I Gave Up To Twitter. Have You?
by
on June 10, 2007,
I was laughing at Twitter, I thought it was absolutely useless and saw no sense at all. But after at least 10 people asked how could I, a blogger, avoid twittering I finally gave up. It proved easier than I thought and takes less time (check this post by Robert Sanzalone on twittering from Skype, this makes using Twitter incredibly easy). So after I found a way to Twitter and get updates from people I'm interested in easily I was hooked. But that's no news, I've already seen many bloggers write similar revelations.
What I wanted to do actually is to post a small poll here about your usage of Twitter and simultaneously test the updated SodaHead widget. We have already reviewed SodaHead on Profy and recently received an update from the developers on the major update of the widget - now they call it "the best polling widget on the planet". So what's new in this widget?
The polling widget allows zoom detail of pictures (in the previous review we mentioned that SodaHead was unlike other polling tools in that it allowed for adding images to your polls). Besides, votes are tracked without cookies. You can create a poll with more than 10 answers and allow for people to comment on votes. Besides, the poll widget uses Flash and thus ensures two advantages: first, it eliminates the JavaScript security issues and second, users don't leave your page so you won't lose your traffic.
These new features really sounded interesting so I decided to try this updated widget out and get to know attitude of Profy readers towards Twitter. It actually takes just a couple of minutes to create a poll (provided that you have all the answers and media ready). It works rather fast, you can easily add media (photos or videos) both to the question itself and to the answers. SodaHead also provides a number of options for you to make the poll private (available only to people you send it to via a link or embedding) or public and available to all the SodaHead community. It also offers you to choose from a number of typical answers (such as "All of the above" or "None of the above (leave a comment)"). After creating the poll you will be able to vote yourself and share the poll with your friends by email (it also supports extraction of email addresses from your current email accounts), as a URL or by embedding it to your own blog post or profile. I chose to embed it and copied the code to paste it into this post. Actually I do think there's still some room for improvement (to actually become "the best polling widget on the planet"): they could add some flexibility for customization of the widget for it to resemble the look and feel of the blog or website you embed the widget to. In this event it will be nearly perfec.
So what is your attitude towards Twitter?
SodaHead Opinion Poll: I Gave Up To Twitter. Have You?
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Jowers
Michael Fidler 
jiri
I joined up with twitter just to see what it was like and to follow the live twitter commentary that Director Greg Yaitanes did for the pilot of TV series ‘Drive’.
I think there may be some useful ways to use their service but I have only used it twice myself, and though I did ‘follow’ a couple of people I really just found it a bit of a nuisance, but then I feel the same way about all IM.
I joined it because i liked the idea of having one on my stumbleupon, which i later discovered wasn’t going to work as stumbleupon didn’t support the code their badges used, so i emailed them suggesting a generated image, which would be easy to put on stumbleupon. That was over 2 weeks ago, and they never replied, nor have i seen anything about what i asked, which would be very easy for them to implement… I will use it if they use my idea, but until then twitter is useless to me as i don’t use myspace, and i don’t have a blog (i just blog on stumbleupon).
Yes I have to confess I Twitter. I’m not sure why I really do it but I do anyway. Can be kind of addictive. I’m not into getting Twitter updates on my mobile though. I guess you can Twitter too much.
Thanks to everybody for the comments. I actually thought so - the opinions are so different that it looks like Twitter is used by different people in very different ways.
I’m not sure if they need to get into development separately for StumbleUpon - they are incredibly popular already and they seem to have lots of things in development already. Besides, I think they expect SU guys to develop a badge for SU blogs because so many people have already developed mashups for Twitter.
And yes, it looks like Twitter can become way too addictive so I prefer not to use it on my phone, I only use it with Skype, it worls fine - I follow several people and post updates only when I’m on my PC only.
Some Twitterers seem to have an inflated idea of their own importance, something between narcissism and delusions of grandeur.
Who cares about the random thoughts of others, especially when folks have taken those thoughts as programming from watching TV and government schooling?
Also, other Twitterers seem to be trying to win favor from influential people through flattery, toadyish bootlicking.
Now that Yahoo Fire Eagle is here, location announcing becomes a snap. When Yahoo links up upcoming.com with Fire Eagle, folks can wed events with presence.
Twitter seems to offer something for folks not savvy enough to configure and use an IRC client.
Svetlana, I didn’t know you one year and two months ago when you wrote this post about quitting Twitter. I do know you now and I do see you on Twitter. So I wonder what changed between then and now.
Ari, actually here “give up” was used by me meaning “surrender” so I actually admitted I finally started twittering in this pretty old post. So yes, I am still on Twitter because I made the decision all this time ago