Tag Archives: Twitter

| Opinion, Technology

28 people who were joking about America turning 2,013 years old

It’s amazing how much of journalism these days consists of someone searching for something on Twitter and then being shocked at finding that thing that’s being searched for.

On Thursday, a few people had the bright idea to search for people who posted on Twitter that the United States turned 2,013 years old on July 4. Of course that’s ridiculous and a sign that the U.S. education system has failed miserably.

Or maybe they were all kidding. Don’t bother checking that, just publish and shame! It doesn’t matter how young they are, they must be ridiculed, post haste!

Here’s a post on something called Twitchy that lists “30 people who say America turned 2,013 years old today.” Wow, those people all sound super stupid.

But let’s go through them one by one, shall we?

Continue reading →

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Weather Network Twitter alerts need fine-tuning

The Weather Network has launched Twitter feeds to alert people to important weather information. It makes perfect sense, except there’s one feed per province. Quebec’s feed has alerts from Gatineau to Rivière du Loup. But I don’t care about the weather in these places. I care about the weather in Montreal.

The Weather Network should split these feeds (especially Quebec, Ontario and B.C.) into more, smaller regional versions.

| Radio, Technology

cbcdbktwt

CBC Daybreak has taken to Twitter, with staff (including host Mike Finnerty) sharing the tweeting duties. Although it includes a lot of stuff that might be considered noise to some (live-tweeting of Habs games, for example), it also gives a rundown of the next morning’s broadcast the evening before, which is useful.

The only thing is you have to learn how to speak txt:

Your Mic is at 0740, 0815 is the chase, new 2u+me from the am. Ur first am MTL news, all the world and biz news from onight – c u from 0530

I think I’ll just stick to listening to the podcast and finding out what was on the program hours or even days after it aired.

| Media, Technology

National Post apologizes for reporter’s Twitter tantrum

Some people see Twitter as a form of instant messaging. But those people can quickly forget that what you say on Twitter is just as public (if not moreso) than what you post on Facebook.

National Post technology reporter David George-Cosh learned that the hard way today when an expletive-filled argument he had with a source on Twitter was publicized (and republicized and republicized), making him (and the paper) look pretty bad.

The result, mere hours later, was an apology posted to the Post’s Editors blog (which doesn’t name the reporter it’s apologizing for, nor the person it’s apologizing to, nor the nature of the conduct, but who needs specifics for these things?). (Via Regret the Error)

Reporters are human, and like everyone else they’ll have off days and they’ll get into arguments. But when they happen online, those arguments can easily become public, and this is probably not the last time we’ll see apologies for personal conduct of people associated with media.

In this case, the reporter’s actions were in a professional capacity (which makes it the paper’s problem), but I wonder when the time will come where reporters, columnists and other public figures associated with a publication’s brand will have clauses in their contracts about what they can post to their Facebook profiles, personal blogs or other public and semi-public forums online.

UPDATE: April Dunford, the victim of the tirade, has similar thoughts on her blog.

UPDATE (Feb. 12): More reaction from Roberto Rocha and a let’s-attack-the-victim post from ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio (which gets its basic premise wrong). Additional commentary from Mathew Ingram and the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond.

UPDATE (May 25): Three months later, George-Cosh writes about the “incident” on his blog, saying he’s learned some hard lessons, though he still makes excuses for his behaviour.

| Navel-gazing, Opinion, Technology

10 reasons why Twitter still sucks

I’ve never been a fan of Twitter. Looking at people’s status updates (or “tweets”, as its members have been told to refer to them), all I saw were a bunch of @ signs and TinyURL addresses. There seemed to be very little that was actually there.

But new media experts around the globe were embracing it. Some people who had been star bloggers a few years ago had all but abandoned them in favour of this new service. They heralded it as some holy grail of journalism (a suggestion I’ve already attacked head-on), as the best way to get breaking news and as being better than blogs.

So a few weeks ago, I setup a Twitter account. I did what I was supposed to do, follow some friends and start posting updates. Few of them would be considered really interesting. Anything important went on the blog, where I have more readership.

Before long I started getting messages that people were following me. A lot of people I don’t know. They probably found me through mutual Twitter friends, since I hadn’t posted my Twitter account here until now (mind you, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out). Unlike blog readership, which I’m sure includes hundreds of people I’ve never met, Twitter seems more personal. I get a message whenever one clicks on the “follow” button, and I see an image of that person’s face with a list of their updates.

I installed one of those Twitter programs (I settled on TwitterFox, which I’m not entirely crazy about but will do for now) to facilitate the Twittering, and I setup my cellphone so I could send Twitter updates by text message (unfortunately the reverse isn’t true, so I can’t read other people’s Twitter messages through my cellphone).

Anyway, you’re here to read about why I don’t like it, despite having used it for a month. I’ll give it to you in point form:

  1. The signal-to-noise ratio. When people talk about all the great information available on Twitter, they’re right. But the problem is that all this great information is buried under piles of @ replies, links, corrections, jokes and pointless trivia. It varies depending on the user, but the way Twitter is setup seems to encourage the noise rather than discourage it.
  2. Technical limitations. This is the other biggie, and it goes beyond the 140-character limit, though that’s certainly a big part of it. The biggest annoyance is links. Because most URLs won’t fit in the 140-character limit, various URL shortening services like TinyURL are used. The problem is that this obscures the actual URL. (Some Twitter clients will decode such URLs, but it would be easier if such a thing were handled internally.) Twitter RSS feeds leave a lot to be desired (clickable links would help), and some simple features like “retweeting” need to be done manually or through some third-party application. I realize that text messages are the reason for the 140-character limit, but how much of Twitter’s traffic comes from cellphones?
  3. Single point of failure. Though I haven’t yet experienced the Fail Whale, I expect it will come up soon. Twitter hasn’t yet found a way of making money (though they’re working on it), and the fact that it’s a privately-run service means if anything happens to Twitter’s servers, everyone is cut off. There is an open-source competition in Laconi.ca/Identi.ca (an Evan Prodromou project), but like the old instant messaging wars, it’s not about what service is better, it’s about what service your friends use. Laconi.ca is planning Twitter integration, which might help that, but until then you need to use both services unless you want to be disconnected.
  4. Microblogging vs. instant messaging. This is largely a cultural thing, which means it could change. But the impression I get from looking at Twitter posts is that it’s more of an open chat than it is about open blogging. Lots of replies (many consisting only of useless things like “:)”) or other messages that are more about conversation than information.
  5. Unwritten rules. I’ve seen this previously for blogs as well, with self-appointed community leaders dictating rules for how others should use a medium. Even though we’re not sure how Twitter should be used, there’s no end to the number of etiquette rules. You can’t update too much. You have to follow others. You can’t follow too many people if not enough people are following you.
  6. Duplication. If it’s on Twitter and it’s big, someone (either the twitterer or a follower) will put it on a blog anyway.
  7. Constant plugging. Some Twitter accounts are setup to automatically read from an RSS feed, post the first 100 or so characters and include a TinyURL link. I could just add that feed to my Google Reader and save a bunch of steps. In other cases it’s not automated, but bloggers will point out every time they post something new to their blog. It’s redundant and annoying.
  8. Time wasting. You’re in the middle of a blog post or reading something and bam, there’s another Twitter message to read. You’re interrupted by someone pointing out something they saw on the Internet that was funny. Did you really need this in real-time? You get back to what you were doing and bam another Twitter message. Very little of what gets posted on Twitter needs to be read immediately, and yet that’s the way it is. It’s a distraction and it wastes time.
  9. @ replies and #hashtags look ugly. Sure, you can turn @replies off when they’re not directed at you (or your friends), but then you risk losing important information that’s passed that way.
  10. No privacy. Even if their updates are public, you can’t follow someone without them knowing unless you do so by manually checking their page or putting their RSS feed in your feed reader. In fact, everyone knows who everyone else follows. Perhaps this is a feature, but it doesn’t make much sense for me. Twitter makes no distinction between types of followers, and I don’t want people thinking I’m friends with people and groups I just want to keep tabs on.

Despite all this, I’m not dismissing the concept of microblogging. Laconi.ca solves many of the technical problems (which suggests that Twitter can solve them too), and others can be fixed over time with culture change.

Despite its failings, people still use Twitter and (like Facebook) it’s a source that journalists have to mine for information. It involves filtering out a lot of noise, but there are nuggets of gold inside. So whether I like it or not I’ll still have to keep using it. Unlike David Akin, who is de-twittering, I still think there’s information that can be delivered using this medium.

But I won’t be using it any time soon to disseminate any important information. Follow me if you want, but you’re not going to see much quality. Anything I have to say, even briefly, of any substance will just be said here. There’s no minimum length for my blog posts.

| Media, Opinion, Technology

Hudson plane crash proved nothing about Twitter

Mere hours after a U.S. Airways jet crash-landed in the Hudson River next to New York City, stories about the influence of Twitter were being ejaculated left and right. They were all fawning over how news of the crash hit Twitter minutes before the big media outlets, and one person even posted a picture of the downed plane which got heavily circulated. This was described as a “scoop” for “citizen journalism”.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is a powerful tool, despite its really stupid self-imposed limitations. They will break these kinds of stories first and traditional news outlets should mine it for information (which they can then use for free!). But all it was were some eye-witness reports, in a city that has no lack for actual journalists. All we learned from Twitter was that a plane had landed on the Hudson River and that people were standing on its wing.

(Mind you, listening to CNN’s mindless filler yesterday afternoon, it was clear they didn’t know much more than that either).

But the rest of the story didn’t break on on Twitter. It broke through CNN or the New York Times or other outlets that could assign a journalist to chase the story.

Phil Carpenter, a Gazette photographer who recently started his own blog, points out that journalists who just repeat something they’ve heard (say, by rewriting a press release) don’t earn bylines because what they’re doing isn’t really journalism.

Perhaps we should consider that when we compare an eyewitness account to the work of a professional journalist.

UPDATE: J.F. Codère and I are happy to have found someone else who feels the same way.

| Media, On the Net, Technology

Live Toronto fire info on Twitter

In my suggestions for 2009 in Hour, I included a request for emergency services and public transit to have live information online, which would democratize police-blotter reporting and free reporters to write about more important stories:

[…That] Montreal police and other emergency services post their breaking news about car accidents, fires and murders online so that curious Montrealers can check for themselves what’s going on instead of having to wait for one of the media outlets to take dictation from the PR guy

Just recently I’ve learned that the Toronto Fire Department is doing exactly that, and this guy has already turned that into a Twitter feed.

When is Montreal going to follow in its footsteps?