Atlantic Xpat

I'm a big twitter user. It's one of the first apps I fire up on my phone or tablet of a morning. I find it useful to follow news organisation, individual journo's, commentators & the odd celeb to keep abreast of breaking news and popular culture.

Yes, There is a limit to how much info can be conveyed in 140 characters but it's useful to click through to a news story. It's also very interesting how quickly a breaking news story can be covered through tweets compared with an update on a news organisations website. Of course like all things on the 'net it's a case of filtering out the good content from the bad but that's the same everywhere these days.

For me the uniqueness of twitter is how you shape your information flow through those you follow. So my feed of a morning gives me local news, traffic and weather, international news, comment from people I'm interested in and the occasional piece of humour. Yes, your tailoring the information to your own biases but you can select information feed more widely if you choose. So follow Al Jazeera news as well as Fox. OK, I don't follow Fox, but you get the point.

The other increasingly useful thing with twitter is engaging with corporations customer service departments. Getting a response from Air Canada for example, can be quicker via twitter than on the phone.

I use twitter more for receiving than sending as I don't tweet that much. Content over quantity!

AX

JamesM

I mainly tweet and read tweets when I am watching The Bachelor or Bachelorette because I like joining in with the wise cracks.

Other than that I've never really grasped the conversations on it. I don't follow that many people and the feed still moves too quick.

JamesM

This!

You can get a query resolved with out going through a lengthy call waiting process.

It is also resolved in your favour because they are terrified of your issue going viral.

Shard

It's not any better for mainstream stories, but very good for local stories and sub-topics. For instance, I'm interested in human evolution and follow some anthropologists and will see links to articles or happenings that I might not otherwise see. I think the other big thing is that by picking people you are interested in (and not picking those that you are not) you get quite a tailored news/info stream. The key is to not over follow - either in individuals or in high volume Twitterers - otherwise it just becomes noise.

Shard

Exactly. I briefly had Piers Morgan on follow, but the volume of tweets and drivel he posts soon led to him being unfollowed. That's the other thing I like, so easy to 'switch people on and off' so for example if someone is making news you can follow for a bit, hear their views, then unfollow when things move on.

Shard

+1

BristolUK

Oh you mean just a score update. I thought you meant you had someone at the game tweeting. You're keener than I thought.

BristolUK

On the other hand, anything worth hearing will be reported in other media. Every time a footballer, for example, makes an arse of himself on Twitter, it gets reported.

When there's a breaking news story on the guardian (and, no doubt other news sites) you get the on the spot reports AND the tweets.

Remember back in the Boston Marathon bombing and the search after, there were tweets from several people observing things going on in their back yards and driveways. That was interesting but how would one actually find stuff like that as an individual? There must have been a dozen different accounts that one wouldn't even know about let alone find. But they were there, on the Guardian among others.

JamesM

It's easy.

The Guardian and other news outlets have invested in software that enables them to scrape twitter and cherry pick the best feeds.

I used to sell the technology. The news organisations can scrape Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.

The problem for people like The Guardian is that for younger generations they no longer go there as first point in call which is why they are still loosing money.

People will go to Twitter and other new media and content aggregator sites first.

Shard

For something like that (Boston bombing) there will quickly be a #hashtag created, and if you follow that hashtag, you will get everyone tweeting on that topic in real time. That really is the beauty of Twitter.

BristolUK

All this unfollowing and unfriending... it's all a bit doubleplus odd isn't it?

Atlantic Xpat

One thing that really bugs me about the existence of twitter though is the laziness it now affords to mainstream news media. These days a reporter doesn't need to actually go talk to someone to obtain their opinion, they just report on their tweets. So someone dies and then an article is published which essentially consists of random celebs tweets of condolences. Pointless and lazy IMHO.

Shard

On the other hand, I quite liked it on the Irish referendum last week that you could read some personal comments from celebs like Ian McKellen. Not Fry though, he always seems to have too much to say.

Siouxie

I used Twitter to find my nephews dog who had been lost for nearly 2 weeks.

It worked.

Shard

Woof!