What’s the twittering about?
MIT Advertising Blog: “Twitter, which looks like a pinnacle of narcissism and is more boring to read then The Dullest Blog in the World” And now there is advertising to go with it. Yikes.
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That’s not advertising… That’s the woot RSS feed being piped into Twitter…
It’s not even entirely useless…
Automattic, for example does a similar thing to announce releases for WordPress (or someone pretending to be Automattic is doing that. :-) )
Twitter is nothing more than people’s voyeuristic tendencies, vanity, and short attention spans all wrapped up into one self-aggrandizing piece of junk. So of course it’s a huge hit.
You can blame me for the advertising. I don’t work for Woot. As a user (and consumer) of Woot, I wanted a way to be updated of new products offerings via text message – something Twitter does very well. So, I started piping Woot’s RSS feed into a Twitter account. A couple weeks ago, Woot contacted me, and I agreed to turn this over to them.
I guess you can call it advertising now, even though it’s completely opt-in “advertising”. As of last count, 1250 people voluntarily receive updates whenever a new item is posted. Whatever it is, some people like it.
MIT is a math school, i guess, but you’d think the advertising folks would know how to spell just a bit.
Pretty embarrassing making that kind of mistake when you’re trying to act self-righteous.
It’s the blogo-hype I am concerned about, not the service or the way Woot is using it (which I think is great), but I’m also curious which part was misspelled.
As one of the many people who follow Woot and occasionally buy deals there, when I saw that they had added a twitter feed (during their recent woot-off) I added woot to my twitter feed gladly.
For me, this is a very low pain way to get notifications that I want to receive from a vendor whom I do shop at and who by the very nature of their business model – one product per day except during rare woot-off’s will not be sending me a lot of twitters.
Twitter is also great because I can control and choose where and how to get the messages – on the twitter website, as an RSS feed, via apps such as Twitterrific, via IM or via my phone and SMS. This flexibility makes me more likely to use a service.
Plus at least for me – and based on who I have chose to subscribe to – the VAST majority of twitter updates are interesting and often useful (I learned of the Kathy Sierra mess via twitters for example).
Shannon