Twitter C/D

The status updates on facebook are one of my favourite aspects of FB, so I liked the idea of twitter when I first heard about it a week or so ago. I've signed up, but it hasn't stuck with me as yet, I think because none of my friends are using it.

It's reduced all my literary ambitions down to daily one-liners: twitter.com/fireland

So much hate for Twitter. So much.

Twitter is for productivity douche-bags and aspirational web developers.

I used to use Twitter quite a lot, but Facebook status updates reach a lot more of my friends, and I can do them from my phone as easily as a Twitter so I've kind of abandoned it.

I think Twitter is good for publishing interesting links and news and things, and for asking advice from the microblogosphere, but for the latter you'd need a whole load of like-minded followers and it's hard to get there.

I think I will have to use it for a while before I decide if I love it or hate it.

There was this thread, by the way:

twittervision

we've def. had a twitter thread before because i remember checking out the twitter homepage to see what the fuss was about, and i just happened to see alba make an update. then i told him about it here.

dats it

TWITTER: I don't get it

CIO/KIU: using ilx like twitter

I just spent another fifteen minutes going down the rabbit hole with this shit clicking on follower avatars
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20080423.jpg
the text of the last panel could possibly be sold as a t-shirt

the weather alert stuff and airport delay announcement feeds seem vaguely useful but it remains the absolute dumbest shit I've ever seen since friendster

I mean what use is something that's supposed to provide low-bandwidth status updates on EVERY STUPID PIDDLING THING EVER IN THE WORLD if it also happens to be breaking constantly

identi.ca is ugly and has a terrible name, as with squoink and jaiku and whatever else, which just goes to show you what actually matters

http://www.soup.io/

IT'S THE NEW TEEVEE

let me make sure to get back here and write you guys some more about how I feel about the web's direction in a little bit

yeah I still think it is all weird and gross

"the microblogosphere"

http://www.the-trukstop.com/miscellaneous/socialmediacrity/warbbler.png

I use Twitter to keep up with a very small handful of friends (FreakyTrigger mob mostly) so mine is mostly a collection of stupid injokes that come to my mobile. I like that a lot, saves me having to text loads of people at once, but it freaks me out when I see random strangers following me. I have to purge my followers list about once a week.

I used to use Twitter quite a lot, but Facebook status updates reach a lot more of my friends, and I can do them from my phone as easily as a Twitter so I've kind of abandoned it

this is a shame, because your minute-by-minute update from "control" was fucking genius. for the few minutes it lasted.

you'd need a whole load of like-minded followers and it's hard to get there.
This is the key, really. Twitter got some ferocious use at wwdc, and was v. good for finding out what was giong on where, and what sessions to leave, etc, but it doesn't work so well if you've just trucked up in some random place.

There's a twitter client for iPhone that might help with that though -- it shows you all the updates from folks in your location.

this is a shame, because your minute-by-minute update from "control" was fucking genius. for the few minutes it lasted.

People were complaining!

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1640#more-1640

as usual

the end of twitter in the UK? er: yes, as far as i can see. i don't want to have to *look* for tweets. i want them to come to me:

Hi,

I'm sending you this note because you registered a mobile device
to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you
know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on
Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

I'll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no
longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy
receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are
recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

Before I go into more detail, here's a bit of good news: Twitter
will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries
throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new
numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you've
been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.

Why are we making these changes?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send
updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to
ten followers, you aren't charged ten times--that's because we've
been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to
the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in
popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish
relationships with mobile operators around the world such that
our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.
We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States.
We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without
passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more
mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we've arrived
at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs
and take a different approach. Since you probably don't live in
Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter
updates via one of the following methods.

m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
TwitterMail.com works on email-enabled phones
Cellity [http://bit.ly/12bw4R] works on java-enabled phones
TwitterBerry [http://bit.ly/MFAfJ] works on BlackBerry phones
Twitterific [http://bit.ly/1WxjwQ] works on iPhones

Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid
placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a
limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter
about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada,
India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair
billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass
these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in
Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships
that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way
service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is
sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies
around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers
for updating via SMS are on the way. We'll keep you posted.

Thank you for your attention,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/biz

I never understood why anyone would want tweets pushed to them. I get excited when I receive a text. I don't want to find it's some spazz like me telling the world they've found an odd-coloured bogey up their nose.

it would be nice, when the iphone's push service is switched on, if twitter would push messages down to twitterific - this would solve the 'excited when I receive a text only to find it's about a bogey' problem

If my phone had let me assign unique message alert tones to numbers like it does with ringtones and voice calls then the problem might have gone away.

Maybe the fundamental problem is that I'm not interested enough in other people.

most of twitter is exquisitely described in metaphor by that news story about the inflatable turd named "Complex Shit" blowing away and breaking actual stuff that matters

of course being me I would say the same for pretty much everything "web 2.0"

actually, i'd follow a tombot twitter feed. furious cynicism at unexpected moments could be fun.

i guess twitterific might step up to the plate here, but then again: it can't run in the background on the iPhone, can it?

(this, incidentally, is my first ILX post from my shiny new iMac.)

creepy

13.28
cozeny Wondering out loud what we'd need to start a UK group SMS system and take Twitter's market: Ruby developers, time, money, and Red Bull... ? 9 minutes ago from web

13.37
Hi, cozeny.

tweetsms (tweetsms) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out tweetsms's profile here:

http://twitter.com/tweetsms

You may follow tweetsms as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

tweetsms
http://www.tweetSMS.com will be available worldwide across almost all carriers. We also plan to deploy an ad-based service for free updates.
38 minutes ago from web

@PurpleKitchen check out www.tweetsms.com about 2 hours ago from web in reply to PurpleKitchen

just uploaded http://www.tweetsms.com to help all of those international SMS users! about 2 hours ago from web

Used it cause I was excited (are you still an early adopter a full year after the SXSW explosion of use?), then didn't for a few months cause I didn't really see the point, now I'm usin it again cause I've had some new local friends start following me.

Good for questions, link-sharing, Microemo bursts, etc.

I have a friend who uses this to read his friends' feeds, so I basically only see it from the angle of a person who is constantly checking his phone while I'm trying to have a conversation with him. The first time I heard of Twitter was from him when I finally got exasperated with his constantly checking his phone.

Maybe I'm the one with the problem, but I can't really think of anyone in the world interesting enough for me to want updates on their activities throughout the day. I'd say the only people I could imagine wanting to twitter could be: Drug smuggler, violent prison inmate, Slash-in-his-heyday type rock star, and a dog (if they somehow managed to translate its thoughts into English text).

don't use it, don't know anyone who does, but i check this one all the time: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

i very very rarely check it on my phone. does mobile use seem to be the prominent use?

SMS functionality seems to be its USP now that Facebook status updates have taken the mainstream microblogging space.

As I said above, people using it for pushed news bulletins and question-broadcasting rather than personal what-i'm-doing stuff is another application.

(I think you can now do Facebook by SMS in America, actually, but not here)

SMS is a fucking trilobite technology

I followed @johncleese back when his followers were in the double digits.

Seriously someone FedEx me a fucking medal already.

how the fuck are they planning to make money? Also, they could easily have charged for this in Europe, and at least started making some actual income for a change.

so: brightkite, then. anyone played about with it much? i'm not sure i can particularly be arsed, TBH.

Twinkle is useful to see if there's trouble on my tram line or the local cafe is on fire.

ON IPHONE

Brightkite seems particularly marvelous, actually. Like Twitter with upgrades.

mildly diverting for a bit

http://joshblog.net/projects/roktok/roktok.html

well, it would be if only folk would stop talking about coldplay and radiohead

oh

it combines the top artists from last.fm (coldplay, radiohead) with twitter

no potential to divert at all now

Saw a post saying twitter would 'merge' with truth social.

The election is the one event where it has prompted people to leave, or really decrease their posting.

The thought that popped into my head this morning

Elon buys truth social and merges it with truth social as a massive bribe to trump for something, but I couldn’t figure out what for. Maybe it’s just to launder a bribe from someone else. I’m probably overthinking this, why would they need to hide anything.

another defection

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis announced Wednesday that she has deactivated her account on X.

She announced her departure from the social media platform via Instagram, writing in the caption “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”

i don't think elon sells twitter i'm not sure what he'd even get for it, maybe a couple billion? that's chump change for him now with tsla mooning... he's also made it his personal echo chamber dopamine machine, where would he go if he sold it?

makes sense. i’m just thinking that whether or not he wanted to buy it in the first place, ex post it seems to have had some instrumental value in getting him inside the trump admin (obviously the 130 billion dollars in donations helped too), which is what’s made tsla stock explode. if it’s going to continue to shed users at its current rate it won’t have much value by the time the next election comes around

lol sorry 130 million

you could argue twitter bought him more influence than bankrolling a GOTV operation, but not 44 billion / 130 million times more.

I pointed out eons ago that Musk very deliberately and systematically tanked Twitter in order to gut its utility as a direct-source news platform. Similar to Zuckerberg, the trick is to do it in such a way that everyone thinks they’re clowning on the billionaire, which keeps them entertained while he quite efficiently does what he set out to do. If you look at the series of his “stupid mistakes” they are targeted precisely at the attributes which gave Twitter its value - authenticity, content policing, community, effective blocking etc. That was the aim and the outcome, and swung an election which ended up with him having the most power possible for someone ineligible to be president. But lol Elon, the liberal user base is decamping, whatever will he do, etc.

what's your evidence for the claim that doing all that swung the election?

the thing is if you see what he actually says and responds to on Twitter it kinda points away from the evil genius theory

They’re not exclusive goals

I don't think buying Twitter actually did swing the election but it is another example of how obscenely rich dudes have all the luck

Also, obviously I can’t provide evidence that it swung the election, just the opinion that Twitter represented an alternative to the corporate owned channels of discourse and he was ideologically opposed to that. It wasn’t “evil genius” any more than tipping honey in the fuel tank of a car and cutting all the visible wires in the engine bay would be a genius way to stop it running. Just effective.

I think what's become more evident is that whatever high Elon's been chasing since, like, 2010 hasn't been working out for him and instead of keeping any of his many houses in order he's just using money and influence to wander the halls of bigger and bigger houses

we've seen him join or appear in: the acquisition of twitter, appearances in Twitter Spaces featuring the dumbest sycophants and hanger-ons on the planet, meme entrance to twitter HQ, a bestselling biography, streaming on Twitch, bouncing around like a petulant child before giving the most tepid intro for a presidential candidate ever, and now as part of something called DoGE which may or may not exist by January. which he will either get bored with or mostly become an irritant and jettisoned within months. all while unveiling the cybertruck and some other dumb robot shit that won't ever happen

and despite all of this, none of these moments had 1/10th the cultural resonance of like, skibidi toilet

the problem with the modern GOP is they're all reply guys. all they can do is steal memes and post "So true!" in response to race science. Trump is the only one who truly has a poster's brain. the only one who came close is George Santos. Elon is just Lowtax with billions of dollars and a much worse sense of humor. well, we can only hope anyway

Is Tesla on the bounce again? I thought the company was suffering but I now see word that the Trump election win is a boon for the home of the Cybertruck? Seems unlikely, but ...

Trump's tour of braindead podcast bros probably scored him more votes than twitter did tbh.

xp trump is good for Tesla because he's going to change laws, tax enforcement and foreign policy so they make more money? doesn't seem that unlikely tbh.

Tesla's stock price never really has anything to do with how the company is performing

what's your evidence for the claim that doing all that swung the election?

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, 14 November 2024 1:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don’t have any evidence, just a hunch that elon’s modifications of the twitter algorithm and other changes amplified right wing voices and that was one causal link in the chain of a broader vibe shift that rehabilitated trump among the general electorate. no idea of the magnitude, could be small. i don’t think any easily accessible evidence would be dispositive, but it would be an interesting like poli sci phd thesis to try to collect some data and tease it out

and tbc i don’t think elon bought twitter thinking “i am going to buy this social media platform and get donald trump elected and then tsla and spacex stock will go up *steeples fingers*” but i do think he must’ve realized at some point before he went all in supporting trump that twitter could be put to that use

All things considered, people like my sister are not on Twitter and there are millions of people like her who have FB and a lightly used Insta, don’t listen to podcasts, but do see cable news we don’t like. Cable news we don’t like is still the main communication vector for GOP voters.

it’s more that all journalists and pundits are on it and then those journalists and pundits go on cable news and regurgitate stuff they read on twitter

yeah a lot of stuff is downstream from twitter. I don't think the theory that twitter was good for 1-2% in the election is *crazy* (it certainly doesn't require 1-2% of the population to be on twitter), but I'm not buying it.

I'm also not buying the musk delibrately destroyed it (or even musk deliberately changed it to influence public opinion tbqh) but yeah I can imagine him realizing he had an opportunity some time after he took over, especially since ads clearly hasn't worked out.

when he made the offer he was thinking (according to him in private conversations released during discovery) 1) make money out of ads and eventually WeChat-style payments stuff and 2) elminimate moderation and let the chips fall where they may as a goal in itself, rather than tipping things right.

Tesla's stock price never really has anything to do with how the company is performing

― frogbs, Thursday, November 14, 2024 2:43 PM (fifty-five minutes ago)

yeah there was a recent matt levine newsletter where he made the point that for the casual elon musk fan who wants to invest in the elon musk industrial complex, tesla is pretty much the only way to do so as the only elon musk public company... everything else is privately held and closed to the public

see also: dogecoin

he definitely wanted twitter to be less woke from the start

how i think it went down is at some point in the past year musk had some conversations with trump and his people, where he was like “im gonna go all in and endorse you, financially i will throw you guys a hundred million and help with GOTV, and also i’m gonna pull the strings on twitter to help you out, and in exchange i get [REDACTED]”. whether or not the pulling of the twitter strings was actually effective (or pivotal) irl, trump team thought it would be effective and it sweetened the deal

yeah there was a recent matt levine newsletter where he made the point that for the casual elon musk fan who wants to invest in the elon musk industrial complex, tesla is pretty much the only way to do so as the only elon musk public company... everything else is privately held and closed to the public

see also: dogecoin

― 龜, Thursday, 14 November 2024 3:40 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

so maybe he makes it public again but keeps a majority of the shares so it’s elon branded and then his fans drive up the price. could be a way out of this

maybe but i'm not sure if he can get the market cap up to $44B even with a super limited float

he's also got a lot of other (very underwater) investors in the cap table who probably have some sort of say and also the debt he used to buy twitter is coming due in a couple of years...

Anyone the news would quote from Twitter already has a profile doing something relevant.

1) Because these migrations to other platforms have previously failed.
2) Because this current one looks a lot like the stereotype of pathetic liberal crybabies throwing their toys out the pram because their preferred genocidal US presidential candidate didn't win. https://t.co/JVIiNiBFhY

— Samplo Corvodina (@TreborRhurbarb) November 15, 2024

TB still going strong!

He does have a point there, but I have found it easy to either mute or not follow the resistance libs / FBPE crowd so far. They aren't great on Palestine, of course, and politics-focused accounts on there do tend to have an odd reluctance to talk about the genocide, but my bluesky account is for music anyway. The people I still see active on Twitter are all left wing politics accounts now. I suppose TBEU should be on the same platform as the people it's mocking, but the megablock function on bluesky would make it difficult to mock them effectively.

As a journalist with an online archive that keeps becoming inaccessible as sites chop, change and close, I can’t with any good conscience delete my account because I would lose almost 15 years of interactions with mutuals (and our DMs). Think about any correspondence you might have there with friends and whether you want to unilaterally bin that by deleting your part. I won’t do that to others.

can you archive what's there?

leaving it allows it to become ai fodder.

that ship has sailed

Again, as stated, if I archive and delete my account, my mutuals lose our correspondence. That’s a shitty thing to do to people.

I think proactively deleting your stuff is pointless, but anyone relying on x.com to maintain an accessible and compete archive of tweets and dms is going to be disappointed . You and your correspondents should take personal backups if you really need reliable long term access to this stuff.

(Although the argument for proactively deleting stuff became a lot stronger this week when they changed to TOS to say cases would be adjudicated in that rotten borough Texas court)

I have arranged a small room at the British Museum for my tweets.

I archived my tweets in 2022, back when it was still possible to do so. At that point, I intended to quit, and even though I relapsed a few times, I always felt like the newer tweets didn't count somehow because they weren't part of the archive. Even though my most popular tweet ever was from this year.

lol lg

lol, got to preserve my eternal legacy of monotonously calling Labour MPs cunts 2019-23 and posting dogs in autumn pics

Photos of my dinner must not perish

Future generations shall seek to repatriate these LG marvels

I have bequeathed my tweets to a Russell group university.

my DMs are in the archive at Moscow centre

I especially want all the grossly offensive and disdainful comments I made about UK armed forces dying during my edgelord phase to be inscribed on terracotta tablets!

Maybe Sotheby's want a few David Moyes at United memes.

Love TB, but I think the second tweet's probably closer

3) Because I enjoy the chaos here.
4) Because I like the wider audience of idiots who I completely disagree with, as I'm essentially a high-end luxury wind up merchant.
5) Because I'm too lazy to even consider rebuilding my various accounts elsewhere. This isn't a fucking job!

— Samplo Corvodina (@TreborRhurbarb) November 15, 2024