{"id":2019,"date":"2007-12-12T10:57:08","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T15:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/twitter-waste-of-time-or-social-tool\/"},"modified":"2007-12-12T10:57:08","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T15:57:08","slug":"twitter-waste-of-time-or-social-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/twitter-waste-of-time-or-social-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter: Waste of time or social tool?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s interesting to see some of the reactions to Scott Karp&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/publishing2.com\/2007\/12\/11\/why-i-stopped-using-twitter\/\">post on Twitter<\/a> and why he stopped using it at Publishing 2.0, a post which has now topped the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techmeme.com\/071211\/p130#a071211p130\">cluster<\/a> of Techmeme discussion about Twitter). Anne Zelenka, who writes for Web Worker Daily &#8212; part of Om Malik&#8217;s GigaOmniMedia &#8212; has a fairly visceral response, which is to call Scott&#8217;s post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.annezelenka.com\/2007\/12\/scott-karp-talking-to-you-people-is-a-massive-waste-of-time\">insulting<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The clear implication, she says, is that Scott finds talking to people like her a massive waste of time. In the classic sense, of course, it <i>is<\/i> a waste of time. As Scott quite rightly <a href=\"http:\/\/publishing2.com\/2007\/12\/11\/why-i-stopped-using-twitter\/\">points out<\/a>, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is quite low in many cases &#8212; there&#8217;s a lot of banter and chat and extraneous information of various kinds, and that can make it difficult to get some good, solid work done. It&#8217;s like having the TV on too loud, or people chatting behind you when you&#8217;re trying to do something.<\/p>\n<p>I think what Anne&#8217;s driving at, though, is that some of this social interaction, some of this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.disambiguity.com\/ambient-intimacy\/\">&#8220;ambient intimacy,&#8221;<\/a> is good for us &#8212; even if it does get in the way of our actual work. I would compare it to working at home versus working at my office: at home, I can actually get a lot more accomplished, but I miss the social interaction, the miscellaneous chatting and random conversations with co-workers. Some of it is just socializing, but some of it has value &#8212; although it may not be immediately obvious.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s interesting to see some of the reactions to Scott Karp&#8217;s post on Twitter and why he stopped using it at Publishing 2.0, a post which has now topped the cluster of Techmeme discussion about Twitter). Anne Zelenka, who writes for Web Worker Daily &#8212; part of Om Malik&#8217;s GigaOmniMedia &#8212; has a fairly visceral &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/12\/12\/twitter-waste-of-time-or-social-tool\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Twitter: Waste of time or social tool?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}