MetaChat - It's nothing personal,

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10 October 2009

It's nothing personal, but I just deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I just didn't want anyone wondering if something had happened.

post by: Ardiril at: 16:13 | 24 comments

You, Miley Cyrus- everyone cool is leaving Twitter :(

posted by ThePinkSuperhero 10 October | 16:15

I bet Miley will open up a new twitter account after she is done with this love interest.

posted by special-k 10 October | 16:51

I'm finding Facebook tolerable, if a little complicated to use (I can never work out how to see other people's walls, so I don't know what they're doing, which was the whole point of me going on Facebook in the first place). I detest the idea of Twitter.

posted by essexjan 10 October | 17:01

Can you expand on that? Twitter is basically the status update feature from Facebook, minus everything else, which sounds like exactly what you want. What's to hate?

posted by cillit bang 10 October | 17:22

Twitter is basically the status update feature from Facebook,

Or, Facebook is basically Twitter with a bunch of EXTREMELY annoying applications and games cluttering up everything. Hope everything's ok, Ardiril.

posted by Melismata 10 October | 17:40

The only reason I'm on Facebook is because I kept missing out on events, nights out, etc. that were taking place where they were organised on FB and I was the only one in the crowd who wasn't on FB, so kept getting missed off the list. That's not happening now :-)

The idea of updating everyone in 140 characters or less on what you're doing all the time strikes me as ridiculous. I don't have a phone that I could use for Twitter, in fact, my mobile is rarely switched on and if I'm at home, I'll email or post on FB.

Where people seem to have their Twitter feeds linked to their FB account, I can never be arsed to read them, as it's usually of the "I'm stuck in traffic and I'm going to be late for an interview!" type of drivel that's of no interest to me.

posted by essexjan 10 October | 17:42

I get the status update part of Twitter but I've never figured out how conversations work. I've never figured out how to respond to someone else's twit with my own and how you are supposed to follow a back and forth dialog.

posted by octothorpe 10 October | 17:43

The idea of updating everyone in 140 characters or less on what you're doing all the time strikes me as ridiculous.

Said the woman with over 2,000 Mecha posts ;)

posted by ThePinkSuperhero 10 October | 17:49

I'll miss your updates. But you'll still come by MeCha, won't you? Come on, I haven't even seen a picture of your kitty yet! :)

posted by halonine 10 October | 17:51

Yes, but 1,859 of those posts are pictures of kyoot critters.

posted by essexjan 10 October | 18:12

The idea of updating everyone in 140 characters or less on what you're doing all the time strikes me as ridiculous.

It totally works out for me as a log of what I did during the day which I keep archived at my LiveJournal. I've even figured out that some of the time, I can cross-reference receipts to what I did during the day and then can thus figure out what I can write-off and what I can't.

But I also like it a lot since I try not to Gmail or Facebook too much at work, it's one of the few ways I get to communicate with people I like, on a time-lagged basis.

Trisha Lynn, Twitter-apologist...

posted by TrishaLynn 10 October | 19:43

Ardiril, I just found out about this from Twitter today, which may interest you. :)

posted by BoringPostcards 10 October | 20:05

But, ej, dontcha want to know if I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today?!

I have FB and Twitter accounts and use and ignore them every now and again.

posted by deborah 10 October | 20:57

I promise not to think less of you. I don't personally see what the big deal is about deleting oneself. It's perfectly common to have an account and update it once in a blue moon -- in fact, that's probably more fundamentally intrinsic to the idea being either site than anything else. The difference between that and a blog you never update is that your update is "pushed" to your friends' walls.

essexjan, I hardly ever look at anyone else's wall, I just watch what they put on mine.

Anyway, I think this "feed" model is of the future. Not every application will be quite like either FB or Twitter, but they'll all incorporate that in their features.

posted by dhartung 10 October | 22:33

For me Twitter is basically facebook without the high school aspect to it. Since you can follow exactly who you want, if you're reading "I had a grapes for lunch" then that's on you and your choice. It is what you make it.

A lot of the friends I have on facebook never leave facebook. For them, facebook IS the internet.

Twitter can be a pretty cool tool, and I'm convinced by the response of many who hate it that they simply have no idea what twitter is or does.

posted by justgary 10 October | 22:41

"For them, facebook IS the internet." Them twunts never heard of the Usenet?

posted by arse_hat 10 October | 23:25

twitter is how i torture myself by following all the NYC food trucks and pining for their specials every day.

posted by gaspode 11 October | 01:29

I don't have any real time access to most of the internet during my working day - all social networking, personal email, blogs, shopping, eBay, etc, is blocked at work, so there's no point reading what someone else has done hours after the event. When I get home, I check my email, check my favourite websites, then get on with my evening.

posted by essexjan 11 October | 03:21

octothorpe:

I've never figured out how to respond to someone else's twit with my own

Mouse over the twit and a little arrow appears on the right hand side. Alternatively you can just type the @username thing manually.

and how you are supposed to follow a back and forth dialog.

Conversations only really work at the moment if you're following both users (or one of the users is you), and then you see them correctly interleaved on your front page.

The Twitter people don't seem very interested in making it easy to piece together other people's conversations.

posted by cillit bang 11 October | 05:07

≡ Click to see image ≡

posted by jonmc 11 October | 09:36

I fruitlessly followed the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck on Twitter, but never once saw it in person. We went to Union Square 3 times looking for the damn thing. Not that we didn't have anything else to do.

So, yeah, Twitter bad.

posted by danf 11 October | 16:32

Dude, I work there and I've never seen it, but then again we're up to our ass in mobile food trucks down there so maybe it got lost in the shuffle.

posted by jonmc 11 October | 16:41

"I don't personally see what the big deal is about deleting oneself."

It's not, but the last time I quit a web community without any announcement, people emailed to ask if I had died of a heart attack. ("Um, yeah!" heheh) You would have thought their brains were made of plastic.

(That latter sentence is a very deep inside joke. If you don't get it, rest assured you are not the target.)

posted by Ardiril 11 October | 20:19

Twitter has its usefulness. You can control your PC via Twitter, for example. http://tweetmypc.codeplex.com/

I like that I can keep up with my friends in much shorter posts. It seems people are much more likely to tweet than say, send an e-mail.

posted by IndigoRain 11 October | 23:22

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