Ashes
Twitter, Facebook and social networks
22 Jul 2012, 8:02PM
I have just signed up to Twitter. I realise its a little late in the piece, perhaps if only to have gotten a good name. I had thought it would just be a waste of time. More smaller messages to take time reading. But so far I'm liking it. Its interesting the way it is done. Effectively its just...
- Links (URIs)
- Tags (# tags)
- Short desc [of something] (text)
All with a limit of 140 chars. I'm not sure why the links or tags need to consume part of that limit, its certainly led to creative shortening of words, tags and links.
I had also thought that the 140 char limit would be dumb, you'd want to use more quite often so it would be a pain. But I see I'm wrong. Its a different venue, it forces you to be concise which is good. You only get small messages here, which is good, no big rants or descriptive text (like this blog). Its quick to read and forces you to convey only what is important.
So not sure whether I need it or not. It will provide some interesting links, New Scientist links, dev links, but mostly just another form of being social. You can see what everybody [who uses it] is up to.
So I read an interesting thing [once]. It was that one of the greatest inventions of HTML was the hyperlink. The ability to link one page on the internet with another. At the time I thought that was dumb. The hyperlink has always been there, its taken for granted, its obvious. But perhaps in hindsight not so obvious. Twitter and Facebook do similar things. The "likes", "shares" and "retweets" are simply further linking (or linking under another name). The tagging is the same. Our internet (or the information on it) is getting more interlinked and it still has a little way to go. I can see some further improvements that could be made. More sharing but with smarter filtering. Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs are all the same thing, just at different sizes/frequency/depth/detail. I'm not sure we need a different site/app for each but more on that another day...
