Sigh
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218179/_whitehouse_takes_on_Twitter_Town_Hall
Is it actually possible to have meaningful conversations about complex topics in a microblogging setting?
I haven’t really told anyone this, but I have microblogged before, using the identica service. I stopped using it after five months because of the frustating character limit, which is identical to Twitter’s limit. Even discussing technical topics such as how to set up custom SSL certificates for Maemo 5’s XMPP client — you know, topics that are cut-and-dry compared to, say, social policy — was a total disaster of multiple updates and space-hungry at-notation.
I found the experience to be worse than IRC, and that’s because of a structural difference in the way messages are aggregated. There is not much difference between a single tweet or status update and a single IRC message; however, when you review a channel log, you can see all public messages and trace conversations. I can’t do that on my own page, much less anyone else’s, without lots of clicking around. It’s a terrible way to review conversations and it has left me permanently convinced of microblogging’s uselessness.
I have reinforced my experiences by noting that people tend to use Twitter not for carrying on conversations, but rather as a feed of laconic, selective, and unsubtle advertisements. (Who needs a media sky when you can route advertisements to billions of nodes?)
So. I clearly don’t think much of this move by the Obama administration — I think it’s mistakenly prioritizing breadth over depth. I also think that said administration knows this and is using Twitter not as a venue for a useful conversation with its constituents, but rather as a public relations stunt.
I am, however, interested in dissenting opinions.