SheGeeks - Latest Comments in The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Jas Talents and Models — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:42:44 -0000

Its a case of the getting too attached to your "home" but sometimes, you gotta get out of your comfort zone because the grass could be greener over the other side of the hill

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Shaneen Clarke — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:10:29 -0000

I agree with you, if you're already satisfied with your current home, why transfer, it's a risk and you might not know it's not that good.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

laptapos — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:43:24 -0000

You should better stay on twitter. Twitter is much more active and better than plurks service. Since you have established a community in twitter, continue it until you reach the top. You are not yet the top user so better continue on twitter.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Nishland — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:03:30 -0000

There will always be newer, bigger, better products/services out there. Advantages/Disadvantages to everything we use. That is the simple nature of competition. If we are making enough noise about Twitter or any of these other mediums, I am sure the developers are taking notice and working to improve (at least we can hope). Not like I am a twitter advocate or anything. If we continually abandon just to hit on the next 'new' thing, then what we will ever gain?
I may not have a lot of followers on Twitter....neither have I promoted my brand. But I agree with you Corvida. Leaving would be bittersweet...

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Mark Waters — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:49:34 -0000

The unreliability of twitter got too much for me on June 27th , I've tried jaiku, friendfeed, pownce and plurk but ended up setting up my own microblog at http://microblog.weloveit.i... using Wordpress with the Prologue theme.

I find it better and am actually posting more , its also more personal and I don't worry so much about creating noise for the people who follow me.

I've found that by reading peoples twitter feeds in an aggregator I can get a more coherent picture more quickly.

The best part about twitter was the Instant Messaging interface and the 'track' facility , both of which are currently offline.

The future should be more distributed not reliant on a single service provider.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

amsall — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:32:32 -0000

I am amazed at the number of times the word "faith" is used in reference to Twitter. Is this a new religion :-) As we all know, faith is irrational and subjective by definition. When all is said and done, Plurk is much better for one2one, human2human conversation than Twitter.

Well, I still use both Plurk and Twitter but I feel I'm getting closer and closer to Plurk - plus the "horizontal timeline" is real cool once you get used to it!

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

lulugirl896 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:22:57 -0000

I think what will eventually happen if Twitter doesn't become more reliable is that it will become a place where people will ocassionally pop-in to say howdy and send some DMs and that will be all. Sad, but true.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

gwalter — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:57:08 -0000

Go for it!

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Michael Gaines — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:37:28 -0000

While I agree that Twitter's community is very important, I wonder if it's people's laziness to move to another service that's keeping people in Twitter in the first place.

I started a Plurk account and within a week I had 1/3 of my 300+ followers there, with more every day.

Granted, Plurk is not Twitter, but it does keep the noise level down a bit.

And really, if people care enough about you, they'll follow you wherever you go. The ones that don't, well, are they true followers or just people padding their own follow list? If you go to Twitter Karma, how many of people's followers have actually posted something in the last week or month?

FriendFeed is starting to grow on me also. Not only is it like Plurk where it keeps the noise level down (albeit in a different manner), it's a great way to find new people.

To be honest, I think Twitter as a service not only needs to become stable, but needs new features built in as well, with the stability issues, that might not happen for a while. We're already down to 20 req./hour and we even hit 10 a week or so ago. It's hard to keep up with things when 8 minutes is already too late.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Fred Brunel — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:35:22 -0000

That's true.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Corvida Raven — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:15:03 -0000

That's way to confusing. What I've sent on Plurk doesn't cater to my Twitter audience. It's two different communities for me and I personally don't want to bother checking on both conversations. It could either become very confusing or very time consuming.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

philbaumann — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:13:54 -0000

Yup, there's a certain pliant intimacy to Twitter that's hard to beat.

It is, mostly, a great community too (so far). A real democratizer, which is maybe why it's so appealing.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Corvida Raven — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:13:50 -0000

The same applies with Twitter in a different way. There's no viable alternative to Twitter (community/brand). ;)

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Corvida Raven — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:12:48 -0000

Maybe, but my followers are also though-leaders and experts (no offense), so in a sense, I may be following them more than they are following me. It's not the same at all though to get them to switch platforms if it's not something they understand or even want to do, no matter how much they want to stalk you.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Corvida Raven — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:09:54 -0000

I never even thought about Fire Eagle. But just because you cross post elsewhere doesn't mean you're disloyal to Twitter. I have communities on FriendFeed, Strands, Diigo, and a few other non-tech places. I cross post on them all, especially FriendFeed (though that's one of the points of FriendFeed). Doesn't mean I'm being disloyal to any of them.

You used great analogies though, I want to make a post just so I can quote your comment lol

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

nickobec — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:53:47 -0000

Like most I experimented with Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, BrightKite etc and each time I returned to Twitter, because of the community.
I have strayed to FriendFeed and stayed there, I am involved in a quite different community there. I use Twhirl with both Twitter & FF windows open, if Twitter is no responding, I wil concentrate of FF.
I do not agree with the Windows analogy, I use Windows at work, Mac OsX on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home desktop. I can live without any one Os and have easily (even my Mac) for any length of time.
The bar analogy is better.
If twitter loses the community I will be out of there.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Andy C — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:26:37 -0000

In my time, I have left Blogger, then WordPress dot com, then spontaneously decided to ditch my hosted WordPress in favour of Habari. More recently, Twitter and I went through a rather messy divorce.

Most times, I don't even bother to put up a redirect notice or redirect my feeds. Sometimes this is due to blind incompetence but mostly it was a conscious decision.

If people are bothered enough to seek out my new presence, it probably means they are genuinely interested and worth knowing.

Also, I think it's fun to occasionally ditch everything that has gone before and start from zero (literally) and forge a new community.

Or maybe I'm just weird.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Anton — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 04:27:30 -0000

For those who like Plurk but don't want to lose his twitter community... May be it would be a compromise solution — to import your Plurk rss feed to twitter via twitterfeed?

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Fred Brunel — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:41:12 -0000

You're totally right. I tried to use Plurk but starting from scratch was a waste of time. And if your community can't follow you to this new service, it's pointless.

I'm not sure about your Windows analogy though. I don't think people stays for the community. Windows has become ubiquitous at the time because there was no viable alternative (price/feature).

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

charlieanzman — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:23:05 -0000

Corvida - You're right on with this post. It's not necessarily the addiction level (although I like your analogy), it IS the fact that people have built some huge follower bases that they can leverage at any time. They will keep coming back as long as there is a Twitter unless the service really went under (for like a week or more). Even then, they'd probably come back.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Nikos Anagnostou — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:51:56 -0000

I agree it is all about the community, but isn't true that your true followers will follow wherever you go? I made an experiment myself by opening a plurk account and within 1 day one third of my followers where there too.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

Albert Willis — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:47:11 -0000

It's been rough using Twitter these days; I also feel that it's all going to get worked out. Jeff Bezos wouldn't have invested if Twitter didn't have a concrete plan for brining stability to the service. And Twitter is hiring some scalability heavy-hitters to get things under control.

Yeah, Twhirl has been weird for me too; luckily I can use Twitterrific most of the time.

Corvida, I agree with your assessment of the Twitter community; I would add that it's also pretty damn resilient.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

michellew — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:47:37 -0000

You are so right. I think I just became follower 901.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

michellew — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:46:55 -0000

You are so right. I think I just became follower 901.

Re: The Problem With Leaving Twitter

gwalter — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:45:44 -0000

After reading your post yesterday, re: Portland and Twitter, I was thinking about some of the implications of Twitter that came up yesterday - or at least what I became aware of. First, Besos getting on board with Twitter; second, Twitter hiring that super-geek, engineer; and finally, I learned that Google had acquired Jaiku (old news, but new to me). Anyway, that got me to thinking.

I compare the social networks to various bars/taverns one will find in a small town. Although every bar looks essentially the same to the common passersby, each has their own clique and their own flavor - subtle differences known only to the insider. Like you said about Twitter above, I was thinking the same thing this morning.

Sure, I could pick up and move to another bar, but it would take awhile to gain trust and relationships. But why would I want to do that? I have a circle of friends here at Twitter's already. There are good people at Jaiku's, Pownce's, and Plurks - not to mention down the street at FriendFeed's, BrightKites, and that new place, Fire Eagle's.

In fact, I'm not incredibly loyal - I cross post, so I already have friends in each place. But I'm not going to walk out on my 350+ followers now.