"Die Twitter, die!"

I love social media. I can post my thoughts about Twitter in FriendFeed on this blog and on Twitter and in the space of 18 minutes a debate has broken out and has largely finished. Current consensus is that FriendFeed ought to modify how it treats incoming tweets or perhaps even remove Twitter streams from the other streams.

That is an oversimplified solution to a problem FriendFeed didn’t create. It also presents a bit of a challenge. What about the people who use Twitter to answer that old question “What are you doing?” rather than as a very public chat room? Why should those people’s often pithy comments not be added to a lifestream in realtime or even excluded because other users use it for a purpose it wasn’t intended for and wind up flooding it with chatter?

And as for the way Twitter is being used, well, this response doesn’t quite cut it for me either:

I am all for people using these tools in ways that work well for them. What I am not in favour of is this sort of complaint that the way we have been using Twitter is working too well. Users are so used to it as a chat service that it is working a little too well even though it isn’t well suited for the purpose. The end result is a truckload of tweets of little real value out of the context of a conversation.

I am deliberately being sticky about this. Try again …

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twitter, chatter, uses, users