Tag: twitter

Spent far too much of the day dealing with my wife’s car’s sudden decision to have bad brakes. Everybody’s fine, she’s home now, no property destruction or anything, but I was pretty much not doing anything more strenuous than Twitter while it was going on. So it goes.

Not that great, honestly.  I think that I’m going to have to pretty much keep all iterations of Twitter or Tweetdeck or whatever off of my mobile devices.  That does help a lot.  The real problem is that I can’t delete Twitter itself from the Internet.  What I’m going to try to do today is regularize and time my logins.  Jump in, log in, check stuff for updates, probably block a few trolls, then log out again. That might help the cravings.

At least, I hope that it does.  The alternative is to simply cancel my Twitter account, and I kind of need it for work.  Which is possibly the largest complication of all: it’s like having a job that requires you to take regular sticks of morphine.  Get off the stuff, and your productivity suffers.  Which may be why more of my professional colleagues aren’t really even aware just how addicted we all are.

[UPDATE: Geez, I had to end up deleting Tweetdeck.  This stuff is addictive.]

Mixed results from yesterday: I managed to stay off for most of the day, but it eventually took disconnecting this site from Twitter (because I would forget, and let the site post from Twitter, and then people would react to those posts, and I’d get a notification*) and protecting my Tweets (because when I did cheat and go onto Tweetdeck the urge to reply to stuff was nigh-insurmountable**) to get into that state.  But I think that I’ve plugged all the holes, now. We’ll see. But I need a couple of legit off-Twitter days to assess what it’s doing to my head.

Moe Lane

*I now really grok what ‘Pavlovian’ means.  That chime literally makes me drop whatever I’m doing to go look.  I had to delete Twitter from my iPod.

**I thought about suspending my account, but that comes with a specific socio-political message right now. Protecting the tweets means nobody can read my new ones, so there’s no point in writing them – and nobody can see my responses, so there’s no point in making them***.

***No, I don’t want to hear of any loopholes.  And that’s in the ‘tell me about a loophole and I may in fact turn off your account here’ sense. The idea is to keep off the stuff for a couple days, remember?

As in, I logged out of Twitter and hid the desktop icon and stuck the iPod app in a folder and deleted it on my phone. I’m curious whether I have a dependency on the thing, you see: so I’m just gonna turn it off for a day and see what happens next. I’ve already suppressed at least one I wonder what funny stuff my followers said about that: I should go look, which suggests that I might, in fact, have a Twitter dependency*. So if I snarl at anybody, say “MOE! Twitter dependency” or something.  That should snap me out of the Madness Place.

Moe Lane

*I’m trying not to call it an ‘addiction’ because that sounds worse.  Might as well be honest about it; I don’t know whether constantly being dipped in social media is bad for my long-term cognitive and neurochemical well-being, but when I actually write it out like that I suspect that I actually do know and just don’t want to admit it. So taking a day off may not be sufficient…

[UDPATE: I forgot that these posts auto-propagate to Twitter.  Dependency much, Moe?]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: I keep forgetting that these posts auto-propagate.  It’s aggravating! – Although not having Twitter around? Not so much. It’s a quite a bit less nerve-wracking than I expected, in fact.]

This is a bad idea and whoever came up with it should not have.

Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company’s 140-character limit, according to multiple people familiar with the company’s plans.

It’s unclear what the product will look like, but sources say it would enable Twitter users to publish long-form content to the service. Users can already tweet out blocks of text with products like OneShot, but those are simply images, not actual text published on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

If Twitter has done nothing else, it has done this: it has taught many people how to be mercifully brief in their commentary. It has even taught some of them to be concise – and, dare I say, even clear. Reversing that seems unwise.