I was away on vacation and without internet, so read the discussion board and tried to read the twitter stream only today.
Discussion board mainly about the use of twitter. At times it felt like a discussion between converts and non-converts, in group and out group, worlds apart.
So, on to http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/mscidel. Unfortunately, I can only see the 10 latest, and an export I can't seem to manage either. It's probably my stupidity, but if a tool is not really obvious I give up real quickly.
So, on to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mscidel as an alternative. What do we get?
- Frequent time outs trying to wade my way towards 7 days ago, I would have liked to make it to 8 days ago, but that was not possible, so already stuff is vanishing.
- Some people use twitter names that don''t relate to their real names, yes, I can look them up on the who we are where we are page, but that's a hassle. Talk about 'embodiedness' ;-)
- Okay, from 7 days ago, I started wading forward, just to give up after going through one day of tweets. Why?
- A lot of solo tweets, that is: not part of a conversation. People quoting some line from some article. 140 characters is just not enough to get some context here.
- Hey, some conversations are going on that can be expanded in Twitter search. Lots of them are short, lots of retweets, I don't get the feeling that there's much discussion really going on.
There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.
It also reminds me of the discussion we had in week 1 about a false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.
Up until now I find Twitter useful to relay information that might be interesting (have done a few times with the #mscel hashtag); when at a conference and people add information (other than retweeting the slides), or being used as a backchannel. I still don't like the tool very much.
Keywords: IDEL10
Comments
>Some people use twitter names that don''t relate to their real names, yes, I can look them up on the who we are where we are page, but that's a hassle. Talk about 'embodiedness' ;-) <
:) Though a few folk use the same sort of account name across different spaces (e.g. twitter, SL), so it could open up interesting questions about identity.
>There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.<
Interestingly, I’ve had folk both argue for and against the ‘retrospective twittorial’. Some, like you found it especially hard to follow, others found it a worthwhile detective experience, a puzzle to piece together that gave them further impetus for learning.
>…false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.<
I wonder if this is also because time is different for each member of the discussion. For instance, in Skype we are all on simultaneously and know that’s basically how each other is experiencing it (albeit with a bit of lag). On the db, we know people are unlikely to beon at the exact same time as us and that they may read things in different order. On Twitter, we might be online at the same time as some, and because of the unthreaded nature, cannot guess at how others might enter the stream when they do come online. So perhaps this makes for an even more temporally strange experience?