Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter 460
PabloSandoval48 writes, "A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter. More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it." Reader mattnyc99 notes a related article in which the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless.
"Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this). Is the mainstream media making too big a deal out of the avalanche of World Cup tweets, or is the world literally flooding the zone?"
Well of course (Score:4, Informative)
If you look at any of the content on the internet, you're going to get similar results. Even here on Slashdot, the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof, though we've luckily got a content rating system to keep most of them in check.
So you've got to objectively view Twitter in the same way you view any social media. For example, if a comment in slashdot is rated at -1, I'm usually not going to waste my time looking at it. Likewise, if there's hundreds of twitterers out there all tweeting, how do I know which ones to look at? Well, lucky for you, they've got their own ranking system. You can look for the people who are most followed, or you can search who you are interested in, and JUST follow them. It's surprisingly THAT easy.
I mean, how many of these engineers care for Youtube comments and 30 seconds Respond videos uploaded to youtube?
I could sit here all day and list things that engineers don't like about social sites, but that doesn't devalue the integrity of a social site.
Re:Breakfast? (Score:2, Informative)
33%?
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/16/1722258/Over-a-Third-of-the-Internet-Is-Pornographic [slashdot.org]
Or, even people who aren't friends (Score:3, Informative)
Twitter isn't just the status update part of Facebook. It's not a symmetric social media. You can follow someone who doesn't follow you, and vice versa. So you're not limited to your friends.
Some people use that to follow celebrities, but you can use it to follow John Resig [twitter.com] or Guido Van Rossum [twitter.com]. Or if you feel weird following geek celebrities, someone like CS professor Phil Windley [twitter.com].
Or if you still don't like Twitter, follow Linus [twitter.com], who feels the same way about Twitter that you do. ;)
Better than Average! (Score:3, Informative)
In a related story, out of 1000 books in the local book-mega-store, only 16% were worth reading, and out of 1000 TV programs only 16% were worth watching.
Frankly I would have thought that Sturgeon's Law [wikipedia.org] applied to Twitter as well.
Re:Twitter is useful? (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily, most of the useless posts on /. are quickly moderated into oblivion. On Twatter, there is nothing to protect the reader.
Re:Engineers make the world go around . . . (Score:3, Informative)
And they probably think that Jesse James was an outlaw from the 1800's.
No, Jesse James used to build [wikipedia.org] stuff. [wikipedia.org] We know who he is.
Who was that woman he was married to?
Re:Content versus medium (Score:3, Informative)
A better reason to hate Twitter is the obsolete 140-character limit (...) the character limit just serves to dictate that all posts be short, which in most cases also makes them vapid.
Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno.. y si malo, no tan malo.
Re:Twitter is useful? (Score:3, Informative)
On Twitter, the reader is the moderator. If someone you don't follow posts a useless comment, you'll never see it unless someone you do follow decides to be sadistic about it.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
There isn't room on FB or Twitter to say stuff that has depth, and so many people are on them that you can't say anything controversial without offending someone. I haven't looked at FB for six months because my conservative religious aunt found it, and then me, and I have to deal with her for the rest of her life so I'm not going to be posting about my anarchist friends' orgy. I suppose I could spend the time to figure out how to build a filter that lets only a few people see it, or make another private FB account that prospective employers can't see, but why bother? I've got a bunch of friends on a BBS that nobody in the rest of the world will ever see and I can say anything I want there, with a 2 kilobyte post that lets me say *exactly* what I want to say.
The medium is part of the message, unrelated to the quality of a person's friends.
Re:Breakfast? (Score:2, Informative)
If you all agree on some hashtag, you can get the effect of an ad-hoc chat room.
Re:Old people? (Score:3, Informative)
I am 43 and a tertiary qualified digital systems engineer and astronomer. I was 'techy' and using the nascent Internet before you were a twinkle in someone's eye. This is not about not understanding the technology, it is about being at different places in life and having different needs of information. My needs are mainly professional. There's no useful amount of engineering or astronomy information that can be imparted in 140 characters, so that channel is of limited use to me professionally. I also see the trend toward instant, fragmented communication in workplaces as having a negative impact on project management... it is very easy to lose important pieces of information in a morass of messages.
I understand the technology of SMS, Twitter etc. but I don't place much value on the social need to be incessantly connected with the inanity of everyone else's life (I have enough of that for myself). I understand that there are people of my decrepit vintage who do not understand the technology and also those who have a need to feel like they are valued through social interactions. I cannot pretend to speak for them all.
"Most people that don't like xxxxx just don't understand it" is a very typical viewpoint of the young, regardless of generation or century. It is also typical to believe that people with different priorities/ages/backgrounds are somehow inferior or qualify for instant dismissal as 'too old to understand'. In 2030 you might understand that you are, in fact, not special. You will also have seen more fads come and go than you can imagine: Twitter may well be one of them.
SNR Is Not The Problem (Score:2, Informative)
It's that these "engineers" aren't focusing in on the right frequency.
Sure, if you're using Twitter on the index page where EVERYBODY'S public tweets show up, you're going to have a lot of shit you don't care about popping up.
However, I use Twitter on my own personalized home page. I see only posts from people I care about. My boss posts his current location on Twitter, it's immensely useful for tracking him down (he's all over the place). I subscribe to local people I know, from LUGs and so on. They occasionally post links to interesting articles or reminders about the next meeting. I subscribe to my web host's twitter feeds for network status updates.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing on Twitter and you just go around following EVERYONE like it's MySpace 2.0, of course you're going to find shit you could care less about. That's why you SUBSCRIBE to people, because you only want to hear what THEY have to say.
For engineers, they sure are dumb.
Re:Breakfast? (Score:3, Informative)
If your reason for not liking Twitter is "I don't really care what you had for breakfast," the problem isn't Twitter - it's that you need to find some more interesting friends.
Exactly. Its like saying email is useless because "I dont really need a constant stream of Viagra offers".
Except email has a lot of real uses, so one doesn't generally say that. Twitter, unlike email, doesn't. People have to really stretch and contort to find use cases for twitter that actually make it worth filtering out the crap to get that worth.
After all, even if I knew "interesting people", i still don't need 120 character updates on what they are doing. What does twitter do that's useful that isn't already covered by email and rss feeds?
The point is, email is mostly spam, but its still very useful. Most of us use it and find ways to limit our exposure to spam. With twitter, for most of us, in most cases, its just not worth the effort, even if we could just see interesting twitter messages, it would still generally be a waste of our time.
Re:Not the method, but the users (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have to find out, I the "Long URL please" extension for Firefox.
Re:Breakfast? (Score:3, Informative)
And a year is 365.25 days.
Wow, we have a liberal arts major among us!
At least, you left out the "approximately" from your assertion. A Julian year is 365.25 days, which led to a multi-day error after several centuries. The simple Gregorian year is 365.2425 days, and it's still wrong by almost half a minute. A year measured from the Earth's orbit around the Sun relative to the most distant visible stars is approximately 365.2422 days long. The adjusted Gregorian year is 365.24225 days (FYI, the centuries rule for leap years is inverted for millenial years: year 4000 and 8000 will not be leap years, but year 3000 and 5000 will be), which is only wrong by approximately 4 seconds.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1511/why-do-we-have-leap-years [straightdope.com]