Also think how an influencer like Felix Salmon experiences Twitter is very different than people like the rest of us does. I still get excited about retweets and mentions, I still appreciate getting new followers, and I still get a tremendous amount of valuable information from people I don’t know but that I respect, every day.

Went through your article and it sound like a ranting against Twitter without any real data and facts and analyzing the fact.
Don’t know what personal vendetta you have against Twitter or when Twitter has hit you very hard but at-least as a journalist you should take a unbiased view.
Why Twitter is not annoying?
1-If I want to follow some one I will follow and If I don’t want then I will unfollow them.
2- Every one who is joining Twitter, they are not Salmon Felix working for Reuters. It is their right to write what they think.

3-Twitter is far more democratic in Nature.
4-You clearly have no understanding of the architecture of Twitter which is very straight and Open. The choice is your that what you want to read and what not.
5-Believe me you have been already sold thousand of times and Twitter selling will be another addition.

6- Your article is appears more like a news which people write to cultivate a view against a particular subject without any reason.
7- is this news a PR News?

Thanks. http://www.vieathink.com

As for the sponsored tweets and hashtags, they can amount to a minor annoyance, but they are also an opportunity. If I get a sponsored tweet from a corporation I don’t like, I take advantage of it and block them. Not exactly the reaction they wanted, and I suspect I’m not the only one to do so. Recently, McDonalds started a promoted hashtag, presumably to get eager customers to say nice things about their restaurants, and it went sadly awry, with many people making uncomplimentary remarks about the quality of the food or its nutritional and caloric problems. Oops. Probably won’t repeat that error any time soon. Again, its fairly easy to make the tweet or hashtag or promoted twitter handle account go away, or wish they had gone away.

As for being more a way to meet people you don’t know than keep in touch with people you do, I suspect women see more value in that than men do. I love being able to find others who share my interests, my politics, my hobbies, but don’t happen to live near me, and whom I never met before. I’ve made real friends that way, and I know many people, close and far, who’ve made real friendships online that became real friendships in the real world, with meet ups, social activities, etc.

Its a support mechanism, as well as a social mechanism. Several of us banded together to help one person who was having panic attacks because of some stuff happening in her personal life. She didn’t want to bother and call anyone, but she was literally panicked, hyperventilating, on more than one occasion. The group of us were already on twitter at the times these panick attacks tended to happen, so we would band together to help her get thru it, have her breathe in a bag when necessary, check when she had taken her meds, follow up on her afterward, help her calm down. That is not the first or the last time people have been able to reach out and help others, make friends, etc.

The reason that I tweeted Wednesday evening about your “core purpose” being “… to provide him (me) with financial news …” was because the public description of your Twitter account is this:

“Felix Salmon is the finance blogger at Reuters.”

Your tweets about the Treyvon Martin shooting incident in Florida had absolutely nothing to do with the financial world in my opinion. As a journalist of some 30 years of experience, I DO find journalists who interject personal editorialization into their work as, yes … annoying. ;)

I never tweeted that YOU were “annoying, by the way, as your blog here hints at. :)

So thanks for the free publicity sir. This is a first in my brief Twitterverse career. I now consider myself a Twitter “professional” now that a Reuters reporter has taken the time and effort to present me to the world as someone who annoys him. :)

Sincerely,
Porter Versfelt III
Versfelt Communications Group
Atlanta, Georgia – USA

No one I know personally has more than 1 or 2 tweets to their account which are usually something like “Hey I’m on Twitter now!!”. And I don’t use it at all for news as RSS feeds seem to be much more useful and readable. So six years later and I’m still asking for someone to show me why it’s such a great technological innovation other than the fact that it’s a great vehicle for spam.

Also, what look to be “related tweets” displayed underneath employ so many @, #, and hyper-shortened names that they look more like bad code than human-readable strings.

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