jeremy snyder’s meta|remix

as i mentioned before, i started using twitter a while ago. but i’m really unimpressed with it. i see a mix of people using it, and for different purposes.

1. those who just have conversations with each other, where every tweet begins with @johndoe
2. those who just use it to push their own services, where every tweet has a tinyurl.com, ow.ly, ping.fm or is.gd link in it
3. those who use it like a digg substitute, with a url as above in it
4. those whose tweets are really what the site was intended for, just personal updates.

so far, i’m not finding too much value in any of those. i hear that you get a lot of breaking news first on twitter, but that’s not a key need for me too often.

and by the way, i always heard the story that twitter started as an offshoot of another company, with the core question being a way to tell people what you’re doing right now, which was observed through people’s status updates in their instant messengers. so why can’t my twitter updates actually update my instant messenger status? i have yet to see a tool that updates my status in skype, adium, pidgin, trillian, aim, etc.

i just searched for myself on facebook, just typed in “jeremy snyder” and hit enter. somehow i don’t appear at all, but going through 6 pages of search results, i see mostly duplicates. weird.

i’ve heard a lot of the hype around friendfeed, both on the positive side (quick, easy, great for keeping informed) and negative (overload, overkill, too much information). my very quick initial feedback.

• getting started was easy
• sign-up was simple and quick
• getting my first 5 services installed was also painless
• it couldn’t find my webmail contacts, except for gmail
• only 4 of my gmail contacts use it

so bottom line: without the necessary “critical mass” of my friends using it, i’ll leave it alone.

a few months ago, danah boyd published her latest thoughts about facebook’s violation of user privacy, and in a previous post, she had talked about owning your own identity.

i’m starting to think that we’re soon going to live in a world where you have to pick either total privacy or total openness. and every one of us is going to have to decide which side we fall in. i tend towards the openness side, especially in business life. for instance, i’ve previously talked about how i’m not a real fan of stealth mode for startups.

but here’s the rub - who has time to be so open? i had this conversation with a guy last night. he mentioned that he uses twitter. i do, too. but, i never visit their web site. i send my tweets via ping.fm, and i love that i can update my own blog using it. so it’s funny - i want to be open and “out there” and tell anyone interested what’s going on. and i don’t even mind if random stalkers show up to find out about me. but who has the time?

at least the status side of it is. i’ll be testing the blogging tools soon.

i’ve resisted using twitter up until now because i always thought it was too much information, or just information overload, and because i had enough things to manage already.

but, i have to say, now i’m seeing some value in it. using ping.fm and a twitter rss feed makes it pretty simple. so my twitter page is http://twitter.com/halffinn. feel free to follow.