[sf-perl] Do You Twitter?

[Joe Brenner]

David Scott <ds94103 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I may sound like an out-of-it old fogey here but the overall usefulness
> of micro-blogging doesn't exactly hit me right between the eyes.  Is
> there a secret sauce?

I'm inclined to agree, but then it's often hard to describe to
someone the point of a new, unfamiliar communications medium.  I can
remember trying to explain to people why I liked email, and getting
responses like "but why not just phone them or send them a letter?"

And anyway, I'm also someone who doesn't see what's so exciting about
cell phones and so on (and if you aren't into "text"ing, it's hard to
see how you'd enter your 140 word twits).  Other people clearly have
different set-points than I do in their need for social interactions,
and I doubt that there's anything fundamentally wrong with this
(though I have to confess I often make fun of cell phone addicts who
seem to be afraid they're going to pop out of existance if they stop
talking for a few minutes...).

As for the public/private life issue, I think it's a bit of a
non-issue...  Myself, I've been living a (semi) public life for a
long time now:

 http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles

If it makes any difference to my life that there's a pile of my
musings on random subjects out there on the web, I'm not aware of it.

Part of the appeal of on-line publication is that you figure if no
one wants to read it, they just don't won't, and there's nothing
lost on either side... And amateurish, egocentric "blog" writing
would be less of a problem if google hadn't decided to index the
stuff as though it were real content.

Oh, and you want "on topic"? This is where my stuff about software
engineering starts:

  http://obsidianrook.com/doomfiles/LANGUAGES_OF_POWER.html