Uncommunicative Tweets
My friends are occasionally perplexed by my tweets. In response to one recent tweet, my friend Dan responded:
@RyanMcE You need to add more words if you intend your tweets to be communicative.
And he is absolutely correct. In this case, there is nothing private about the tweet in question (“Dubious indeed”). The story was that my friend Maria and I pulled an April Fools prank on Facebook by becoming engaged. Enough people fell for it that it was fun, but one of my friends called the timing of the announcement “dubious,” since it did come of the first of April. The tweet was in reference to this comment; probably only those who happen to follow me on Facebook would have had any idea what I was talking about.
So, if there is a tweet you don’t understand, know this: not all my tweets are meant to be communicative to all audiences. Just like with some of my blog posts, some of my tweets are really just markers in time for my future reference. I wrote about something like this before, in a post called Why I Blog, and before twitter, I would occasionally post a one-liner to this blog. Now those one-liners have simply migrated to Twitter.
April 4th, 2010 at 04:12:19 pm
This is one of the largest shortcomings of online social networks – they miss a lot of real-life context and often the information they present may be interpreted incorrectly. An example: when a church Young Men’s president follows a 15 year old in the young women’s program – those without the added context might view such a social connection as decidedly dangerous and evil. But those with the added “real life” context would know that it’s simply a church youth leader staying connected with a youth of their congregation.