Johannes Schlüter

Some time ago I already wrote about me not understanding twitter. But well, sometimes at least I'm open for learning new stuff so, I did what everybody does and started to use twitter. I tweeted some messages, followed some people, by using the web interface and by using different client. And I still have to say: I don't get it.

My initial thinking when watching twitter was (and still is) that people are using it to tell pointless things like that they are on their way home or on the way to the restroom. I actually don't see the point in this information - neither why I should give it, nor why one might be interested in reading this.

When asking "What is twitter?" before I was told "it's kind of a delayed IRC". Well, I use IRC and IRC is used for useless stuff like above, too but for one often in a different way ("Sorry can't answer on my way home") or as an information for specific people. But well often pointless, too, but IRC is about more: It is about discussion. For that I can see a point in a delayed IRC - that might mean something like "hey I don't have to be on my box all the time to follow the whole discussion". But that doesn't work with twitter. So let's assume I have a question, I put it on twitter and maybe one of the few people following knows the answer answers me, maybe I have a question ins response and get an answer, again. That's fine. But looking at it from a third perspective is bad: I follow the one having an interesting question. How do I get the answer? - One way is to follow everybody who follows the person asking the question so I get the answer, too. This won't work as I'd have to follow way too many people and have tons of nonsense information. The other way is to search for answers, maybe using search.twitter.com's web interface, maybe using the API (and some client). But there the APIs suck for that purpose. Although twitter has the "reply" feature and tracks it I can't search for answers to a givin tweet, all I can do is search for tweets mentioning the name of the one who asked the question and then then check whether that's a reply to the question, then I'd have to do this recursively to get all answers. That's just broken.

Well, I'll continue having that twitter client running and post things from time to time maybe the enlightenment comes or I get bored of it ... I'll see

As one can see on the frequent updates on this blog I don't have much to say, now there's this twitter thing, until recently I didn't understand it. Whenever I visit the site I see mostly pointless (imo) stuff like "preparing my pizza", "eating my pizza", "done with my pizza". The other thing I see there are people telling me what errors in their applications they are currently fixing. I can't see why that's interesting. But as people seem to be interested I found out that I have stuff to say, too, or better my PHP has, since sometimes I have errors there, too. But well, I'm lazy so I don't want to "twitter" them myself, instead of that I wrote a little PHP extension intercepting the error handling and sending the error messages to my twitter profile. While doing that I found out that this saves a whole lot of monitoring infrastructure as twitter then can send you a SMS telling you your app broke, great no? (Disclaimer: I won't use it on a production box as it makes the error reporting way slower and twitter seems, from what I've heard, to be down quite often)