Do You Use Twitter To Chat?
I’ve read about the pitfalls of Twitter’s being used as a public chatroom. People are likening Twitter to CB radio , which was popular from the 1960’s to the 80’s*. While Twitter’s primary purpose is for people to answer the question what are you doing right now? a lot of people are publicly sending messages to each other, responding to one another’s tweets.
And you know what, I think you can’t blame them (actually, us since I’m fond of chatting via Twitter, too). Twitter is essentially a social network, but it lacks most of the sophisticated features that other social networks have, like the actual network of friends (being friends in twitter is just one level deep: your friends and your followers, and no concept of friend-of-a-friend).
And unlike a blogging service, readers cannot comment on tweets posted by twitter users. So what if you wanted to respond to a post? Just tweet yourself!
Hence it’s common to see Twitter updates bearing names of other Twitter members, which means that particular update is intended for the other person. So a typical thread would look like so:
Bob: Having Lunch in a while. 5 minutes ago
Jim: @Bob What’s for lunch? 4 minutes ago
Bob: @Jim Steak and pasta. Yum! 3 minutes ago
Jim: @Bob Enjoy! 3 minutes ago
... and so forth.
What’s wrong with that? Well, it’s just like sending instant messages that are readable by the public. And that could have privacy implications, especially if you’re haphazard with what you tweet about. So you’d better not chat on Twitter about things you’d rather keep to yourself, or a select group of people. Even if your Twitter updates are restricted to friends only, that still means that all of your friends can read whatever you’re writing, even if it’s intended for one of them only.
I think chatting via Twitter is all right if you’re fully aware that tweets are intended to be public in the first place. So Twitter should not just be about what you’re doing right now, but also what you want to say right now.
*Essentially because CB comprised of non-secure public broadcasts, so everyone can listen in to conversations.
[...] Do you use Twitter to chat? [...]
I Just Ditched FireFox in Favor of Safari and Camino | The J Spot said this on April 24, 2007 6:08 am
[...] Searching the web, I found I’m not the first to compare Twitter to chat or IRC. But lets look at what problems with IRC and Chat that Twitter solves. [...]
Twitter Solves the Chat Usability Problem said this on June 3, 2007 8:22 am
I have also gone through the twitter but i haven’t used twitter for chat because i have no friends in their. If any body add me as their friend then i would gone for chatting. It is a interesting social network but as you said something was missing in that other than the others networking site.
Tom life said this on September 26, 2007 2:00 pm