During CMSexpo many people were boring me to tears with how great twitter is.
At the time I'd never used it and really couldn't see it's purpose.
Then I found an excellent blog post "People in the Joomla Community using Twitter" so I thought I would give it a try.
My first impressions have not been good and first impressions count.
Twitter.com refused to accept my first avatar, I tried uploading it multiple times over several days and all I got was "too many tweets please try later" then when I decided to try a different image as an avatar it accepted the image but cropped the top.. The bit where my face was.
Twitter.com also constantly reminds me to set up SMS updates but this time all I get is "Note: We currently don't support sending SMS to this number." No explanation as to why. Is it because I am in the UK?
So what type of things have I seen on twitter so far and have they been useful.
- Twits about "Jenny riding her new bike" or "I'm drinking a coffee now with Joan"
No interest at all and just a distraction - Twits about new blog posts
Might be of interest but my rss reader does a better job - Repeated announcements about the same product launch
Once is enough, multiple times just annoys me and makes me want to deliberatley ignore you - RT (re-tweets, I had to ask what this was and apparently it's when you repeat someone elses tweet to further publicise it)
Why? - Links to website articles of interest
Because of the masked shorturls you have to click to find out the source only to discover you have already read the article. Google Alerts finds all the articles I want, no one has RT to something I havent already seen yet and the need to click to the site has just wasted my time. - Chats between friends
That's what skype is for and it is more efficient at doing it than twitter will ever be - General Technical Help requests
A forum post will reach more eyes and the 140 character limit makes good answers hard - One-to-one Technical Help requests
I am sure a direct email or a support ticket would be more productive
So what is twitter good for - absolutely nothing!
I'm going to persevere with it for a few more weeks just in case I've missed something but I'm not impressed so far.
Unless you can tell me a good reason to use twitter that I've missed.
(If you do comment please say if you came to this post via RSS, twitter, google, direct link etc)
