Are you ready...for the awesomeness?

Twitter has to be the most annoying medium on the planet, let it be said. If you look at it, you can't follow a conversation; you have to click on someone's name to see what that person had said to provoke the "tweet" you're reading, which replies to it.

I throw my hands up. If it were at all user-friendly, the exhibitionist side to it (not to mention the voyeurist side) would be all too appealing.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Side rantTwitter has to be the most annoying medium on the planet, let it be said. If you look at it, you can't follow a conversation; you have to click on someone's name to see what that person had said to provoke the "tweet" you're reading, which replies to it.

I throw my hands up. If it were at all user-friendly, the exhibitionist side to it (not to mention the voyeurist side) would be all too appealing.
Click to expand...
Ok, unfortunately this is because of the new redesign they did recently. It's probably my least favorite thing about this new format/layout. I actually really like Twitter. It's pretty ADD, but I like the brevity. I just saw an awesome quote someone had: "Twitter makes me like people I've never met, Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life". Have to say it's pretty true.
 
How was it before the redesign?

I think its brevity is great encouragement to creativity. There was a "rewrite the Declaration of Independence" competition on Slate a few months ago where the whole D of I had to be rewritten as a tweet. It was hilarious and ingenious.

But really, what I like is following a conversation. If I click on JohnWino's profile and see @TimAlky: Yes. Then I have to click on the other guy's tag and then get lost in his other things to other people. Click back and see what he said, etc.

As W. B. Yeats put it, the center cannot hold.

Please tell me if I'm doing this wrong.
 
Before, you could just roll over the bottom of the tweet and it would have a link that said 'in reply to' and you could click that and it would take you to what the person was replying to. It was a bunch of clicks, but you could actually follow a 'conversation' unlike now where you just have no idea.

Hell, even Thor is trying his hand at it. Thor! I wonder if he's having word withdrawal yet.
 
OMG.

So, yes, I guess I remain nonplussed by the formatand especially its popularity, given that it's so shattered and hard to follow.

Maybe if you just follow a famous quipster (I was looking at Mo Rocca's yesterday) and have no need of interactive features it's easier?
 
I actually seem to be able to follow the wine conversations on it because most of the people going back and forth with each other are on my feed, so they show up in order without the need to click on anything. I've never posted on it but I check the feed from time to time, usually for links to interesting articles or blog posts. The single most annoying aspect is the people who truncate words and use juvenile IM chat abbreviations like "U" and "2" to fit in the 140-character limit. Better to simplify what you're going to say and keep it literate.
 
This is why I was offering SFJoe and any other takers a wheelbarrow full of excess words. I'm certainly not using them while I'm a Twit.

It is aggravatingly difficult to follow conversations unless, as Keith said, they're all in your feed. I haven't pulled the trigger on something like TweetDeck yet because I have certain objections to unintegrated apps, but I suppose I might have to.

The RU2B@ abbreviation nonsense doesn't bother me because the people who do it are mostly horrible writers anyway...barely comprehensible even when they use full sentences. Plus, I'm a Prince fan. Kinda used to it.

Oh, and it is the death of literacy. (Film at 11.)
 
I like twitter but then I'm kind of ADD and unfocused and dilute and it's a good milieu for me because it's like that anyway. I use tweetdeck and it works just fine, enabling me to follow diverse conversations and references to threads about hints of conversation and my brain just sort of fills in the blanks and the message gets across. Most of the time. It's not like we're giving cut-by-cut instructions about neurosurgery or anything (that's what I use Facebook for).

-Eden (aw c'mon Thor, literacy's not dead, it just smells that way)
 
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