Comments on: “Twitter Does Not Foster Meaningful Discussion”

By: John

John — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:30:41 +0000

Mark,
Agree to a point – the tool is not meaningful, but using the tool can foster meaningful discussions. Keep in mind that in addition to the tools that I use to decide who to follow and engage are augmented with search and discovery tools to learn what I did not realize I would need to know. I want to be careful we don’t come away from this conversation making the same a priori decisions about what is important to us. The serendipity of being presented with information we didn’t know that we didn’t know is essential to my message here.
Regards,
jb

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:40:40 +0000

John,

The specific tools and methods that you use to make sense of the Twitter noise are the kinds of filtering techniques needed to discover the unknown information that could be of value to you. The key is that you, not a sysadmin or the like, has made the substantive decisions about what you want to follow, who you want to engage, and what is important to you. So, Twitter is not meaningful…it’s what we do with it that is.

Regards,
MB

By: John

John — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:39:18 +0000

Daniel,
Concur – but I believe tools and techniques are evolving nicely. Tweetdeck allows me to follow specific search terms and groupings of people, and being judicious about who I follow helps quite a bit. I discover and get discovered by following 2nd level network contacts on occasion and monitoring a tag cloud that reflects a data aggregation of terms flying across Twitter. Honestly, this combination has greatly increased the signal-to-noise ratio for me.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:34:06 +0000

In fairness to the sweepingly general assertion, there is a lot of meaningless crap on Twitter. It would be nice if some combination of technical tools and social norms helped improve the level of discussion on Twitter. That said, I’ve derived a lot of value from discussions on Twitter, and I suspect that those who dismiss it are largely doing so based on uninformed (or under-informed) preconceptions.

By: Jim Millen

Jim Millen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:58:43 +0000

I agree, and have also found many who struggle to understand the value in Twitter. It strikes me that the initial statement – “Twitter Does Not Foster Meaningful Discussion” – may be broken down into two key points, which explain a great deal about why Twitter is in fact so useful!

First, “meaningful” – this does not equal complexity or depth. Some of the most meaningful insights can easily be expressed in 140 characters or less – indeed, forced brevity can enhance the power of a message. It’s entirely possible to have meaningful discussions via Twitter, as your last example shows.

Then “…does not foster..” – in its very brevity, Twitter acts as a filter and channel to more complex and in depth interactions. It most certainly does foster meaningful discussion, in whatever medium best suits – your other examples are great illustrations of this!

Twitter can become a low-bandwidth aggregator, allowing you to easily filter by context that which you wish to pursue and that which you don’t. Here, the real value lies in your interaction with your network – and Twitter enables meaningful interaction with a surprisingly large network.

Therefore I too would thoroughly disagree with that statement – thanks for a valuable post, it’s made me think about this more deeply!