Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

The irony:  I was pointed to the URL for this post by twitter
(via user "freebsd", which aggregates several things including
FreeBSD folks blog posts).

The second-order irony: the twitter client I use actually masks
itself as an IRC server, so it was in an irssi window where I saw it.

Cheers.

Posted by Grrrr at Tue Mar 24 11:41:30 2009

I generally just use TwitterFox - a plugin for Firefox.  I too heard about this blog post via @freebsd (twitter speak for twitter.com/freebsd).  If you want to get work done, you just ignore it, it's very unobtrusive.  A lot of people simply don't use IRC (especially your friends that aren't computer geeks), and IRC is blocked by a lot of firewalls these days.

All depending on who/whom you follow on twitter, some of the tweets/posts can be educational - like @commandlinefu or news related like @freebsd, @openbsd too.

Posted by David at Tue Mar 24 13:39:58 2009

At least, it's possible to use tircd to suffer twitter within irssi...

I neither don't understand what kind of value adds twitter, or all of the "microblogging" things, it's just like IRC, but using an heavy and unconvenient http API (don't talk about the xhtml/ajax thing), where you must states the channel name in all messages (like you're doing IRC in telnet), and forced to use a single proprietary implementation on the server side.

What interest?

But sad part is, as more and more users use thoses craps, and if you want to follow some events, you may actually need to use those things (here comes tircd...)

Posted by fosco at Tue Mar 24 14:11:43 2009

It's not like you have to (or should) announce everything that you're doing on twitter. At least with the people I follow on twitter, the stream of consciousness is far more interesting than whatever is being said on IRC. Because you're limiting yourself to 140 characters per post, you try to squeeze in as much information as possible. Unlike a IRC channel, no one sees what you say unless they decide you're worth following, so most people limit the inane crap that they'd normally spew on IRC.

In my opinion, twitter allows you to do better filtering than IRC. On IRC if you're in multiple channels, you monitor per-channel activity, not per-user activity. For example, say that I wanted to know if rwatson said anything in any channel that we're both in. I'd have to keep paging back and forth between all those channels any time there was activity (unless I did some scripting thing, which is still annoying and a waste of time). That's a PITA, and completely inefficient. Using tweetdeck, I can set up a 'group' - let's call it FreeBSD - and I can add specific people whose data I find interesting. I can just leave it running in the background, and it'll notify me anytime one of those people post.

Twitter is also handy for real-time news. A few weeks ago, we had an earthquake, or so I'd been told. Not much was on the news sites yet, and I'd slept right through it. I went to http://search.twitter.com, looked for the term earthquake, and saw that a lot of people in my area had noticed it. Remember the Bill Gates/mosquito thing at TED? Yeah, that was on twitter before it hit anywhere else.

I know dissing on twitter is totally trendy right now, but it does have it's uses. ;)

Posted by Randi Harper at Tue Mar 24 14:30:50 2009

I treat twitter much the same way I used to treat IRC (and the same way I treat email. phone calls, etc.) - If I'm working heads-down on something I won't pay attention to it.  I've found it doesn't impair my personal productivity any more than those other nuisances, and you get some interesting fringe opinions on twitter (including total nutjobs like myself, but sometimes useful things come up too). 

Also to repeat Grrrr's irony: I too was pointed to this via @FreeBSD on twitter :)

Posted by mikeg at Tue Mar 24 15:47:04 2009

I'm no huge twitter fan and I dont really like the whole @person routine.. but I have to admit, its a great outlet for when I'm working and I need to vent! Whenever I get distracted I can post my distraction to identi.ca & get it over with.

It works!

Posted by Gert at Tue Mar 24 19:09:07 2009