Comments on: Take Control of Your Twitter!

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:52:13 +0000

Thanks John, you always land the big fish.

And I hear the frustration over the twitter hype cycle, which is inevitable.

let’s go jump into seesmic

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:20:07 +0000

Oh, I understand that twitter isn’t an essential utility. And I get that things break all the time. But at the same time, it’s a bit disingenuous to introduce scads of new users to it and then shrug our shoulders with “yeah, it does break a lot, doesn’t it.” I think that criticism, though, would be unfairly aimed at you, I get the “fisherman/nuggets” thing and think you have helped teach a lot of fisherpeople(?). The frustration is more directed at the “twitter is THE learning network, bring twitter into your classroom” school of demagoguery that I just tune out from, the least of all reasons being twitter’s horrible performance history. And for the record, I run a blog, on my own server, with an RSS feed, FOR A REASON. I been fishing so long they sometimes call me John.

By: Alan Levine aka CogDog

Alan Levine aka CogDog — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:07:33 +0000

You wont like my response, but deal with it this way– I have very little expectations of twitter, so when it gets a hairball in its crawl, I do something else. As much as I love it, its hardly essential, like air, water, electric, and it is certainly not a utility service (in terms of expecting uptime all the time)

And we do a disservice to the teachers, students we work with to lay them the expectation it will work all the time. The web internet is invariable “broken” at small and large skills, and we ought to be doing the fish teaching to help people understand that and be good at looking for end arounds, rather than having them get bent out of shape because the nugget machine is busted.

Okay, push back, brother. I am waiting ;-)

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:38:53 +0000

For the record, I *know* that I can alter the URL when the ‘older’ link disappears. But that doesn’t make twitter any less broken when that happens. So

- “Yeah!” for simple, persistent URLs I can hack by hand
- “BOO!” for Twitter’s sucky uptime and “break it on the fly” development model

By: Anne Mirtschin

Anne Mirtschin — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:44:20 +0000

I thought it was just me who was losing those bottom buttons, so this was of interest to me. When I first joined twitter, I also could not make sense of it, but now it is almost a ‘must have’ in my life!!! My teaching and classroom outcomes have been all the richer for doing so. Unfortunately, I am having difficulty opening your movie so will try again later, as I would really like to view it.

By: Anne

Anne — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:47:45 +0000

Oh my gosh! I am so glad to know that I am not the only one who [at first] thought it was the “dumbest thing anyone can do.” Now I can’t get away from it. The resources and professional connections I have made in just the last week are amazing and have been greatly beneficial in my own work. Thank you Tweets!