I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.
I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to run the study with enough participants to get significant results, I'm afraid. Academic politics and favouritism got in the way :(
Especially cool to be able to follow anyone (friends, role models, favorite authors) and see what's on their mind and what interests them.
The signal/noise ratio is horrific, and the insistence on 140 characters is far more aggravating and frustrating than anything. Nowadays I see people dividing their thoughts into 8+ tweets (prefacing each with 1/8, 2/8, etc) and I just shake my head.
If you want to know what's happening right now, Twitter will give you better results than anything else, including a Google search. Tweets famously beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, fulfilling an XKCD joke. And it's almost all searchable by the public in real time.
So that's one thing: it's a close as you're going to get to a real-time tap in the zeitgeist.
Another use is comedy; you get everything from corny puns and "dad jokes," to multi-year character humor arcs, to biting political humor, all in one place, as fast as you want it.
Another is the ability to drill down into a wide variety of subcultures. Various niches within politics, programming, sports, finance, etc. all have robust conversations going on constantly, and many of them internationally.
Candidly, it took a long time for me to get Twitter. Ultimately for me the secret was to follow a bunch of folks I might like, see what they said, unfollow the ones I didn't like, and then follow the folks who the others (the ones I kept) retweeted.
I spend more time on Twitter now than any other social network or app. And I only really started "gettting it" a year or two ago.
It looks much more like "a little chatter with foes", IMO.
Its a blank canvas - when you sign up who do you tell? With FBK, you invite friends, with Linkedin its your colleagues. But Twitter?
Your network continues growing like this until you've got too much on your feed to follow, and you need to take a step back and maybe eliminate some follows. It's a pretty organic thing and you end up with a couple close friends plus a ton of other people semi-connected to your real life friend network.