OK, I was reading about the start of twitter and apparently it happened that it was invented and then at a conference a bunch of people got up and left a lecture to go see another lecture. You see through twitter people found out instantly that there was something really interesting going on in another lecture, so they went to check it out. Clearly that was a key human tool in its infancy used as a tool to let people know about something happening. Sounds good to me, I guess it's a matter of who's doing the telling and why.
Unfortunately now it has become a standard marketing tool flooded with millions of yelps from millions of Who's working to push their product... always a bad combo. Me, I follow hockey writers, music folk, politics, news and a few other various science related folks. Tweet comedy or links to blogs or sites with interesting material are my favourite... incessant gig notices, sports franchise "tweet ups", and non-comical self suffering dreck are things that annoy me. I'm sure I annoy others, but I don't give a rat’s ass if people "follow me". If you don't want to hear what I have to say and you are not hearing it I think that's awesome, it helps the both of us.
I was actually about to go to bed, when I saw a news story that read
Flames post controversial tweet on Hemsky
Hemsky plays for the rival Oilers and has displayed the skills of an offensive player but is having an off year in terms of goal production... I think he has about 4 goals this year, but he was just resigned to a fairly healthy contract for 2 years... so somebody tweeted a mockery of that signing, and then the tweet was taken down, and now it's news... important enough to have a title and a story.
So let me get this straight. There is etiquette for short 140 character blurbs written in non-English, that are flooding a virtual world at an apparent rate of 2 million per day, and one of them is real news for real humans in a real world with real problems.
It's a good thing I'm not famous, it wouldn't go very well.
