Eat Your Broccoli
Stefano Mazzocchi: I suspect (which is the reason why I don’t use it) that Twitter is as addictive as any good IRC channel… and as pointless as they feel when you look at them for too short of a time span.
When my kids were younger, they were like that. Won’t try something, but were sure that they won’t like it. As a veteran of twitter (with just over 24 hours under my belt), I can already tell that it is nothing like IRC. IRC is intense and quick and not everything is either directed at you or even is of interest to you. With twitter, you subscribe to whom you like, and if the number of people you are subscribed to is low, you can check it infrequently. I’ll try to keep my subscriptions low for now.
Additionally, twitter messages may be specifically directed at you. I’m concerned about not seeing those, so I wrote a little script that forwards them onto me via XMPP. It is set up to run once an hour, so if a message is either directed at, or merely references, me, then I’ll see it around a half hour later. I’m hoping that the expectation is not that people respond to every reply.