capacity for cell phones goes out, it's entirely possible you can still text, which is what we did during katrina. texting note: it's a pain in the ass to text dozens of people at the same time; (supposedly) tweets would reach anyone who was interested in my well being.] so that's the utility of twitter. i passed on my friend's offer.
posted by msconduct at 3:45 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by msconduct at 3:45 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Twitter is social bullshitting (which means different things to different people), on a large scale. That's it, that's all, it's nothing deeper and that's fine and that's pretty much the genius of it.
Naturally, the guy who created Metafilter has the best twitter stream.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:51 AM on May 7, 2009
Naturally, the guy who created Metafilter has the best twitter stream.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:51 AM on May 7, 2009
While my use of it has been strictly casual, my husband's use of Twitter has been a direct contributor to his growing side-career as a food writer. Through it he's been able to a) significantly increase traffic to his blog, and b) make personal contact with people he might not otherwise been exposed to (e.g. professional chefs, other food writers, the freaking CEO of Dean & Deluca) in a traditional blog-and-email environment.
posted by shiu mai baby at 4:10 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
posted by shiu mai baby at 4:10 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
Naturally, the guy who created Metafilter has the best twitter stream.
thanks, BB - you completely cured me of the curiosity to give twitter a shot. or even a second look.
(why does "twitter stream" parse for me as a golden shower? is it the onomatopoeia?)
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:17 AM on May 7, 2009
thanks, BB - you completely cured me of the curiosity to give twitter a shot. or even a second look.
(why does "twitter stream" parse for me as a golden shower? is it the onomatopoeia?)
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:17 AM on May 7, 2009
(by which i should explain: this micro-level of communication doesn't seem to be a healthy mental environment thing to me. essentially, i quit livejournal for the same reason - communication reduced to the barest of bites)
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:25 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:25 AM on May 7, 2009
"surface signal toward content on the Web"
I really don't even know what that means but just reading it fills me with a powerful Viking urge to smash something.
Bru,
I'm sure you are a very nice person, I certainly have nothing against you at all and I wish you all the best in life and in your adventures with twitter, I mean this sincerely.
I'm off to destroy a table.
posted by Divine_Wino at 4:27 AM on May 7, 2009
I really don't even know what that means but just reading it fills me with a powerful Viking urge to smash something.
Bru,
I'm sure you are a very nice person, I certainly have nothing against you at all and I wish you all the best in life and in your adventures with twitter, I mean this sincerely.
I'm off to destroy a table.
posted by Divine_Wino at 4:27 AM on May 7, 2009
Wow, Twitter is like the new chipotle. Every damn thing has to have twitter in it now. Even people who don't know what the hell it is seem to think so.
The only major difference being that people generally pronounce Twitter without inverting two letters, unlike the, say, 40% of the populous who seem to think it's pronounced "chi-pol-tee."
posted by SpiffyRob at 4:56 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
The only major difference being that people generally pronounce Twitter without inverting two letters, unlike the, say, 40% of the populous who seem to think it's pronounced "chi-pol-tee."
posted by SpiffyRob at 4:56 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
Jessamyn: What were you thinking about?
Not sure. That's why I mentioned "brainstorming". My point is that Mefi is part of my daily online destinations (I go there), parts of it are also in my RSS reader (it comes to me), and now that Twitter has become a major source of info/news, I would like to have the option to integrate Mefi alerts into Twitter.
pb: The MeFi front page Sideblog is mirrored at the Twitter account http://twitter.com/mefi
That's a start, but it's not updated very often.
... and then there's the Recent Twitters by MeFites
Didn't know that. I took a look at it and it's not really helpful for me: too much noise (and there is already a lot of noise on Twitter). But it gives me an idea: what could be useful is a Twitter feed of the sideblog of my "contact activity". Bingo. Caveat: I don't even know if it can be done.
koeselitz: Can you explain this to me?
Let's try. I wasn't an early adopter. My geek friends were on it since the beginning, as they are now on identica or seesmic, and tried to convince me. I resisted because I felt that I don't have enough time and I don't need another mode of disruption. Last year my friend @afrognthevalley just registered me on Twitter, telling me it was "just to make sure nobody would squat my name".
So I gave it a try. I had no idea what to say, so I just began looking at the people my friends where "following", and "followed" those who might interest me. I often hear people worrying about their output on Twitter. My advice would be: don't bother. Somebody said that "Twitter is a great listening device". Exactly. "What to write about" will come by itself, when you know who you are talking to (or for me, rather: who I want to talk to, and about what).
Note that I didn't follow my "friends" for trivial or personal info. Twitter is for me first a professional tool and, step by step, I found the top guys in my field: @jayrosen_nyu, @jeffjarvis, @cshirky, @mathewi, and then their contacts.
Do you remember the time when we first discovered bbs? And then the first forums and communities? This feeling and excitation of suddenly being "nearer", "in contact" with people with whom you can have more topical interactions than with your neighbors and even your local friends? Twitter is it. Once again. Another level, another proximity. Now I tell people that the most important fact about Twitter is not the content, it's the feeling of "being there" in what some call "ambient intimacy".
Now I am there. I love it. I also follow new people and unfollow them just like I "taste" new feeds in my RSS reader. I also found some of my heroes like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and totally obscure people who are just crazy enough on narrow topics I like.
And about content: among people I follow, Twitter is more used to point toward links than to tell stories or drop snippets of their life. I was an editor and I have much fun squeezing the maximum input in a a few words and a link. In fact, I use Twitter a lot like MetaFilter (as a source of links) and that's why I think it could be a good fit.
Finally, Twitter is not very user-friendly and it might become bothersome as soon as you follow more than 50 people (I was told that they put all their effort into scaling the beast - seems to be working: it crashes less and less). So there are several "Twitter clients" that make the whole thing simpler and clearer (you can divide your contacts in groups and have many one click options to interact with the content or the people): I use and enjoy Tweetdeck, mac people talk a lot about nambu, and seesmic looks cooler every day. And there are others.
And about Twitter bashing: who cares? Who cares about email bashing, internet bashing, blogs bashing, online games bashing, forum bashing and why not blackboard bashing and white page bashing? A tool is a tool. Nobody makes you use it by force. If you need it or just have fun with it, that's good enough for me.
For me, it's full of wonders, and more so every day.
posted by bru at 5:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
Not sure. That's why I mentioned "brainstorming". My point is that Mefi is part of my daily online destinations (I go there), parts of it are also in my RSS reader (it comes to me), and now that Twitter has become a major source of info/news, I would like to have the option to integrate Mefi alerts into Twitter.
pb: The MeFi front page Sideblog is mirrored at the Twitter account http://twitter.com/mefi
That's a start, but it's not updated very often.
... and then there's the Recent Twitters by MeFites
Didn't know that. I took a look at it and it's not really helpful for me: too much noise (and there is already a lot of noise on Twitter). But it gives me an idea: what could be useful is a Twitter feed of the sideblog of my "contact activity". Bingo. Caveat: I don't even know if it can be done.
koeselitz: Can you explain this to me?
Let's try. I wasn't an early adopter. My geek friends were on it since the beginning, as they are now on identica or seesmic, and tried to convince me. I resisted because I felt that I don't have enough time and I don't need another mode of disruption. Last year my friend @afrognthevalley just registered me on Twitter, telling me it was "just to make sure nobody would squat my name".
So I gave it a try. I had no idea what to say, so I just began looking at the people my friends where "following", and "followed" those who might interest me. I often hear people worrying about their output on Twitter. My advice would be: don't bother. Somebody said that "Twitter is a great listening device". Exactly. "What to write about" will come by itself, when you know who you are talking to (or for me, rather: who I want to talk to, and about what).
Note that I didn't follow my "friends" for trivial or personal info. Twitter is for me first a professional tool and, step by step, I found the top guys in my field: @jayrosen_nyu, @jeffjarvis, @cshirky, @mathewi, and then their contacts.
Do you remember the time when we first discovered bbs? And then the first forums and communities? This feeling and excitation of suddenly being "nearer", "in contact" with people with whom you can have more topical interactions than with your neighbors and even your local friends? Twitter is it. Once again. Another level, another proximity. Now I tell people that the most important fact about Twitter is not the content, it's the feeling of "being there" in what some call "ambient intimacy".
Now I am there. I love it. I also follow new people and unfollow them just like I "taste" new feeds in my RSS reader. I also found some of my heroes like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and totally obscure people who are just crazy enough on narrow topics I like.
And about content: among people I follow, Twitter is more used to point toward links than to tell stories or drop snippets of their life. I was an editor and I have much fun squeezing the maximum input in a a few words and a link. In fact, I use Twitter a lot like MetaFilter (as a source of links) and that's why I think it could be a good fit.
Finally, Twitter is not very user-friendly and it might become bothersome as soon as you follow more than 50 people (I was told that they put all their effort into scaling the beast - seems to be working: it crashes less and less). So there are several "Twitter clients" that make the whole thing simpler and clearer (you can divide your contacts in groups and have many one click options to interact with the content or the people): I use and enjoy Tweetdeck, mac people talk a lot about nambu, and seesmic looks cooler every day. And there are others.
And about Twitter bashing: who cares? Who cares about email bashing, internet bashing, blogs bashing, online games bashing, forum bashing and why not blackboard bashing and white page bashing? A tool is a tool. Nobody makes you use it by force. If you need it or just have fun with it, that's good enough for me.
For me, it's full of wonders, and more so every day.
posted by bru at 5:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
And about Twitter bashing: who cares? Who cares about email bashing
good point. every communication medium is the same as every other.
apart from, perhaps, the idea of asynchronicity. snail mail & email are geared towards asynchronous interaction. twitter seems premised on things being as close to synchronous as possible, leading to obsessions with being online all the time, and posting all the time - hence, the breaking down of things into the minimum possible size & content that can be posted & digested, because nobody has enough time to absorb & respond to so much stuff.
i like, in these situations, to revert to whatsisname (some reasonably famous thinker/futurist) and his wonderful aphorism: "when data doubles, information halves, knowledge is halved again, and so too wisdom"
twitter is data. the rest seems to me to be a foregone conclusion.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:28 AM on May 7, 2009
good point. every communication medium is the same as every other.
apart from, perhaps, the idea of asynchronicity. snail mail & email are geared towards asynchronous interaction. twitter seems premised on things being as close to synchronous as possible, leading to obsessions with being online all the time, and posting all the time - hence, the breaking down of things into the minimum possible size & content that can be posted & digested, because nobody has enough time to absorb & respond to so much stuff.
i like, in these situations, to revert to whatsisname (some reasonably famous thinker/futurist) and his wonderful aphorism: "when data doubles, information halves, knowledge is halved again, and so too wisdom"
twitter is data. the rest seems to me to be a foregone conclusion.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:28 AM on May 7, 2009
The only major difference being that people generally pronounce Twitter without inverting two letters, unlike the, say, 40% of the populous who seem to think it's pronounced "chi-pol-tee."
and 40% of the populace seem to think it's spelled "populous".
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:33 AM on May 7, 2009 [7 favorites]
and 40% of the populace seem to think it's spelled "populous".
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:33 AM on May 7, 2009 [7 favorites]
Yeah, I mean I don't know how well Metafilter could be integrated with Twitter ... although it could be cool to have a twitter account of the most active posts in a day or something.
I have Metafilter in my RSS feed, so I read at least skim all posts every day, but I am sure there are many more casual users who don't.
posted by hazyspring at 6:00 AM on May 7, 2009
I have Metafilter in my RSS feed, so I read at least skim all posts every day, but I am sure there are many more casual users who don't.
posted by hazyspring at 6:00 AM on May 7, 2009
UbuRoivas: twitter seems premised on things being as close to synchronous as possible
At first sight, yes, but not necessarily. If you follow many people on a single column, you'll miss a lot of posts and may feel obligated to scramble back or try to catch up. Forget it. I was talking about this last night with @afrognthevalley and he called the single column with all people you follow "the river". You don't try to absorb everything in "the river", you just have a look or sample it from time to time. People you really want to follow, you put them in small "groups" and then asynchronicity is back: you visit when you have the time and respond or forward (RT or retweet) whenever you want.
the breaking down of things into the minimum possible size & content that can be posted & digested
It's generally not about content to be digested. For me, it's mostly about links, that you can follow and read at your convenience. "Minimum possible content" is a link.
I would say I went through 3 stages: the first one is to shyly and carefully taste it and learn to use it; the second one is to be overly enthusiastic and quickly overwhelmed; the third is to take control of it and integrate it in your daily routine so it's not disruptive, just useful and fun.
posted by bru at 6:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
At first sight, yes, but not necessarily. If you follow many people on a single column, you'll miss a lot of posts and may feel obligated to scramble back or try to catch up. Forget it. I was talking about this last night with @afrognthevalley and he called the single column with all people you follow "the river". You don't try to absorb everything in "the river", you just have a look or sample it from time to time. People you really want to follow, you put them in small "groups" and then asynchronicity is back: you visit when you have the time and respond or forward (RT or retweet) whenever you want.
the breaking down of things into the minimum possible size & content that can be posted & digested
It's generally not about content to be digested. For me, it's mostly about links, that you can follow and read at your convenience. "Minimum possible content" is a link.
I would say I went through 3 stages: the first one is to shyly and carefully taste it and learn to use it; the second one is to be overly enthusiastic and quickly overwhelmed; the third is to take control of it and integrate it in your daily routine so it's not disruptive, just useful and fun.
posted by bru at 6:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
If Matt/pb want it and can do it fairly easily, piping each post - somehow - into Metafilter and AskMetafilter twitter accounts would just be like an alternative rss feed for some people and a potential traffic generator. I don't care either way but it's seems like a logical step considering how many people use twitter.
posted by peacay at 6:03 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by peacay at 6:03 AM on May 7, 2009
bru - very reasonable of you; more so than me.
i've only had the barest glimpse at the thing, supplemented with whatever opinion pieces etc i've come across, so not in the best position to judge, here.
*reserving judgement until sometime after i can work out whether a camera is really a necessary part of a telephone*
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:05 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
i've only had the barest glimpse at the thing, supplemented with whatever opinion pieces etc i've come across, so not in the best position to judge, here.
*reserving judgement until sometime after i can work out whether a camera is really a necessary part of a telephone*
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:05 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
Now I tell people that the most important fact about Twitter is not the content, it's the feeling of "being there" in what some call "ambient intimacy".
Ohhh. I'm starting to get it. I think. Maybe.
posted by diogenes at 6:16 AM on May 7, 2009
Ohhh. I'm starting to get it. I think. Maybe.
posted by diogenes at 6:16 AM on May 7, 2009
Follow the Twitter feeds of MeFites you like (or love to hate) and you'll get some MeFi flavour infused in your Twittery. Matt's feed often has the kind of thing that he would have posted to MeFi back in the day. Jessamyn is always witty and entertaining. Wendell's mirth about his own stunt posts is engaging. Follow a bunch of them, and you'll find out where there attention is currently; sometimes it's something on MeFi you would have missed, sometimes it's a sandwich.
posted by nowonmai at 6:16 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by nowonmai at 6:16 AM on May 7, 2009
I do like the idea of tormenting the Fail Whale by dumping the whole of MeFi onto Twitter in real time though. You could send posts and comments over 140 characters as multi-part rar files with yEnc encoding.
posted by nowonmai at 6:23 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by nowonmai at 6:23 AM on May 7, 2009
The easiest thing to do would be for somebody to run the MeFi RSS feed (or any RSS feed) through http://twitterfeed.com and make a separate Twitter account for it. In fact, bru, you could use this easily to put together a slimmed down but combined feed of just your favorite MeFites, or just Projects and Music, or whatever.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 6:24 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 6:24 AM on May 7, 2009
> wendell makes stunt posts?!??
And the only first surface way to find out is Twitter!
posted by nowonmai at 6:25 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
And the only first surface way to find out is Twitter!
posted by nowonmai at 6:25 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
nowonmai: Follow the Twitter feeds of MeFites you like
Good point. If I follow my MeFi contacts who tweet and some of us post on Twitter about interesting posts (or comments) on MeFi, the "bridge" I was talking about is made "naturally" by the community, not by some programming from MeFi's code magicians. Cool.
posted by bru at 6:33 AM on May 7, 2009
Good point. If I follow my MeFi contacts who tweet and some of us post on Twitter about interesting posts (or comments) on MeFi, the "bridge" I was talking about is made "naturally" by the community, not by some programming from MeFi's code magicians. Cool.
posted by bru at 6:33 AM on May 7, 2009
I would like to have the option to integrate Mefi alerts into Twitter.
Yeah I guess this is a sticking point for me. There's no such thing as a MeFi alert, there's the site and you can read it. You can read it via automated means like an RSS reader, but while it might add eyeballs (which we're not hurting for) I'm not seeing how it's useful to the site to have a Twitter "angle."
I mean you can follow the mods, I know mathowie keeps an eye on MeFi mentions on Twitter, there are some nice little confluences of MeFi on Twitter, but except for just putting a MeFi feed on Twitter, I'm not sure what we'd do. The reason the sidebar isn't updated that often is because it takes a little bit of manual intervention and we often don't get around to it. Any non-automated Twitter approach that isn't solving a problem seems unlikely.
Put another way, the minimum possible content angle for a site that is (in my opinion) sort of content rich seems to be a step backwards, not forwards. If there's a way to make sort of a highlights reel via a Twitter feed, that would be worth looking into, but also likely contentious (on MeFi?! mais non!) and it's not something we're likely going to want to manage much.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:34 AM on May 7, 2009
Yeah I guess this is a sticking point for me. There's no such thing as a MeFi alert, there's the site and you can read it. You can read it via automated means like an RSS reader, but while it might add eyeballs (which we're not hurting for) I'm not seeing how it's useful to the site to have a Twitter "angle."
I mean you can follow the mods, I know mathowie keeps an eye on MeFi mentions on Twitter, there are some nice little confluences of MeFi on Twitter, but except for just putting a MeFi feed on Twitter, I'm not sure what we'd do. The reason the sidebar isn't updated that often is because it takes a little bit of manual intervention and we often don't get around to it. Any non-automated Twitter approach that isn't solving a problem seems unlikely.
Put another way, the minimum possible content angle for a site that is (in my opinion) sort of content rich seems to be a step backwards, not forwards. If there's a way to make sort of a highlights reel via a Twitter feed, that would be worth looking into, but also likely contentious (on MeFi?! mais non!) and it's not something we're likely going to want to manage much.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:34 AM on May 7, 2009
How the other half writes is a pretty good explanation of what attracts people to Twitter. It's a portable note-taking system, where you can share your notes with anyone who might find them relevant. If someone makes boring notes, or mistakes it for a chat program, or is a 'social-media consultant', then you just don't follow them.
I wouldn't follow a Metafilter posts account, because I hate RSS feeds all up in my Twitter, but a lot of people seem to like them. It might attract a new group of people. But I've just followed the sidebar blog account, because the contacts bar pushes it down to where I don't always see it. Contact activity could be nice, too.
posted by harriet vane at 6:38 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
I wouldn't follow a Metafilter posts account, because I hate RSS feeds all up in my Twitter, but a lot of people seem to like them. It might attract a new group of people. But I've just followed the sidebar blog account, because the contacts bar pushes it down to where I don't always see it. Contact activity could be nice, too.
posted by harriet vane at 6:38 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
Another thread where people who don't like Twitter get to use the same lines they used in 1997 to describe the internet
Riiiiight. Because I'm quite positive that, 12 years from now, people will see the creation of Twitter as being on-par with the mass-adoption of the internet.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
Riiiiight. Because I'm quite positive that, 12 years from now, people will see the creation of Twitter as being on-par with the mass-adoption of the internet.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:01 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
Can you hear that little pitter pat?
I hope it's not a Twitter twat.
posted by Termite at 7:04 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
I hope it's not a Twitter twat.
posted by Termite at 7:04 AM on May 7, 2009 [2 favorites]
OK, with all this twitter talk it's time to finally see what the fuss is all about. Mefites on twitter? Must be good! Let's see;
Recent Twitters by MeFites
@BlackEyedGurl TOTALLY what I had in mind [high-five]
4 minutes ago by sweetney from TweetDeck
I am truly a genius in my own mind. for clarity...I'm talking about the one in my penis.
9 minutes ago by theduty from Birdhouse
Let me just put it out there and end all speculation: Star Wars > Star Trek. OK, there, I said it...move on, folks.
15 minutes ago by fijiwriter from TweetDeck
Right. No need to integrate this any further.
posted by klue at 7:09 AM on May 7, 2009
Recent Twitters by MeFites
@BlackEyedGurl TOTALLY what I had in mind [high-five]
4 minutes ago by sweetney from TweetDeck
I am truly a genius in my own mind. for clarity...I'm talking about the one in my penis.
9 minutes ago by theduty from Birdhouse
Let me just put it out there and end all speculation: Star Wars > Star Trek. OK, there, I said it...move on, folks.
15 minutes ago by fijiwriter from TweetDeck
Right. No need to integrate this any further.
posted by klue at 7:09 AM on May 7, 2009
wait, pat rhymes with twat?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:10 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:10 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Some people seem to prefer Twitter feeds to RSS feeds. I think it may just be easier for the non-technically-minded to wrap their heads round.
So, you could just copy the existing "Sites" RSS feeds, and output them to Twitter. So there'd be users on Twitter with names like Metafilter, AskMeFi, MeFiProjects etc. People who want to would follow them, and get an update with the title and a link.
I prefer RSS myself, but some people might want it.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:18 AM on May 7, 2009
So, you could just copy the existing "Sites" RSS feeds, and output them to Twitter. So there'd be users on Twitter with names like Metafilter, AskMeFi, MeFiProjects etc. People who want to would follow them, and get an update with the title and a link.
I prefer RSS myself, but some people might want it.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:18 AM on May 7, 2009
If Matt/pb want it and can do it fairly easily, piping each post - somehow - into Metafilter and AskMetafilter twitter accounts would just be like an alternative rss feed for some people and a potential traffic generator. I don't care either way but it's seems like a logical step considering how many people use twitter.
There's a problem of constraints, here: metafilter posts aren't limited to a raw 140 characters, or even to a comprehensible-or-interesting-in-isolation first 140 characters, so automatically chucking posts out into twitter salvos is pretty much a no go. The data structure for posts is just too open-ended to make that practicable.
If someone wanted to take up the task of doing a like curated mefi post twitter digest, that might work: watching the mefi feed and writing a twitter-sized capsule summary of each post and tweeting that. 20-30 items a day, maybe the sort of thing that someone with an editor's bent would enjoy.
But that might be asking an awful lot of someone, and it has it's own problems: how responsible is that person for making sure they don't inject an additional layer of editorial opinion/preference/slant in their rewrite? What's their motivation for posts they don't otherwise take an interest in? Is this person volunteering for a lifetime appointment? Etc.
So in the vaguest terms I'm interested in where you coming from, but in practice I'm not sure what there is to do.
Things I do to enhance my own mefi/twitter crossover experience:
1. Follow other mefites. Some people strike a balance I like, of link-forwarding and funny one-liners and bits of mefiana chatter, all of it relatively sparse in volume, and those people I follow. Some people tweet a lot, or primarily about their cheese sandwich that day, or or or, and those folks I don't follow or unfollow. Carving out your feed according to your actual preferences is pretty key.
2. Keep a search bar open for the terms metafilter, mefi, metatalk, and askme. Some thing son mefi just have unusually significant forwardability, and it's neat to watch those things make the rounds organically—this doesn't require any mefi intervention, people on the internet just do it because they like the content. The Beuller AskMe was a good example of this.
3. I've been using Tweetdeck for about a month now and really like it. Having something more robust than the actual twitter interface to work with has made it a lot easier to manage a lot of followed accounts and push the experience back into asynchronicity land where I don't spend so much time refreshing, or being annoyed that I'm so frequently refreshing, twitter. I keep tweetdeck off on a separate desktop so it's out of site, out of mind, too. But this is a lot to ask of someone just dipping their toe in the pool for the first time.
I like twitter. It's a good thing, and it and it's lookalikes will I think mature into a pretty interesting substrate of the social media complex. But it's new, it has a lot of problems, and I can totally understand people not seeing the appeal when they come to it from other more substantial-feeling models. Superficially, twitter and metafilter couldn't be less a like, even if there is some meaty connections to be made once you really dig in.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:21 AM on May 7, 2009
There's a problem of constraints, here: metafilter posts aren't limited to a raw 140 characters, or even to a comprehensible-or-interesting-in-isolation first 140 characters, so automatically chucking posts out into twitter salvos is pretty much a no go. The data structure for posts is just too open-ended to make that practicable.
If someone wanted to take up the task of doing a like curated mefi post twitter digest, that might work: watching the mefi feed and writing a twitter-sized capsule summary of each post and tweeting that. 20-30 items a day, maybe the sort of thing that someone with an editor's bent would enjoy.
But that might be asking an awful lot of someone, and it has it's own problems: how responsible is that person for making sure they don't inject an additional layer of editorial opinion/preference/slant in their rewrite? What's their motivation for posts they don't otherwise take an interest in? Is this person volunteering for a lifetime appointment? Etc.
So in the vaguest terms I'm interested in where you coming from, but in practice I'm not sure what there is to do.
Things I do to enhance my own mefi/twitter crossover experience:
1. Follow other mefites. Some people strike a balance I like, of link-forwarding and funny one-liners and bits of mefiana chatter, all of it relatively sparse in volume, and those people I follow. Some people tweet a lot, or primarily about their cheese sandwich that day, or or or, and those folks I don't follow or unfollow. Carving out your feed according to your actual preferences is pretty key.
2. Keep a search bar open for the terms metafilter, mefi, metatalk, and askme. Some thing son mefi just have unusually significant forwardability, and it's neat to watch those things make the rounds organically—this doesn't require any mefi intervention, people on the internet just do it because they like the content. The Beuller AskMe was a good example of this.
3. I've been using Tweetdeck for about a month now and really like it. Having something more robust than the actual twitter interface to work with has made it a lot easier to manage a lot of followed accounts and push the experience back into asynchronicity land where I don't spend so much time refreshing, or being annoyed that I'm so frequently refreshing, twitter. I keep tweetdeck off on a separate desktop so it's out of site, out of mind, too. But this is a lot to ask of someone just dipping their toe in the pool for the first time.
I like twitter. It's a good thing, and it and it's lookalikes will I think mature into a pretty interesting substrate of the social media complex. But it's new, it has a lot of problems, and I can totally understand people not seeing the appeal when they come to it from other more substantial-feeling models. Superficially, twitter and metafilter couldn't be less a like, even if there is some meaty connections to be made once you really dig in.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:21 AM on May 7, 2009
wait, pat rhymes with twat?
[NOT BRITISHISH]
I'll come around on twitter right after melissa may does.
C'est la vie.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:22 AM on May 7, 2009
[NOT BRITISHISH]
I'll come around on twitter right after melissa may does.
C'est la vie.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:22 AM on May 7, 2009
Well. Is it now to time to avail myself a bullshit ad hoc band/person distinction to save face? Consider it so availed. C'est that in your vie and smoke it, millard!
posted by Kwine at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by Kwine at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2009
Riiiiight. Because I'm quite positive that, 12 years from now, people will see the creation of Twitter as being on-par with the mass-adoption of the internet.
It's more that people confuse the content with the technology in the same way they did then.
"I'd never use the Internet, all the sites on it are just filled with rubbish."
"I'd never use Twitter, all the updates are just banal."
"I'd never use a telephone, all the conversations on it are just boring and trivial."
The point is that you surf/follow/call people who are interesting to you. If a person or site bores you, you're not forced to experience their content. Since people are different, you many even find that the content you think is interesting, is considered boring by others.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2009
It's more that people confuse the content with the technology in the same way they did then.
"I'd never use the Internet, all the sites on it are just filled with rubbish."
"I'd never use Twitter, all the updates are just banal."
"I'd never use a telephone, all the conversations on it are just boring and trivial."
The point is that you surf/follow/call people who are interesting to you. If a person or site bores you, you're not forced to experience their content. Since people are different, you many even find that the content you think is interesting, is considered boring by others.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2009
wait, for some people pat and twat don't rhyme?
[POSSIBLY NON-BRITISH ENGLISH-IST]
posted by patricio at 7:40 AM on May 7, 2009
[POSSIBLY NON-BRITISH ENGLISH-IST]
posted by patricio at 7:40 AM on May 7, 2009
There's a problem of constraints, here: metafilter posts aren't limited to a raw 140 characters,
And fundamentally, they are based on URLs, and those URLs are not tinyurl'd or anything, so you're doomed.
posted by smackfu at 7:46 AM on May 7, 2009
And fundamentally, they are based on URLs, and those URLs are not tinyurl'd or anything, so you're doomed.
posted by smackfu at 7:46 AM on May 7, 2009
cortex, I get it. The minimalist alternative would be to have only the URL posted without text which might be an easy? feed to set up. That would be useful in what?, 7 out of 10 posts maybe?, as to the nature of the content. But I'm not pushing for it: I wouldn't subscribe anyway. I do it for my own site manually and I would not want to do it 30 times+ a day that's for sure.
posted by peacay at 7:53 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by peacay at 7:53 AM on May 7, 2009
wait, for some people pat and twat don't rhyme?
Here in America, the common pronunciation rhymes with "cot" or "robot".
The minimalist alternative would be to have only the URL posted without text which might be an easy? feed to set up.
If we enforced the URL field, that'd be one thing, but folks can skip it entirely and just embed their link or links in the main post text itself. Automagically identifying the best link in a multilink post sounds like a job for Skynet, not a quick scraper script, so I'm less enthusiastic about the prospects than I might otherwise be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:06 AM on May 7, 2009
Here in America, the common pronunciation rhymes with "cot" or "robot".
The minimalist alternative would be to have only the URL posted without text which might be an easy? feed to set up.
If we enforced the URL field, that'd be one thing, but folks can skip it entirely and just embed their link or links in the main post text itself. Automagically identifying the best link in a multilink post sounds like a job for Skynet, not a quick scraper script, so I'm less enthusiastic about the prospects than I might otherwise be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:06 AM on May 7, 2009
It's more that people confuse the content with the technology in the same way they did then.
In a lot of ways the technology is more or less defined by the content though. Back in 1997, the Internet really was a lot less useful than it is today. In those days, you couldn't do things like log into your bank account or read the New York Times online, and most of the web content was amateurish personal web pages with construction sign animated GIFs plastered all over them.
The transition from custom personal vanity pages to roll-your-own blogs to hosted blogs to social networking sites to twitter has made it easier and easier for random people to post random stuff on the Internet. Although having a massive technology platform that everyone can add content to easily is good in some ways, there is also something to be said for having some kind of minor barrier to entry or minimum expected level of quality. A low median level of quality does seem to drive out high quality content from the platform, just look at YouTube comments or remember back to what GeoCities sites were like.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:11 AM on May 7, 2009
In a lot of ways the technology is more or less defined by the content though. Back in 1997, the Internet really was a lot less useful than it is today. In those days, you couldn't do things like log into your bank account or read the New York Times online, and most of the web content was amateurish personal web pages with construction sign animated GIFs plastered all over them.
The transition from custom personal vanity pages to roll-your-own blogs to hosted blogs to social networking sites to twitter has made it easier and easier for random people to post random stuff on the Internet. Although having a massive technology platform that everyone can add content to easily is good in some ways, there is also something to be said for having some kind of minor barrier to entry or minimum expected level of quality. A low median level of quality does seem to drive out high quality content from the platform, just look at YouTube comments or remember back to what GeoCities sites were like.
posted by burnmp3s at 8:11 AM on May 7, 2009
Automagically identifying the best link...
Not needed. I was suggesting that a twitter feed be only the FPP URL and not the content text/links.
posted by peacay at 8:17 AM on May 7, 2009
Not needed. I was suggesting that a twitter feed be only the FPP URL and not the content text/links.
posted by peacay at 8:17 AM on May 7, 2009
A bridge to Twitter
*burns bridge*
*...and village on either side of it, just to make a point*
posted by quin at 8:17 AM on May 7, 2009
*burns bridge*
*...and village on either side of it, just to make a point*
posted by quin at 8:17 AM on May 7, 2009
Ultimate twitter integration: Limit Mefi posts to one character.
.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:56 AM on May 7, 2009
.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:56 AM on May 7, 2009
So I'm signing up to find out what the hype is about and it's asking me for my gmail password. What functionality does this enable?
peacay writes "The minimalist alternative would be to have only the URL posted without text which might be an easy? feed to set up."
Tinyurl them and you'd have the ultimate in mystery meat.
posted by Mitheral at 8:58 AM on May 7, 2009
peacay writes "The minimalist alternative would be to have only the URL posted without text which might be an easy? feed to set up."
Tinyurl them and you'd have the ultimate in mystery meat.
posted by Mitheral at 8:58 AM on May 7, 2009
For me, Twitter is like a party line where you get to hear random thoughts and snippets of conversation. So bots posting content from elsewhere are annoying in that context, and the only automated twitterer I subscribe to is the MeFi sideblog. And the sideblog posts are very human-sounding, but they're not made for Twitter, so they're not within the "flow" of that larger conversation.
I'm afraid dumping everything from MeFi to Twitter and twisting and contorting posts to make that happen would be dumping noise into the Twittersphere. I know people do it. But it just doesn't feel useful to me. A newsreader doesn't have the 140 character constraint and handles syndication and notification much better.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:04 AM on May 7, 2009
I'm afraid dumping everything from MeFi to Twitter and twisting and contorting posts to make that happen would be dumping noise into the Twittersphere. I know people do it. But it just doesn't feel useful to me. A newsreader doesn't have the 140 character constraint and handles syndication and notification much better.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:04 AM on May 7, 2009
Not needed. I was suggesting that a twitter feed be only the FPP URL and not the content text/links.
What I'm saying is that it is needed because for many posts there is no such thing as "the" URL. And posts with multiple URLs do not necessarily present the most definitive link first even in those cases where there is such a thing as a "most definitive link", which in a lot of cases there is not.
So you could automatically produce a sort-of kind-of on-target caricature of mefi that would be very hit-or-miss, but not do much better, with this sort of approach. Worse yet, hit-ness would probably correspond fairly closely to posts that aren't very uniquely metafilterian -- diggbait making the rounds would probably come through well, curatorial posts about x would not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:10 AM on May 7, 2009
What I'm saying is that it is needed because for many posts there is no such thing as "the" URL. And posts with multiple URLs do not necessarily present the most definitive link first even in those cases where there is such a thing as a "most definitive link", which in a lot of cases there is not.
So you could automatically produce a sort-of kind-of on-target caricature of mefi that would be very hit-or-miss, but not do much better, with this sort of approach. Worse yet, hit-ness would probably correspond fairly closely to posts that aren't very uniquely metafilterian -- diggbait making the rounds would probably come through well, curatorial posts about x would not.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:10 AM on May 7, 2009
Actually, I think the suggestion was to post (tweet) something like this:
http://www.metafilter.com/81477/NYC-From-Above
posted by Mister_A at 9:15 AM on May 7, 2009
http://www.metafilter.com/81477/NYC-From-Above
posted by Mister_A at 9:15 AM on May 7, 2009
What I'm saying is that it is needed because for many posts there is no such thing as "the" URL. And posts with multiple URLs do not necessarily present the most definitive link first even in those cases where there is such a thing as a "most definitive link", which in a lot of cases there is not.
No no no dude is suggesting a link to the post rather than a link taken from the post. This might not be all that useful, but it's not technically difficult. What you're talking about certainly is a hard problem, for which you should go ahead and develop strong AI, damn the consequences.
posted by grobstein at 9:17 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
No no no dude is suggesting a link to the post rather than a link taken from the post. This might not be all that useful, but it's not technically difficult. What you're talking about certainly is a hard problem, for which you should go ahead and develop strong AI, damn the consequences.
posted by grobstein at 9:17 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
In [1997], you couldn't do things like log into your bank account or read the New York Times online
NY Times, 1997
Wells Fargo Online Banking, 1997
A Twitter feed of MetaFilter would scan like Jorn Barger's weirdly compressed weblog entries, though possibly without so much anti-Zionism. As more people from a wider demographic try to use it for something, Twitter's evolving into a neo-IRC.
posted by meehawl at 9:18 AM on May 7, 2009
NY Times, 1997
Wells Fargo Online Banking, 1997
A Twitter feed of MetaFilter would scan like Jorn Barger's weirdly compressed weblog entries, though possibly without so much anti-Zionism. As more people from a wider demographic try to use it for something, Twitter's evolving into a neo-IRC.
posted by meehawl at 9:18 AM on May 7, 2009
That's it, thanks. That's why I was saying it would kinda tell you in 7 out of 10 cases maybe what the approximate nature of the post was. It's merely a feed for thems that don't do rss and live in twitter and want to know when the next post is up. I don't see how this is noise pb, I mean, you have to follow the twitter feed if you want to and it would be obvious what it is. I just see it as another platform like email or rss. *shrug* I guess my saying that I don't care much starts to sounds a bit less that sincere around about comment number 4 so I'll leave it there.
posted by peacay at 9:21 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by peacay at 9:21 AM on May 7, 2009
peacay, I'm considering it noise in the "lead by example" sense. If we're going to publish cryptic URLs with little or no context, how does that reflect on the site? I mean, if someone has their first MeFi experience at Twitter it's kind of crummy if that's what we're offering.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:24 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by pb (staff) at 9:24 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Actually, I think the suggestion was to post (tweet) something like this:
Ah, I understand now. That makes sense but seems to have so very little value other than as sort of "hey, fuck rss, let's do it in a weirder spammy way" as is that I'm not really excited about the idea.
Or what pb is saying, yeah. It would be functional, but it would also be sort of an overmarkety-feeling firehose of like the least interesting possible view of metafilter.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:31 AM on May 7, 2009
Ah, I understand now. That makes sense but seems to have so very little value other than as sort of "hey, fuck rss, let's do it in a weirder spammy way" as is that I'm not really excited about the idea.
Or what pb is saying, yeah. It would be functional, but it would also be sort of an overmarkety-feeling firehose of like the least interesting possible view of metafilter.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:31 AM on May 7, 2009
Kwine, don't worry, my hatred is still pure and white and burning like phosphorous. I'm being set up, and I can see you're my only true friend. Meet me at the Meh Meh Lounge later and I'll tell you the plan. Come alone. Make sure no one's following you. If you see anyone texting, shoot them immediately. If anyone asks, tell them it just goes to show you can't be too careful.
posted by melissa may at 9:31 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
posted by melissa may at 9:31 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
Aye, well, that's fine then. I see various avenues of further argument on some of these points but I think I'll save my hubris and razor blades for a fight in which I have more than just passing observational interest.
posted by peacay at 9:38 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by peacay at 9:38 AM on May 7, 2009
reposted from Kottke.org:
In defense of Twitter
Living in a big city, you get to hear other people's conversations all the time. These are private conversations meant for the benefit of the participants but it's no big deal if they're overheard on the subway. And you know what people talk about most of the time? In no particular order:
1. What they had or are going to have for breakfast/lunch/dinner.
2. Last night's TV or sports.
3. How things are going at work.
4. The weather.
5. Personal gossip.
6. Celebrity gossip.
Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.
Ever since the web hit the mainstream sometime in the 90s, people have asked of each new conversational publishing technology -- newsgroups, message boards, online journals, weblogs, social networking sites, and now Twitter -- the same question: "but why would anyone want to hear about what some random person is eating for breakfast?" The answer applies equally well for both offline conversation and online "social media": almost no one...except for their family and friends.
So when you run across a Twitter message like "we had chicken sandwitches & pepsi for breakfast" from someone who has around 30 followers, what's really so odd about it? It's just someone telling a few friends on Twitter what she might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram. If you aren't one of the 30 followers, you never see the message...and if you do, you're like the guy standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform.
P.S. And anyway, the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing. Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?
posted by lazaruslong at 9:41 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
In defense of Twitter
Living in a big city, you get to hear other people's conversations all the time. These are private conversations meant for the benefit of the participants but it's no big deal if they're overheard on the subway. And you know what people talk about most of the time? In no particular order:
1. What they had or are going to have for breakfast/lunch/dinner.
2. Last night's TV or sports.
3. How things are going at work.
4. The weather.
5. Personal gossip.
6. Celebrity gossip.
Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.
Ever since the web hit the mainstream sometime in the 90s, people have asked of each new conversational publishing technology -- newsgroups, message boards, online journals, weblogs, social networking sites, and now Twitter -- the same question: "but why would anyone want to hear about what some random person is eating for breakfast?" The answer applies equally well for both offline conversation and online "social media": almost no one...except for their family and friends.
So when you run across a Twitter message like "we had chicken sandwitches & pepsi for breakfast" from someone who has around 30 followers, what's really so odd about it? It's just someone telling a few friends on Twitter what she might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram. If you aren't one of the 30 followers, you never see the message...and if you do, you're like the guy standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform.
P.S. And anyway, the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing. Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?
posted by lazaruslong at 9:41 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
It's more that people confuse the content with the technology in the same way they did then.
The message is the medium, baby!
(waits for Marshall McLuhan to step out of line and tell me that I know nothing of his work)
posted by Afroblanco at 9:45 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
The message is the medium, baby!
(waits for Marshall McLuhan to step out of line and tell me that I know nothing of his work)
posted by Afroblanco at 9:45 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
Oh hey... I just got it.
This would be really invaluable for me to keep in touch with my family in Iceland about quotidian minutiae. I'll have to set up a twitter account later and start pestering my family about getting on Twitter.
posted by Kattullus at 9:49 AM on May 7, 2009
This would be really invaluable for me to keep in touch with my family in Iceland about quotidian minutiae. I'll have to set up a twitter account later and start pestering my family about getting on Twitter.
posted by Kattullus at 9:49 AM on May 7, 2009
Useful things I've gotten from Twitter:
1. made contacts in my job field - I've searched for keywords in their bios/tweets and vice versa
2. thus, found out about conferences, new software, job postings, and other developments in my career field
3. gained knowledge about a health problem I have - people responded to me when I had an issue with it and I discovered a forum for people with the same problem
4. Comcast and Verizon have actually responded to my tweets when I complained about service, negating the need to sit on hold or send support emails into the ether
5. discovered lots of interesting and fun links via friends and friends of friends
6. yesterday, I learned that the White Sox game would be rained out by monitoring a search of people's tweets from the game
7. kept up with events in real time from multiple perspectives (e.g. Mumbai attacks, plane landing on the Hudson, H1N1 spread)
8. able to make snarky comments that would be deleted in AskMe
9. quick way to judge others' opinions on new movie/book/product/service
10. I'd never follow 100+ blogs (tl;dr) but it's easy to follow 100+ people on Twitter, so that's 95 more people I can get to know if I want to deepen the contact further than Twitter
Yes, I could do all these things in a different way, but with Twitter, it's aggregated and it comes to me.
posted by desjardins at 9:54 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
1. made contacts in my job field - I've searched for keywords in their bios/tweets and vice versa
2. thus, found out about conferences, new software, job postings, and other developments in my career field
3. gained knowledge about a health problem I have - people responded to me when I had an issue with it and I discovered a forum for people with the same problem
4. Comcast and Verizon have actually responded to my tweets when I complained about service, negating the need to sit on hold or send support emails into the ether
5. discovered lots of interesting and fun links via friends and friends of friends
6. yesterday, I learned that the White Sox game would be rained out by monitoring a search of people's tweets from the game
7. kept up with events in real time from multiple perspectives (e.g. Mumbai attacks, plane landing on the Hudson, H1N1 spread)
8. able to make snarky comments that would be deleted in AskMe
9. quick way to judge others' opinions on new movie/book/product/service
10. I'd never follow 100+ blogs (tl;dr) but it's easy to follow 100+ people on Twitter, so that's 95 more people I can get to know if I want to deepen the contact further than Twitter
Yes, I could do all these things in a different way, but with Twitter, it's aggregated and it comes to me.
posted by desjardins at 9:54 AM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
reposted from Kottke.org
Your linkmachine, it is broken?
I think Twitter is fine and it solves several problems in my life BUT I think part of that is because I am a human. I subscribe to very very few non-human Twitter feeds and I find most of them no better than junk email, personally. If there seemed to be a groundswell of interest, we might find a way to push content out via Twitter but in a lot of ways it goes against our general "lay low and let motivated people come to us" ethos.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:05 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Your linkmachine, it is broken?
I think Twitter is fine and it solves several problems in my life BUT I think part of that is because I am a human. I subscribe to very very few non-human Twitter feeds and I find most of them no better than junk email, personally. If there seemed to be a groundswell of interest, we might find a way to push content out via Twitter but in a lot of ways it goes against our general "lay low and let motivated people come to us" ethos.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:05 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Unuseful things I've gotten from Twitter:
1. PDiddy screaming "LETS GOOO PEOPLE!!!!!!" and "I'M SO BLESSED BY GOD!!!!" every 12 seconds 24 hours a day, which led to a quick and mighty end to the Let's Get to Know PDiddy experiment.
posted by jerseygirl at 10:28 AM on May 7, 2009 [5 favorites]
1. PDiddy screaming "LETS GOOO PEOPLE!!!!!!" and "I'M SO BLESSED BY GOD!!!!" every 12 seconds 24 hours a day, which led to a quick and mighty end to the Let's Get to Know PDiddy experiment.
posted by jerseygirl at 10:28 AM on May 7, 2009 [5 favorites]
might normally tell them on the phone, via email, in person, or in a telegram
Excepting face-to-face, I communicate with friends and family exclusively by singing telegram.
posted by owtytrof at 10:30 AM on May 7, 2009
Excepting face-to-face, I communicate with friends and family exclusively by singing telegram.
posted by owtytrof at 10:30 AM on May 7, 2009
and 40% of the populace seem to think it's spelled "populous".
Touché. That 40% (myself included) probably just spent too much time playing this.
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:31 AM on May 7, 2009
Touché. That 40% (myself included) probably just spent too much time playing this.
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:31 AM on May 7, 2009
Wow, Twitter is like the new chipotle. Every damn thing has to have twitter in it now.
"Hey! You got Twitter in my Chipoltee!"
"Well, you got Chipoltee in my Twitter!"
"Waitaminute... this tastes like shit!"
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:53 AM on May 7, 2009
"Hey! You got Twitter in my Chipoltee!"
"Well, you got Chipoltee in my Twitter!"
"Waitaminute... this tastes like shit!"
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:53 AM on May 7, 2009
1. PDiddy screaming "LETS GOOO PEOPLE!!!!!!" and "I'M SO BLESSED BY GOD!!!!" every 12 seconds 24 hours a day, which led to a quick and mighty end to the Let's Get to Know PDiddy experiment.
I say yes when my high school friend tells me to come out because he's hanging with Puffy. A real story, that. I say yes when Hollywood says they'll give me enough money to publish a hundred different books, or send twenty kids through college. Saying no is so fucking boring.
And if anyone wants to hurt me for that, or dismiss me for that, for saying yes, I say Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers, finally, finally, finally.
posted by grobstein at 10:55 AM on May 7, 2009
I say yes when my high school friend tells me to come out because he's hanging with Puffy. A real story, that. I say yes when Hollywood says they'll give me enough money to publish a hundred different books, or send twenty kids through college. Saying no is so fucking boring.
And if anyone wants to hurt me for that, or dismiss me for that, for saying yes, I say Oh do it, do it you motherfuckers, finally, finally, finally.
posted by grobstein at 10:55 AM on May 7, 2009
C'est that in your vie and smoke it, millard!
This seems like as good a time and place as any:
Centered around Chicago, but in a dozen states or so, is a store called Menards. Apparently, this isn't funny at all to people who grew up with them. To me, who didn't, it's a store that's basically called "My Balls." Tee hee hee.
But we can be all a-twitter about that in a moment. The IMPORTANT thing is that they have a very catchy TV/Radio song:
You save big money
You save big money
When you shop Menards!
(discussion of current deals)
Save big money at Menards!
Ever since I learned cortex's real name, I only hear this when the ad comes on:
He makes the funny
He makes the funny
His name's Josh Millard!
(discussion of site policy)
Make that funny Josh Millard!
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:57 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
This seems like as good a time and place as any:
Centered around Chicago, but in a dozen states or so, is a store called Menards. Apparently, this isn't funny at all to people who grew up with them. To me, who didn't, it's a store that's basically called "My Balls." Tee hee hee.
But we can be all a-twitter about that in a moment. The IMPORTANT thing is that they have a very catchy TV/Radio song:
You save big money
You save big money
When you shop Menards!
(discussion of current deals)
Save big money at Menards!
Ever since I learned cortex's real name, I only hear this when the ad comes on:
He makes the funny
He makes the funny
His name's Josh Millard!
(discussion of site policy)
Make that funny Josh Millard!
posted by SpiffyRob at 10:57 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
In your defense, SpiffyRob, that game was the best of its kind.
posted by Mister_A at 11:00 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by Mister_A at 11:00 AM on May 7, 2009
Ah, SpiffyRob, we have a Menard's just up the road from us, and now YOU'VE RUINED IT.
Fortunately there is a Home Depot right across the street.
posted by desjardins at 11:16 AM on May 7, 2009
Fortunately there is a Home Depot right across the street.
posted by desjardins at 11:16 AM on May 7, 2009
Damn grocer's apostrophe snuck in there.
posted by desjardins at 11:17 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by desjardins at 11:17 AM on May 7, 2009
If every common homonym error corresponded to an excellent Peter Molyneux game, the world would be a better place. Or have a lot fewer homonym errors, I guess.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:18 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:18 AM on May 7, 2009
He makes the funny
He makes the funny
His name's Josh Millard!
(discussion of site policy)
Make that funny Josh Millard!
He should send out Christmas cards that say "Warm seasons greetings to you all from the Millards!"
posted by burnmp3s at 11:23 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
He makes the funny
His name's Josh Millard!
(discussion of site policy)
Make that funny Josh Millard!
He should send out Christmas cards that say "Warm seasons greetings to you all from the Millards!"
posted by burnmp3s at 11:23 AM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Wow, don't know why it took typing it out to realize this, but my awesome song hinges on his last name being pronounced like Kevin Millar's name with a D at the end, rather than like Millard Filmore.
I really hope it's Millar with a d. If not, my day is ruined and I might cut off Me Nards.
posted by SpiffyRob at 11:30 AM on May 7, 2009
I really hope it's Millar with a d. If not, my day is ruined and I might cut off Me Nards.
posted by SpiffyRob at 11:30 AM on May 7, 2009
Until I finally listened to the music podcast, I always imagined it was a Spanish name, pronounced /mi YARD/.
posted by Plutor at 11:36 AM on May 7, 2009
posted by Plutor at 11:36 AM on May 7, 2009
The guy pronounces Me-Fi as Meffy. I would not trust him to pronounce his own name correctly.
posted by cairnish at 11:37 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
posted by cairnish at 11:37 AM on May 7, 2009 [4 favorites]
Yeah, listen to the podcast if you want audio confirmation, but it's mə-LARD. So you're safe.
And I don't pronounce it "meffy". People unreliably transliterate my pronunciation as "meffy" because they are crazy. It's not like Jeffy or Buffy or Muffy or "man that's kind of iffy" or anything like that, with the long "E" sound in the second syllable. No.
It's a long "I" sound, like a pirate would say: "Aye, Aye, I lost me left eye to MEH-fie, yar."
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:47 AM on May 7, 2009
And I don't pronounce it "meffy". People unreliably transliterate my pronunciation as "meffy" because they are crazy. It's not like Jeffy or Buffy or Muffy or "man that's kind of iffy" or anything like that, with the long "E" sound in the second syllable. No.
It's a long "I" sound, like a pirate would say: "Aye, Aye, I lost me left eye to MEH-fie, yar."
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:47 AM on May 7, 2009
Funny, I had just asked this morning (via Twitter) for a Twitter counterpart to the Mefi server status blog, as a consequence of this morning's outage.
I always have a window or app open on Twitter so a new announcement of the site being down or up (and why) would be something I'd see instantaneously. I could subscribe to the blog via RSS but the mechanics of that are a little awkward, and it means a (hopefully) rarely-updated website would be permanently occupying a slot in the precious screen real estate of my RSS list.
Streams of tweets from the Mefi site generally? I couldn't get into that.
posted by ardgedee at 12:00 PM on May 7, 2009
I always have a window or app open on Twitter so a new announcement of the site being down or up (and why) would be something I'd see instantaneously. I could subscribe to the blog via RSS but the mechanics of that are a little awkward, and it means a (hopefully) rarely-updated website would be permanently occupying a slot in the precious screen real estate of my RSS list.
Streams of tweets from the Mefi site generally? I couldn't get into that.
posted by ardgedee at 12:00 PM on May 7, 2009
It's a long "I" sound, like a pirate would say: "Aye, Aye, I lost me left eye to MEH-fie, yar."
yes yes a thousand times yes
posted by grobstein at 12:08 PM on May 7, 2009
yes yes a thousand times yes
posted by grobstein at 12:08 PM on May 7, 2009
"Aye, Aye, I lost me left eye to MEH-fie, yar."
No. There is no "H". It's Mee-Fie; two distinct separate syllables that shouldn't be levered into a single word.
That sort of thing is exactly the kinds of perversion that leads to a corruption of the moral rectitude in the youth of today. It's a slippery slope, one minute your jamming sounds together inappropriately, the next you're bandsawing the remains of the nuns after your latest "incident".
posted by quin at 12:22 PM on May 7, 2009
No. There is no "H". It's Mee-Fie; two distinct separate syllables that shouldn't be levered into a single word.
That sort of thing is exactly the kinds of perversion that leads to a corruption of the moral rectitude in the youth of today. It's a slippery slope, one minute your jamming sounds together inappropriately, the next you're bandsawing the remains of the nuns after your latest "incident".
posted by quin at 12:22 PM on May 7, 2009
Another vote for Mee-Fie.
posted by desjardins at 12:41 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by desjardins at 12:41 PM on May 7, 2009
Another vote for Mee-Fie.
Yep. It's worth remembering that cortex enjoys ketchup on his hot dogs, so this is simply further evidence of his advancing psychosis.
posted by Skot at 12:47 PM on May 7, 2009
Yep. It's worth remembering that cortex enjoys ketchup on his hot dogs, so this is simply further evidence of his advancing psychosis.
posted by Skot at 12:47 PM on May 7, 2009
It's a long "I" sound, like a pirate would say: "Aye, Aye, I lost me left eye to MEH-fie, yar."
So, compensating for cortex's inability to pronounce the first syllables of words correctly, his name should really be pronounced as MY-lard.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:50 PM on May 7, 2009
So, compensating for cortex's inability to pronounce the first syllables of words correctly, his name should really be pronounced as MY-lard.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:50 PM on May 7, 2009
Is it Mee-Tah-Filter? This is important!
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:54 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by Devils Rancher at 12:54 PM on May 7, 2009
Wait... ketchup on his hot dogs? I recant any prior disparagement and in light of his astute taste and sound judgment will pronounce Me-Fi as Meh-Fie henceforward. (Not really.)
posted by cairnish at 12:56 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by cairnish at 12:56 PM on May 7, 2009
Which, bizarrely enough, is just how they pronounced it when I graduated from college. Despite having solicited from us pronunciation guides ahead of time.
I get a lot of "MILL-erd", but no one else has ever, ever produced "MY-lard". I think I almost tripped, walking across the stage. I'm pretty sure she was too far away for me to have heard it, by my Mom burst out laughing, and made the local paper, so impressed was a nearby reporter at the gusto of her outburst.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:56 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
I get a lot of "MILL-erd", but no one else has ever, ever produced "MY-lard". I think I almost tripped, walking across the stage. I'm pretty sure she was too far away for me to have heard it, by my Mom burst out laughing, and made the local paper, so impressed was a nearby reporter at the gusto of her outburst.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:56 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Look, when you don't have much money you use ketchup as a sort of seasoning cure-all. We also put it on our burritos when I was a kid.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:58 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:58 PM on May 7, 2009
Is it Mee-Tah-Filter? This is important!
Personally, I make it a point to pronounce "modem" as "MAH-deem."
posted by lore at 1:21 PM on May 7, 2009
Personally, I make it a point to pronounce "modem" as "MAH-deem."
posted by lore at 1:21 PM on May 7, 2009
Don't you play the poverty card on me, buster! I was a Goodwill kid! I wore pre-owned bell-bottomed corduroy pants!
I really liked those pants.
posted by Skot at 1:22 PM on May 7, 2009
I really liked those pants.
posted by Skot at 1:22 PM on May 7, 2009
Personally, I make it a point to pronounce "modem" as "MAH-deem."
It's name is a killing word!
I really liked those pants.
I had these really great white-and-black checked slipons that I loved to death but then one day after they were already pretty worn out I wore them out into a muddy cow field and man was that pretty much the end of those when I got back to the house. Broke my tender little heart, it did.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:28 PM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
It's name is a killing word!
I really liked those pants.
I had these really great white-and-black checked slipons that I loved to death but then one day after they were already pretty worn out I wore them out into a muddy cow field and man was that pretty much the end of those when I got back to the house. Broke my tender little heart, it did.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:28 PM on May 7, 2009 [3 favorites]
cortex: "Actually, I think the suggestion was to post (tweet) something like this:
Ah, I understand now. That makes sense but seems to have so very little value other than as sort of "hey, fuck rss, let's do it in a weirder spammy way" as is that I'm not really excited about the idea.
Or what pb is saying, yeah. It would be functional, but it would also be sort of an overmarkety-feeling firehose of like the least interesting possible view of metafilter."
I think this is kind of a common misconception of what twitter is like. Comparing RSS to Twitter is pretty common, but not terribly informative.
It might be more accurate to say that it would be kind of like a RSS feed with comments where you could subscribe to people that you found interesting and not even hear people that you choose not to. Except for the way that the comments aren't really in threads, they are more like a conversation that can mutate in odd directions. Except for the character limit, which is more or less because the service is designed to be available in real time pretty much anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.
I think that having a Twitter feed of Metafilter would be kind of like being at a bar or party talking to a bunch of people and all the sudden having your friend METAFILTER say something (hopefully something interesting) over a megaphone. Except for only people who subscribed to the megaphone could hear it.
posted by jefeweiss at 2:13 PM on May 7, 2009
Ah, I understand now. That makes sense but seems to have so very little value other than as sort of "hey, fuck rss, let's do it in a weirder spammy way" as is that I'm not really excited about the idea.
Or what pb is saying, yeah. It would be functional, but it would also be sort of an overmarkety-feeling firehose of like the least interesting possible view of metafilter."
I think this is kind of a common misconception of what twitter is like. Comparing RSS to Twitter is pretty common, but not terribly informative.
It might be more accurate to say that it would be kind of like a RSS feed with comments where you could subscribe to people that you found interesting and not even hear people that you choose not to. Except for the way that the comments aren't really in threads, they are more like a conversation that can mutate in odd directions. Except for the character limit, which is more or less because the service is designed to be available in real time pretty much anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.
I think that having a Twitter feed of Metafilter would be kind of like being at a bar or party talking to a bunch of people and all the sudden having your friend METAFILTER say something (hopefully something interesting) over a megaphone. Except for only people who subscribed to the megaphone could hear it.
posted by jefeweiss at 2:13 PM on May 7, 2009
like a dog whistle?
posted by desjardins at 2:24 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by desjardins at 2:24 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
Well, not misconception so much as maybe some transference: broadcasting a pile of contextless content, on the order of dozens a tweets a day, is just about the least useful thing Twitter accounts can do in my opinion, and it's something that I encounter being done primarily by spammer jackholes trying to leverage the service to their bullshit ends.
If my friend METAFILTER kept grabbing the megaphone thirty times in the course of a conversation, I would be inclined to shove the megaphone down his blue-clad throat.
Which, yeah, that's my take on it, and it's not universal, but I feel considerable antipathy toward the idea of doing something that could make other people feel that way about the site. We've made a lot of "let's not be annoying" decisions about site features in the past, and this feels like the same sort of thing—a broadcast of contextless urls that essentially say "something or other apparently got posted to metafilter, click here to find out what" feels like an obnoxious way to engage potential readers.
RSS is a great solution for generalized syndication because it's just as opt-in as twitter and it doesn't have the hyper-constraining limit on content—so posts and such can be delivered with all their context instead of just being an enigmatic url that might or might not even give any hint to the content of the post in its title slug. Assuming, of course, that Twitter even let the title slugs through instead of tiny-ing up the urls.
Anyway, I want to be clear that I'm not comparing Twitter to RSS out of some mistaken conflation of the two platforms. I'm comparing them because the function being discussed here is syndication of mefi posts. And on that front, the only way I see Twitter being an attractive method for alerting the world about new mefi posts is through a human editor putting in a lot of work to reduce each post to a url and a pithy, accurate, neutral description of the post.
Which, again, if someone really wants to give it a shot, go crazy. But it seems like a lot of work, seven days a week, to do it right, and it doesn't seem like an attractive addition to the metafilter feed to do it any way other than like that, to me.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:36 PM on May 7, 2009
If my friend METAFILTER kept grabbing the megaphone thirty times in the course of a conversation, I would be inclined to shove the megaphone down his blue-clad throat.
Which, yeah, that's my take on it, and it's not universal, but I feel considerable antipathy toward the idea of doing something that could make other people feel that way about the site. We've made a lot of "let's not be annoying" decisions about site features in the past, and this feels like the same sort of thing—a broadcast of contextless urls that essentially say "something or other apparently got posted to metafilter, click here to find out what" feels like an obnoxious way to engage potential readers.
RSS is a great solution for generalized syndication because it's just as opt-in as twitter and it doesn't have the hyper-constraining limit on content—so posts and such can be delivered with all their context instead of just being an enigmatic url that might or might not even give any hint to the content of the post in its title slug. Assuming, of course, that Twitter even let the title slugs through instead of tiny-ing up the urls.
Anyway, I want to be clear that I'm not comparing Twitter to RSS out of some mistaken conflation of the two platforms. I'm comparing them because the function being discussed here is syndication of mefi posts. And on that front, the only way I see Twitter being an attractive method for alerting the world about new mefi posts is through a human editor putting in a lot of work to reduce each post to a url and a pithy, accurate, neutral description of the post.
Which, again, if someone really wants to give it a shot, go crazy. But it seems like a lot of work, seven days a week, to do it right, and it doesn't seem like an attractive addition to the metafilter feed to do it any way other than like that, to me.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:36 PM on May 7, 2009
At the 10th anniversary satellite meetups, can we agree, at least, that if we are Twittering live, we use a specific hashmark so that we can follow everyone who tweets? Something like #mefi10 would be easy enough to implement.
posted by misha at 4:07 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by misha at 4:07 PM on May 7, 2009
great idea, misha. We're planning to put together a page or two at the anniversary site that gathers tweets and flickr photos tagged with some specific tag (#mefi10 is great!) by MeFi members with those services in their profile.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:47 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
posted by pb (staff) at 4:47 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
And just because it seems appropriate to mention this here... John Cleese on Twitter
posted by hippybear at 5:54 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by hippybear at 5:54 PM on May 7, 2009
My main problem with Twitter is that it doesn't constrain the communication enough. I might use it if all tweets were forced into a specific poetic form. Sestinas. Hiaku. Hell, even limericks.
@IRFH
sitting by the window eats
bagel with cream cheese
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:27 PM on May 7, 2009
@IRFH
sitting by the window eats
bagel with cream cheese
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 6:27 PM on May 7, 2009
cortex: the function being discussed here is syndication of mefi posts.
Not necessarily. Some way of being able to communicate between Mefi and Twitter doesn't have to be hardcoded. As I wrote earlier, it can be done organically by interested members, on a personal basis. You don't have to do anything. Let's see what happens. We may use a hashtag so you can track it in your giant crunching machines. Is #mefi OK?
posted by bru at 8:00 PM on May 7, 2009
Not necessarily. Some way of being able to communicate between Mefi and Twitter doesn't have to be hardcoded. As I wrote earlier, it can be done organically by interested members, on a personal basis. You don't have to do anything. Let's see what happens. We may use a hashtag so you can track it in your giant crunching machines. Is #mefi OK?
posted by bru at 8:00 PM on May 7, 2009
I had a little fantasy about a Twitter keyword for each MeFi thread that could be used for dinky sidechat.
posted by grobstein at 8:04 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
#mefi81497 yeah I flagged this as double . . . doubleplusgood!Then I fantasized about having this sidechat actually syndicated onto the MeFi thread page . . . perhaps by some kind of oily primate.
posted by grobstein at 8:04 PM on May 7, 2009 [1 favorite]
I'm really annoyed that the SciFi Channel changed their name to Syfy, because every time I see it I think of syphilis.
posted by Afroblanco at 9:12 PM on May 7, 2009
posted by Afroblanco at 9:12 PM on May 7, 2009
Not necessarily.
To be clear, I was referring to the specific suggested notion that peacay had brought up of publishing each new mefi thread's url as messages from a twitter account designed to do exactly and only that. I wasn't trying to include every possible mefi/twitter notion, just speaking to that subthread of the conversation that a few of us were nattering on about.
I don't have any problem with folks playing around with this stuff organically; it happens already, if unintentionally, with twitter users talking about mefi content already.
#metafilter might be a better choice than #mefi for pure disambiguation purposes, as there's an irc channel called "#mefi" that uses that shorter tag sometimes already. But, organic being as organic does, whatever folks use is pretty much what they're gonna use.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:12 PM on May 7, 2009
To be clear, I was referring to the specific suggested notion that peacay had brought up of publishing each new mefi thread's url as messages from a twitter account designed to do exactly and only that. I wasn't trying to include every possible mefi/twitter notion, just speaking to that subthread of the conversation that a few of us were nattering on about.
I don't have any problem with folks playing around with this stuff organically; it happens already, if unintentionally, with twitter users talking about mefi content already.
#metafilter might be a better choice than #mefi for pure disambiguation purposes, as there's an irc channel called "#mefi" that uses that shorter tag sometimes already. But, organic being as organic does, whatever folks use is pretty much what they're gonna use.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:12 PM on May 7, 2009
grobsteins suggestion makes me want to sit in a dark corner and rock autistically by myself.
Please don't post a twitter stream to the Blue. I have already quit reading people's journals because they stopped containing real content and are just twitter nattering. It ruins things. Need proof? Compare the entries of this blog from Feb2009 and Mar2009.
posted by hippybear at 7:45 AM on May 8, 2009
Please don't post a twitter stream to the Blue. I have already quit reading people's journals because they stopped containing real content and are just twitter nattering. It ruins things. Need proof? Compare the entries of this blog from Feb2009 and Mar2009.
posted by hippybear at 7:45 AM on May 8, 2009
I don't want a Twitter stream on Mefi, either. I use Twitter, but I don't want my Twitter taking over Mefi. I go to each place (though technically I used Tweetdeck so I don't actually go to Twitter.com much) for entirely different reasons.
For Mefi, I want discussions that don't have to be condensed into 140 character observations. Twitter, for me, is just for quick updates. Also, unless you code it so that it loads after the rest of the page has already loaded, any Twitter stream will slow a site wa-a-a-y down.
I don't have any problem with using hash tags when I am actually referring to Mefi on Twitter, though.
posted by misha at 10:06 AM on May 8, 2009
For Mefi, I want discussions that don't have to be condensed into 140 character observations. Twitter, for me, is just for quick updates. Also, unless you code it so that it loads after the rest of the page has already loaded, any Twitter stream will slow a site wa-a-a-y down.
I don't have any problem with using hash tags when I am actually referring to Mefi on Twitter, though.
posted by misha at 10:06 AM on May 8, 2009
Yeah it wouldn't be fair to the Tweeters... Twitters... Twitterers... Twitfolk... what the hell do you call someone who tweets... Twits seems awfully mean-spirited.
I saw someone, in all seriousness, refer to them as Tweeple.
posted by turbodog at 2:07 PM on May 8, 2009 [1 favorite]
I saw someone, in all seriousness, refer to them as Tweeple.
posted by turbodog at 2:07 PM on May 8, 2009 [1 favorite]
I saw someone, in all seriousness, refer to them as Tweeple.
See, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me hang my head in shame for humanity.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:23 PM on May 8, 2009
See, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me hang my head in shame for humanity.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:23 PM on May 8, 2009
Don't hang your head in shame, Devlis Rancher. Just punch someone in the dick.
posted by dersins at 4:42 PM on May 8, 2009
posted by dersins at 4:42 PM on May 8, 2009
Just punch someone in the dick.
For humanity, of course.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:44 PM on May 8, 2009
For humanity, of course.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:44 PM on May 8, 2009
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by Effigy2000 at 9:15 PM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]