for the last 6 months or more we’ve had a running joke about twitter: someone mentions it and someone else will say “twat did you say?” offensive or not, there are many times that i wonder if its the most accurate response to those obsessed with it. yes, i’ve got an account. yes, i use it. yes, i put a feed of my “twats” on the site. however i’m still struggling to make sense out of its overall purpose and usefulness. i should elaborate.
what’s the purpose?
so far i’ve only had a handful of experiences where i can see a real purpose of “twats” (fyi twits twat). the first is really more of an api thing. simply put, the fact that i can connect twitter with multiple site’s “status updates” makes the overall upkeep of multiple “distribution channels” easier. the second was surrounding the tsa’s “leaked” security directive and its fall out (fastest found via the #tsafail hashtag). this was a case where it took a bit for the traditional news channels to pick up on the absurdity of it all. outside of this, most (though not all) of what i’ve come across via twitter i’ve already found via another online channel. as i’ve slowly increased the people i follow, i find that the “signal to noise” ratio continues to decay, mostly due to twits re-twat’ing other’s twats (you can blame my wife for that string of absurdity) or just overall useless oral diarrhea.
what’s the usefulness?
well somewhere in all that oral diarrhea are nuggets of “info” that are worth looking into. It ranges from links (blog posts, etc) to notifications (such as klm and delta’s messages regarding delays). the problem seems to be founded in a lack of standardization for twat tags. for instance, airlines should probably all use the same hashtag to report on flight delays, such as #flightdelays. i blame this on the lack of a controlled vocabulary defined for twitter. there are too many people, too many messages, WAY too few characters allowed, and only organically defined standards that change with time due to “approaches” coming in and out of popularity/favor.
i’m still struggling with the overall point of twitter. i’ve had a couple conversations with some developers that have brought up possible uses for it that raised my interest, such as setting up applications to monitor your own twats for specific tags. unfortunately, my own creative mind can’t come up with a long enough list of items to automate remotely to justify even sketching on a napkin. that could be my own failure.
as far as i can tell twitter seems to be a giant conversation of status updates and links. i’m really not seeing that it brings people closer. i also fail to see it as the “next big thing” for marketing. please don’t get me started on the term “microblogging.” its a nice way to say, “i can’t write so i post inane comments and links up to 140 characters. if you feel otherwise let me know, but frankly its a marketing term to generate hype.
i came across this link this morning discussing how facebook and twitter are “becoming business tools.”
Dangson believes Facebook is a good setting for businesses to reach consumers, but that there is a greater business opportunity in Twitter, particularly in business-to-business markets, because “everything is public and open.”
Twitter “is a fantastic direct marketing tool,” she says. “People have opted in to follow you and follow your messages.”
maybe i’m completely and totally missing something here, but i would really like to hear how the business to business market has an opportunity within the world of twitter. it really sounds more like someone is throwing some terms around to generate a buzz without any substance to back it up. i could be mistaken, but unless all the people i know are dumb as dirt, none of us can come up with a viable use. now the statement about people following your messages is comical. i’m following just under 100 people and its already “too loud” to pay attention to them all. from what i can tell, most people follow a lot more people than that. so exactly how does one see that important message within all the noise?
twat did you say? yeah exactly.
this year i have only one request: just not the jump seat. anyways, last year i went in the spring with a co-worker. since then i’ve planned to go back at the same time of the year for one reason: keukenhof. only a little over two weeks remaining until i’m sitting at the gate in atl waiting to see if we get on. so far its looking just fine for us, but we shall see.
Anyone that spends a decent amount of time creating their own music develops their own work flow to get to the end product. The same is of course true of any art really. I can’t say every time its exactly the same (sometimes sticking to a process limits the end result too much), but for the most part its close. I’m going to stick to high level and use later posts to discuss the nitty gritty details of template files, tips and tricks, etc. The process comes down to four stages:
For about the last two years or more I’ve been going to 
