If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Pat Phelan has a very interesting blog post about "what's the cost of Twitter?". He extrapolates that the worldwide economy will loose $13.5bn in 2008 because people waste time with silly Twitter updates. His thought provoking text caused a big discussion and reminds me of last year's story "Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions". But while Pat seems to agree that Facebook is a terrible time sucker, he still declares Twitter a "tool I couldn't live without". For me they are of the same category.

I like Pat very much. But I don't need a status update every time his airplain is delayed, he buys a CD of Take That or answers a friend's question. That's the kind of information I find in Twitter feeds. For me that's not useful and causes a false sense of intimacy. That's why I don't like Twitter. I am very happy that Pat doesn't publish his "Daily Tweets" so often anymore, blog posts where he just mirrors his Twitter feed. They are mostly noise between his excellent articles. As a technology journalist I have to follow hundreds of blogs and filter out such distracting information.

That's what Twitter costs me, although I don't even use that tool. I whish my browser had some kind of Adblocker for irrelevant Web2.0 crap.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Twitter, Web_2.0

                                      

comments:

Nice post Markus
Totally agreed on Daily Tweets posting, I removed it ages ago and subscribers actually went up.
I enjoyed Twitter though, I am careful who I subscribe to though, mostly people in my own arena

# posted by  roam4free : Sunday, 6 January 2008 20:17:00 o'clock CET

 

Perhaps there is a simpler solution. Instead of getting rid of Twitter and Facebook, which so many people other than yourself seem to enjoy, why don't you just stop using them?

# posted by  shel israel : Sunday, 6 January 2008 21:49:00 o'clock CET

 

It's not so easy to get rid of Twitter and Facebook. More and more people move their publishing into Facebook. Jon Arnold already asked "Is Facebook killing blogs?" and Jeff Pulver, who once was a VoIP blog guru, today nearly exlusively writes about social media.

# posted by  Markus : Monday, 7 January 2008 01:13:00 o'clock CET

 

Twitter is a whole other beast to me. It fills in the "white space" and thus doesn't add appreciably to cost structures. I don't Twitter instead of other things, I do it in addition to everything else I do. It's like the stock ticker on CNBC. I consume it casually except when it triggers my radar. It's the ticker feed of my network.

# posted by  Jonathan L. Yarmis : Tuesday, 25 March 2008 15:21:00 o'clock CET

 

Post a Comment