Guido trips himself up by criticising Twitter
Dear Guido Fawkes,
It was fascinating to read your attack on Twitter yesterday, following Rachel Sylvester’s article in the Times. You stated that “the idea that it is some kind of revolutionary form of social media interaction is laughable” and proceeded to make the case against what you described as “political Twittery”. While I largely agree with your analysis, I think you’ve missed a rather fundamental point about Twitter that, when reflected back, should make all bloggers pause for thought.
The ‘evidence’ that you presented against political Twittery was compelling enough. The mere fact that Dolly Draper has the most followed political Twitter is utterly ridiculous. His 2,918 followers are clearly the result of reciprocal following, hence why he himself claims to follow 2,836 which, given the number of minutes available in a single day, is truly hilarious. Like you said, Iain Dale has roughly the same number of followers but only follows 152 people – a distinctly more realistic figure. I agree that Iain Dale’s Twitter feed occasionally borders on the innane, although there are a few interesting nuggets thrown in there as well (none of which wouldn’t be better suited to a short blog post, mind). I have no reason to doubt that your wife is probably the only person on the planet who might be “interested in knowing that Guido was stuffing porridge into a recalcitrant 2 year old at 7.30 a.m. or Guinness into himself at 7.30 p.m”, and even then she might not be that bothered. Rachel Sylvester believes that ”at Westminster, [Twitter] is a symbol of a wider loss of confidence by the political class”, while psychologist Oliver James said in the Times that “nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity”. They’re both wrong.
You claim that ”political Twittering is merely a displacement activity for doing something more meaningful” and that it comes down to “self-worth stemming from attention. That people care to know what the Twitterer is doing enhances their own sense of self worth.” Absolutely spot on. Political bloggers, be they MPs or totally irrelevant ranters in the blogosphere, do it because knowing that people are listening to you is intoxicating. The more people that follow you on Twitter, the more people appear to care what you think, the bigger fix of the Twitter drug you get. But, hold on a sec, doesn’t the same logic apply to blogging as well? The more readers we get, the more people we know are listening to us, the more our self-worth is boosted. What’s the difference? Knowing that the number of readers for my blog may well get into the giddy heights of double figures one day is an alluring thought, while you already have hundreds of thousands of readers (and make a healthy financial return from blogging as well). Surely you would admit that part of the reason we all blog is because the knowledge that someone out there cares what we think and wants to know what we have to say (even if it’s just to criticise it) is incredibly enticing and makes us want to keep coming back for more.
I can’t stand Twitter, it bores the life out of me. There is nothing that Twitter offers which email, a blog or even a text message cannot offer and do a million times better. I agree that Twitter at some level is just a popularity contest, but the same applies to blogging. There is something instrinsically appealing about other people listening to what we have to say and the blogosphere is the perfect forum for boosting one’s self-worth by getting other people to take notice of our opinions. If no-one read my blog, I wouldn’t do it. If no-one read your blog, would you keep going, honestly?
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
Interestingly, a very similar debate just happened over on Tom Harris’ blog.
I make most of my points there but right now, I’m on the fence and note that with the withdrawl of sms-delivery in the UK, the service may be on the way out. Until then, its a narcissits playground (mostly) with some potential meta-uses and forms a handy ‘look, look, I’m Web2.0-cool!’ badge…
I think Twitter has values as news wire service which is primarily why I follow certain people. I also do not like people trying to tell other people what to use twitter for. I use to feed information into the stream to provide people with content that if they are interested in then they will follow, if not then they won’t. I won’t lose sleep over it either way.
I often retweet PeasintheirPods because they send out Riyla Alerts on missing children. I wll see people retweet some of the most insignificant tweets but will not tweet some as important as getting the word out about a missing child.
One thing I can’t stand is those who talk about what their twitter rankings are all the time or call themselves the Twitter Elite. That is the last thing we need in this world is another class of people with over overinflated self-worth thinking they are better than the rest of us ordinary folks.
Scotty, I agree that Twitter has (like blogging) become a popularity p***ing contests in many respects, which doesn’t really help anyone.
I think blogging is hugely important whereas I don’t see any relevance for Twitter. Twitter are already starting to push their advertising, just like Facebook did, and no doubt people will tire of it at some point.
Perhaps it has something to do with my natural verbosity, but I can’t see myself ever Twittering. Of course knowing that people are bothering to read what you right is “intoxicating” – but so is knowing you have written something worthwhile, even if few people are reading it. Blogging does at least hold out the possibility that you will discover something new, formulate an argument differently, start a ball rolling, and thus produce some sort of effect on the real world. Usually, that will be an illusion; but it need not always be an illusion. Unless it is actually breaking news – and most twitterers aren’t in a position to break news – then Twitter really is a waste of time.
That’s my point – even breaking news should be done as a blogpost because it will get to a much wider audience than Twitter at precisely the same speed and with more detail.
I personally get some satisfaction from trying to put an argument together in a few paragraphs, something that Twitter will never beat or even match.
“read what you right”. Did I actually write that? I never used to make such dreadful mistakes before I started blogging, but now it seems to happen all the time – it must be turning my brain to mush.
Perhaps you should start using Twitter – only 140 characters, less room for error.
Twitter is clearly an early medium device.
In the 1860’s thousands of people were trained as telegraph operators. Then the telephone was invented and it was mostly replaced. So telegraph switched to sea and air communications until radio came along. Then satellite.
My very first job was as a telex operator. Something that may well be as meaningless to your readers as a Barrowman or a Mantle Maker. Telex was a dodo by the late 1980’s superseded by the infinitely superior fax, which has largely been superseded by email etc.
Just before mobile phones became widely available 02 tried to break into the untapped roaming market.
Deservedly it was an expensive failure. But mobile phones that changed changed communications on a telegraph like technology level soon followed.
So, its what comes after Twitter that is where the innovation and money will be.
If only we knew what that was?
I personally get some satisfaction from trying to put an argument together in a few paragraphs, something that Twitter will never beat or even match.
You very nearly contradicted yourself there, since you wrote that argument in 148 characters. Remove ‘or even match’ and it’s a tweet.
You’re right that Twitter is no different to blogging. I tweeted about that myself (http://bit.ly/12eRtm). We are all ego-centric.
You should realise that Twitter isn’t a ‘transmission medium’. Reading other people’s tweets is far more important than writing your own.
Also, Twitter is not a Competition. The number of people who follow Derek Draper is a meaningless statistic.
I take some satisfaction in condensing a thought downwards to its core, and expressing it in under 140 characters. It’s a fun challenge.
Note, every paragraph in this comment is under 140 characters, and each contains a single, well-expressed thought.
I hope this proves my point.
don’t see the trip up – there is no comparison between blogging and twittering, except perhaps that both attract all sorts of different people. Guido’s analysis seemed spot on to me.
Nice one Stu, quite impressive.
Alistair, are you not aware that Twitter is referred to as ‘micro-blogging’?…
by whom?
First line of Wikipedia description:
“Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates”
If you type ‘microblogging’ into Google, you will also see Twitter referred to as microblogging by just about every single link.
Just looked back and read Heresiarch’s comments…
You’re wrong – Twitter is an excellent news-breaking system. Head to http://search.twitter.com and you’ll see at the bottom the latest ‘trends’. As I type this, they are Apple, #pubcon, New iPod Shuffle, #sxsw, Watchmen, Germany, #itb09, Michael Jackson, iPhone, and #fose
Those are the things that people on Twitter are talking about more than anything else. Just by clicking on their names, I’d find out the news that Apple have released a new iPod today, that South By Southwest Festival is coming up this weekend, that ‘Watchmen’ continues to be the biggest film of the week, that Michael Jackson has a new tour, and that there has been a horrific shooting in a school in Germany. As news breaks, people start talking about it on Twitter. As people talk about it, it appears in the trends. As the trends appear, more people talk about it. If you keep an eye on the trending topics, you learn about news stories far quicker than if you watch RSS feeds.
I’m not saying that Twitter is a replacement for blogs, but it works as a damn speedy news wire if you want it to.
Sorry Stu but I don’t see your logic. People start talking about the Watchmen being big and Michael Jackson’s new tour and whatever, but where do you think they got this information from? Websites or press releases or specialist blogs or RSS feeds.
I simply don’t understand how you can suggest that “you learn about news stories far quicker” on Twitter. Twitter is just people talking about things that have already happened, most of which (from your short list, anyway) I have absolutely no interest in. If a topic interests me, I follow it already in real time without the need for Twitter.
Like I said, Twitter performs no service that other places cannot do better already.
“Websites or press releases or specialist blogs or RSS feeds”
More likely from Twitter.
Example: The Hudson plane crash. The crash occurs and appears on the news in New York. If I happen to be watching the news in New York, I’d find out about it within an hour or so, just as you say.
If not, I may hear about it on an evening news bulletin, or in the paper the next day. Time to arrival: 6-24 hours.
Perhaps if I read blogs or news websites, then I can find out about about the news next time I check my RSS Reader. That’s what’s so cool about blogs, right? The info you want, when you want it – it just appears. Time to arrival probably a couple of hours, unless I’m busy.
Now imagine I have a Twitter client on my desktop. It automatically updates every five minutes with new tweets. Someone in New York could perhaps have tweeted “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”, including a picture. Someone who followed him could respond to that, their friends could repeat it again, it could spread like wild fire, and the news could appear on my desktop in a matter of minutes. As more people talked about it, it would become a trend. People stood at the banks could post pictures, and others could see and talk about them.
Within 10 or 15 minutes of an unpredictable event occurring, I could find out about it and be involved in a conversation about it, even on the other side of the world. The mainstream media weren’t be involved at all and yet I have pictures, videos and live updates. And that’s exactly what happened.
I don’t know if I can explain the game-changing nature of Twitter any better than that, so if you still don’t get it, you probably never will.
Stu, your explanations are very clear, it’s just that I disagree with them.
In the name of being pedantic because I’m bored at work, your example is an interesting one because unless you check Twitter on a very very frequent basis it would not alert you any quicker than a major news network would, plus you wouldn’t be able to get any high-quality information on the incident until a news network covered it anyway even if you’d heard something had happened to a plane near the Hudson.
Re constantly checking Twitter, I use a desktop client which grabs updates from Twitter every three or four minutes. I rarely go on the Twitter site itself, but if I’m using my computer I see new stuff pretty much as it appears.
As for not being ‘quality’ info, personally I prefer the ‘I’m on the ferry right now, people are standing on the wings of the plane, here’s a photo!’ ground-level approach to the typical TV News reporting: ‘we’re waiting for updates here in the newsroom, Our correspondant Jim is in the area – Jim, have you got any updates for us?’ ‘Thanks Judy, there’s not much information being given to us at the moment, but from what I can see it appears that it is a plane of some sort. Authorities haven’t yet confirmed if this is a terrorist attack’.
That’s a matter of preference, of course…
Firefox Twitbin plugin is nice – updates every 2 mins with a resizable column on the left of the browser that doesn’t mess up page rendering. Ohnoes, came over all professional and nerdy there. I’ve really let myself down…
MAny of the mainstream news networks have Twitter accounts and tweet the headline with a link to the full article. Therefore, it can be technically called a news wire service. The Mumbai attacks in Indian was a good example of instant “man on the street” breaking news.
I do not have a problem with Twitter monetizing the site. They have bills and employees to pay. I send out links to my sponsors in my tweets, not a lot in comparison to how many other tweets we send out.
If someone is providing something of value to someone else there is nothing wrong with earning an income from it. If person does not like ads, they can simply stop following me and in the case of Twitter, they can stop using it.
Twitter has many uses, people use it for different reasons as I stated before. It is up to the individual to decide how he wants to use it and for the other users to decide who they want to follow.
As far as being comparing Tweets to a Blog post, there is no comparison. Tweets as a “blog post” are just comments where as a blog post is a lecture in comparison.
Spot on Stu; people don’t compare essays (blog posts, perhaps?) with text messages (tweets). At least sane people don’t.
My interest in it is mostly professional; as a web developer, its indisputable that a free, open-access, hyper-text communications platform can’t be ignored. The fact that it can only carry text and links, perversely, makes it *closer* to what the www platform was originally designed for.
Images, fonts, the blink tag (remember that?I still get flashbacks!) all were added much later. Its also, therefore, agreeably egalitarian as straight-out text to speech apps are ten-a-penny and ensure the visually impared can know *exactly* as much as anyone else.
So really its a platform, not merely a communicative mode. In that respect its interesting. Narcissistic diarrhea dribbling out of Dolly Draper, not so much!
* I meant Stu and Scotty. Sorry.
Have to disagree with you LFAT (not often that happens)
Twitter is useful to me to keep up to date and in touch “instantly” with a tight group of people ( i follow 20 or so people)
OK, I use IM as well, but twitter is like texting, and my contacts have pointed me to some useful info. Like “I need a web based OLAP client for postgreSQL – anybody?” got some good recommendations and started some conversations “offline”. Ok I could’ve googled but thats a bit scattergun.
my 2 cents.
Twitter is not like IM-its not private, is it?
@Shaun P
No twitter isn’t private which is why I take any stuff over to IM – but you can “direct message” a contact which IS private.
Its just another comms medium I use. One of many.
You make some fair points from which I do not deviate that much.
For me the joy of the piece was that it has wound up Dolly.
Suffice to say that if Dolly Draper is the best that Labour have got to offer the blogosphere, victory at the next general election moves a little bit closer. For their ‘big guns’ to turn out to be such big prats is extremely satisfying.
I don’t see Twitter as a service where I have to “follow everybody in detail”, for example as I would in a small group conversation.
It is more like a big political conference where I may pick up interesting nuggets here and there, or where I can use various tools (for a conference: programme, workshop titles, recommendations from the bloke in the bar, flyers etc: for Twitter, hashtags, keyword searches, following people who know their stuff, random conversations I happen to see etc) to find interesting comments.
A better explanation than I can do in a comment:
Twitter as 18C Coffeehouse:
http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-how-to-be-twit.html
And on the basics:
http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2009/02/twitter-compleat-twit.html
Right, lunch.
M.