Tag: twitter

Do it yourself color commentary

Last night’s first game of the American League division championship between the Red Sox and the Angels  was a classic post-season game that began at 10 pm and ended around 1:30 am, insuring that I only got two-third of my required allotment of sleep. Today will be a long one.

Following the Game through Twitter and the “#redsox” hash tag (twitter is a 140-character “microblogging” system, think of it as open instant messaging) was an unrewarding experience. Keeping an eye on the laptop and an eye on the television made me miss some important plays, and none of the tweets, or comments, were particularly insightful or hysterically funny.

I’d rather read a live blog account from Red and Denton at Surviving Grady, or hang out with a bunch of smartass friends at a local dive, get messy, and call in sick the next day. The virtual bar of #redsox, while occasionally funny, had just enough lag to make it unfun. Then the volume of baseball chatter overwhelmed the usual Twitter torrent of Palin and Obama talk and the system started to lag. By midnight on the east coast, the Red Sox was dominating the Twitter buzz, but the content was … well, making fun of the color of one guy’s salmon colored sport coat, simultaneously cheering good catches and homeruns, and making fun of television ads for Viagra.

Ditching Twitter (twhirl)

I tried and rejected Twitter in 07, returned in January, followed it via the Twhirl desktop client and the TwitterFox plug in, and now am basically saying it sucks yet again.

Sure, it’s another valid channel to monitor from a brand reputation standpoint. Who is bitching or praising brand terms is a good thing to know. But in terms of signal-to-noise ratios, it’s mostly noise, a classic example of the ourosborosphere/echo chamber promoting their latest blog posts, product beta, or book on social networking.

Only two twitter accounts really caught my attention — and both are demented. One was Merlin Mann’s @hotdogsladies and the other was @ainsleyofattack (recommended by Merlin). The reality — I don’t care what some Forrester, Jupiter, TechCrunch, GigaOm bloviator has to say about ButtDog 2.0, whether they want to organize a “tweet-up” at the brew pub after the BarCamp, or if they think Twitter’s Fail Whale is the meme of the week.

No, what I like to read is dementia such as this Tweet from @ainsleyofattack: “AinsleyofAttack It’s confirmed. During sex I sound like a laundry bag filled with chihuahuas being smacked against a MoonBounce. 10:54 AM June 28, 2008 from web “

So, rather than unsub from everyone who talks about things that bore me to tears (should it be called social media? what is the ROI of social media? why do airlines suck?), I decided to expand my circle of suck to include everything, and I mean everything, but joining the cool kids’ march to FriendFeed.

Which meant installing a FriendFeed desktop client — the Alert Thingy — which rolls the whole burrito of diggs, delicious tags, flickr uploads, Amazon buys, tweets, etc. into one cacophony of desktop alerts.

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