> On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 10:26 -0400, Nathan Hamiel wrote: > > > > Let's also not forget that Twitter and Facebook just helped overthrow a > > couple of governments, so not all babble is pointless ;) > > Pretty sure the concept of coup d'état was well established long before > Twitter or Facebook. People just use the tools at their disposal given > the times. > > Back in the day papyrus might have done what Twitter and Facebook are > doing in a much more modern and high tech way. At some point in time > papyrus was high tech, as many other things. >
Oh wow, you do live in a bubble. I am not sure why you threw the papyrus reference in there, you have to know that is complete BS. First of all in the days of papyrus most people couldn't read much less have a basic education. Not only that but there wasn't an instant one to many and then shortly after a many to many relationship with written data. That is massively huge and enormously large :) Social networks (love them or hate them) have connected the world it a way not thought possible before. You may be feeling a certain way about the government or your living conditions and have no idea that thousands of people around you also feel the same way. Then you find out that all over your country feel the same way. You may have kept it to yourself. You may not have been aware that the government dragged someone a few blocks away out of their house kicking and screaming never to be seen again. That's the power of socially connecting to people on the Internet. Hell, most news stories are broken on Twitter before you see them on the evening news. These facts are pretty undeniable. I would like to see a papyrus do that ;) > Or another contrast, someone using Twitter at all. I am pretty proud > that I have never. :) > Why does that make you proud? I am always surprised when people say things like this. There is no way to really know the value of a social network until you use it. The value of your social network experience is based on who you are connected to as well as your contributions back to it. I realize this is hard for you to understand because you haven't participated but I think you would be surprised. Often I see things on twitter days and sometimes weeks before it ends up on something like Slashdot. What about things that would be useful to you that might not make it to something like Slashdot? In some ways by not being a Twitter user you are losing out. In some ways participating in Twitter allows you to directly connect with developers of a project or other experts in your field. Take the security community for instance, you may find out about new tools an techniques long before other people find out about them. You may even find information that his helpful that never gets published to a news aggregator. I turn a lot of security people on to Twitter for these very same reasons. I fail to see how any of this is a drawback. Often people are going through massive amounts of information and giving you the useful highlights. That is a HUGE advantage to someone like me who stays pretty busy. So you are still saying this collaborative community is something that you are proud to not participate in? > The bigger point is that a large majority of people just have nothing > > interesting to say, so they just say anything in order not to be silent. > I > > just wish people would understand that it's ok not to say anything for a > few > > days on Twitter. The planet will still keep spinning and everyone will > still > > be able to move on. > > The same could be said for blogging, and most of the social > media/networking world. Surely some good, amongst all the useless babble > and opinions. > Once again though, it depends on the people you socially connect with. The people with the useless babble probably wouldn't be the people you would follow every day. For a blog, you just wouldn't read it if it provided no value to you. > > There is far worse research out there. I can see where some company > looking > > at a social network presence may be interested in this type of data. I > > personally wouldn't do it, but oh well. > > Its just ironic considering the companies they are researching or built > around have yet to grab a profitable footing and still feeling their > way, making their mark on the world. Just wondering if any money is > being made from all the wheel spinning. Sure seems like a whole lot of > time is being wasted. Not just some money an ass-load of money. This is a huge area of next generation marketing. This is the future so it seems reasonable that people would foot some research in to it. Now, even though I have a Facebook account, I don't like Facebook at all. The only thing I do on Facebook is talk politics and call my friends horrible names, but there are people out there who consider Facebook the "Internet". Almost the same way that people used to think of AOL as the Internet back in the day. They get everything they want to do online from Facebook and don't really need to go anywhere else. This is a driver for marketing people and pretty easy to see why they are throwing money at it. -- *Nathan Hamiel* http://hexsec.com <http://hexsec.com>http://twitter.com/nathanhamiel blog: www.neohaxor.org
