

Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration 102
WSJdpatton writes "The growth of services like Twitter and Dodgeball, which tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication, elicits mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
What's for dinner? (Score:2)
Pass. I'll stick with myspace once a day or every cpl days. Don't need anything new.
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Re:What's for dinner? (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a teenager once was quite enough, thank you.
And I'll take that pony now.
Re:What's for dinner? (Score:5, Funny)
(sorry, just couldn't help it
Re:What's for dinner? Ponies. (Score:1)
Ignorance (n) The state or fact of being ignora... (Score:3)
You're just announcing your ignorance to the world.
For better or worse, Myspace is incredibly huge. It's used by tens of millions of people every day. Teenagers? Yes. But also professionals. Adults like you and I that find a lot of value in the way it lets them keep connected with their friends and acquaintances.
Yes, there are ignorant people on MySpace. But there's ignorant people on Slashdot. And even if
Re:Ignorance (n) The state or fact of being ignora (Score:1)
Yeah that's just nonsense. There's no call for others to scoff at people with ANY sense using Myspace. Only for others to scoff at people with a sense of AESTHETICS using Myspace.
Once again... (Score:1)
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A while back there was a band I was interested in, but instead of having a real web page, they just liked to their myspace profile. I gave it a good five-minute try, which is far longer than I'd normally give a poorly-designed page, and I couldn't figure out how to extract any usable information from it.
You call it a stereotype, but I say the truth is an absolute defense. As far as I've seen, Myspace is a pit.
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Here's a simple test: provide us with a pointer to a couple aesthetically pleasing pages at myspace.
I'm open to the possibility that they exist.
Show me.
If you can't, then the "silly over-generalization and stereotype" is just simply the plain truth.
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IMHO it doesn't have to do with the actual means of communication, nor the age.
The mother of a friend of mine calls him five times a day. Every day. It's driving him nuts.
When I first started working at the univ, our private (10 users or so) mailing list had a daily limit of 300 messages or so, that was routinely reached. This changed however when the work load increased. In the mean time the list has ceased to exist.
What I am trying to say is that this kind of behaviour in whatever form is probably spu
Re:What's for dinner? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Charged for a text? (Score:3, Funny)
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U.S. wireless companies must make loads of profit, if they are even charging every time you RECEIVE text messages.
The profits made all over the country by these big companies should be taxed. Since they make tons of profit, the government should be getting a whole lot of taxes from these big companies.
If the government gets so much money from these companies, shouldn't the working class have to pay less?
Shouldn't the deficit be going away?
(at least, I think that is what he meant.)
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People shouldn't be charged for something they don't control.
If my ip allocation gets ddos'ed i don't get charged, i didn't request that traffic.
I have a friend who likes sending jokes by sms, or mms i don't want to get charged for that,
Sender pays is the only fair way
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Re:Charged for a text? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, we were all surprised to learn that taxes from SMS messages profit didn't cover the cost of running the entire federal government, plus our elective wars. Who could have guessed...
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Some guy named jenkins get's a pat on his back and a new corner office with windows for throwing all the custo
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Re:I JUST DUMPED A HUGE TURD (Score:5, Funny)
Once upon a time, a post that would have been a troll, or maybe the Subject: line in a spam sent on behalf of a coprophagy fetish site.
But today, thanks to Shitter, (a new Web 2.0 mashup based on Twitter API), turds of a feather can flock together, for only $0.10 per SMS received.
Yes, now you too can always know what sorts of shit your friends are pumping out through the Intertubes. For the past three weeks, people have joined the crowds on Shitter.com, a site that invites everyone to answer the question: "What are you dumping?"
"I didn't get it at first," said the Goatse Guy. "How much information do I really need to let the world know about me?", but with the demise of ratemypoop.com (a Web 1.0 predecessor to the fecal networking ecosystem), "I've been getting dozen or more 'flushes' a day" - quick, as-they-happen updates to friends who had chosen to link to him through the service. Topics ranged from the effects of lunch (a bowl of corn chowder, a bowl of chili, or a bag of Olestra-based nachos) to work annoyances (a nearby co-worker in an adjacent stall who made the most annoying sounds while wiping his ass). Goatse sends flushes from his office and home computers, and uses his cellphone to send posts from the back woods or even the rank washrooms of a bar at happy hour. "It became addicting very quickly," he said...
Shitter's Mr. Horsey said his company is fine-tuning the service so that members can specify groups of friends whose flushes they receive, though he declined to say when the new features would be available. He defended the site's often scatalogical content. "Everyone says Shitter's completely useless, I don't want all this information," he said. "We check in later, and they're complete addicts."
Despite her gripe with Mr. Goatse's flushes, Helena Handbasket said she's only unsubscribed from a few other people's bowls. She doesn't even mind the occasional dinner Shittering, she said. "I'm actually kind of interested in what people have been eating."
Jeremy Irons on the toilet (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like the people interviewed in the article are all newbs:
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That works when there's a limited supply. The problem with that is that there are so many competing services that can do the same thing with just a little work. It seems like they are all fad services, once it becomes uncool, people move to the next fad service. I'm surprised that many web sites are given venture capital money and later, bought out. Just no good way to capitalize on a service that other people give away free.
Re:Prior art (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone contributes, only a few profit. Lots of that venture capital came from tax money, lots more came from 401(k) investments where the people investing only knew their investments as conglomerate funds.
Pretty sad that it's allowed to continue this way.
So what's new there? (Score:2)
E.g., I've had a RL friend who is, sad to say, an OCPD case. His world has no shades between perfect and crap. E.g., he was proud for example of saving and reloading before _each_ _move_ in turn based strategy game, until he got the perfect result. Not because he actually need
What's the target market? (Score:5, Funny)
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No need to try out those (Score:2)
Actually you need to turn them off sometimes in order to feel you have some privacy in the midst of your living room.
Curmudgeons Unite! (Score:1)
Indeed. Which is why I am not one of those campaigning for video connectivity for the Linux Skype client. The last thing I need is to provide a view of myself and my study at any time of day or night. Some things are just better left to the imagination.
Actually, I got tired of ICQ within a couple of weeks of it coming out. Every time I needed to get anything done, I would be interrupted by that infernal "Uh Oh!". E
Swapping twitters?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Better watch out, he probably thinks the name is a Microsoft conspiracy or something to subvert his goals of...whatever.
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Chaff (Score:3, Insightful)
Raises hand (Score:5, Funny)
And the fact that I have no social life or friends has absolutely nothing to do with it.
IRC (Score:1)
Re:IRC (Score:5, Funny)
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> instant message, and I use SMS only to receive appointment reminders.
Then you realised you could turn it off; disable the ringer and use vibrate only; or use a quiet 'beep' as the ringtone; not give your phone number out to everybody; reject calls at will etc. It's not rocket science.
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This college girl who lives acr
Re:Raises hand (Score:5, Funny)
They had to put up with a horrible mental disorder called thinking. You younger people may not have heard of this, but many of us were afflicted with it in the past. For those of you unfamiliar, imagine being in a waiting room with no cell phone, not even a magazine to read, and no one but strangers around you. At first you try to occupy your mind by examining the pattern on the carpet, but slowly -and no matter how hard you try, you can't help it- your mind will start to wander. You will start to have the most unnerving thoughts. It starts with things that aren't too bad like "what am I going to have for dinner," but will escalate to things like "I wonder what it would be like to go out with that girl over there," or "why did we invade Iraq." These thoughts will leave you very uncomfortable because there is no way to know the answer to them for sure. Essentially, "thinking" leads to more thinking, and just pushes you closer to insanity. And if you think you can avoid the problem by talking to the person next to you, think again. Just imagine trying to talk to someone you don't know. You have no idea how they will react to what you say (unlike your friends and family, whose responses are very predictable). I, for one, am so glad I have a cell phone to help preent the onset of insanity.
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What i would like (Score:2)
I was thinking about this while in the shower the other day.
It would be pretty nice (probably not to privacy zealots who don't allow cookies and such) to have one account which routs all forms of communication to you.
For example, instead of giving each person or organization that needs to send you mail your current address you just give them a meta-address and the mail gets routed to you whenever you change your physical address.
And you c
Complex task (Score:2)
Re:What i would like (Score:4, Insightful)
I was thinking about this while in the shower the other day.
It would be pretty nice (probably not to privacy zealots who don't allow cookies and such) to have one account which routs all forms of communication to you.
For example, instead of giving each person or organization that needs to send you mail your current address you just give them a meta-address and the mail gets routed to you whenever you change your physical address.
And you could have nifty features like aliases that are opaque to the sender, blacklisting, setting up certain media to trigger other media..
That's all i can think of at the moment.
Too long. How about...
EMAIL!
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You can get these services already - but they cost.
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In the future, we'd all be watching you in the shower as you had this remarkable epiphany!
Gaim, email forwarding. (Score:3, Informative)
Gaim unites your IM world. Email forwarding, such as provided by the free software foundation, routes your email to whatever friendly name your ISP gave you. Or you could just give them a gmail address.
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While being a teen... (Score:2)
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There are reasonable ways to see how much use twitter is getting:
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2007/03/15/tracking.sh tml [waxy.org]
There have been about 7 million messages this year; that's about 100,000 a day. So the entire thing could be explained away as ten thousand people sending about ten messages a day. That's peanuts, and it is a lot more likely that there is a big chunk of users that generate many more than ten messages a day. If summer rolls around and the
The future (Score:5, Funny)
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The initiation by the colon is behavior by design, intended to give you the opportunity to override the sphincter & shit all over yourself if you so desire.
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Sure, it's funny now, but it is also likely to be true, or damned close. After all we've got some good research and experiments in reestablishing "communications" between muscles and the brain.
Now, when the ED medication people catch wind of this tech, watch out. We'll be seeing Smiling Bob commercials where he "turns it on and off at will", and slashdot will have jo
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I could see it being given a COCK address & configurable through wi-fi though.
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CrunchGear Headline on WSJ Twitter Article (Score:1)
"WSJ Discovers Twitter, Buttocks in Dark Sans Flashlight"
link: http://crunchgear.com/2007/03/16/wsj-discovers-tw
Mobile updates are *optional*! (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, Red Hat's Mugshot [mugshot.org] service lets you aggregate disparate social networking services and get them from a single interface. Makes it much less of a hassle to keep track of friends in various networks.
Sociopathic? (Score:2)
Okay, they don't cover attention whoring in the DSM.
Not to mention what kind of insecurity do you have that you don't feel any kind of connection to your friends unless you're know exactly what they're doing at every moment.
I had a stalker like
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Paranoia, however, is covered in depth.
Away message: Out to dinner (Score:2)
P.S. Mary, I love you.
Guess who? (Score:2)
Of course, it's most likely an aide, but is he the only one actively campaigning on the internet?
Stay Connected? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell is with this social networking crap? I haven't even talked to my best friend in 3 days. I've gone months without talking to him, for no particular reason than I just didn't have anything of substance to say. People don't need to be updated on what's going on from a moment to moment basis. If my life was that fucking exciting, Discovery would make a documentary about me.
I think this whole period of the internet will be remembered in a decade as another stupid idea up there with refreshing web page chat room/message boards, web pages embedded with ICQ contact panels and GOTO.com search boxes, and web rings. Useless chaff.
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I doubt it.
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I would say we became friends by not talking for long periods of time. Back when we were teenagers, we only talked on Thursday nights. That just meant we looked forward to meeting up instead of it being just another day.
I don't think constant communication fosters strong friendships, because you have little time to reflect on the importance of your relationship with them, and so little changes in a single day that the nature of the relationship becomes shallow and trivial. As they say, absence makes th
tech-savvy people? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who seems to notice that carrying around a lot of expensive electronic bling is not at all a sign of someone being tech savvy? People who actually work with computers and electronics have, A) seen enough products come and go that they know that this year's status symbol is next year's copper bearing material B)have enough endless scanning of data at work to not make it their hobby in their off hours.
Most people with actual te
I was interviewed for this article but not quoted (Score:2)
Dodgeball doesn't work (its Friend of a Friend function hasn't worked in nearly a year and a half) and there are SO many fucking douchebags that are trying to use Dodgeball as if it is Twitter instead of using Twitter.
I'm half glad that I wasn't quoted as the questions the w
Eww. (Score:1)
Information on Social Networking Websites (Score:1)