U juz sey dat cuz ur jelus.

Is it 'cuz'? I retain the ability to be shocked by the spellings my son comes up with in texts, though I think he's pretty consistent. Twitter doesn't tend to produce such radical re-spelling, though shortened forms like u, 2 and r are pretty common. What a world, eh. "Not like it was in my day" has itself become such an understatement that it will have to be put into premature retirement like much else.

Dung:

If as Richard says there are good things happening there then it must be worthwhile ...

But you have something other than my opinion at the top of the thread - I gave eight links to Twitter conversations from 1st January involving ten people including Andrew Montford, Brian Cox, Richard Betts and Barry Woods. By giving URLs I was enabling you to make a judgment for yourself. (Something you failed to do when arguing that I should be banned from Bishop Hill recently by the way. That meant others would be unable to judge the context and in some cases even the meaning of the snippets you came up with. So I thought the principle might be worth underlining in this less heated context.)

TBYJ:

Unfortunately Paul, some of that discussion takes place on Twitter itself, and is effectively lost.

First, Twitter throws nothing away so it's not lost in that sense. Storify isn't the only attempt to reconstruct some narrative or other from the pieces. But the deeper issue is the one I, then Paul, have been asking about: how come there is interaction between people on Twitter who never talk to each other on blogs? Is that because anonymous ranters do not play any real part in destabilising the conversation as Twitter encourages one to see it? I think that's a key factor and it has a profound and subtle relationship to the way so much is 'lost' as you call it. Perhaps more needs to be lost in places like this?

Ha Barry, thanks for that spanner in the wheels of my theory!

I tried to be careful in what I said:

Is that because anonymous ranters do not play any real part in destabilising the conversation as Twitter encourages one to see it?

The key (but inadequate) phrase being 'the conversation as Twitter encourages one to see it'.

I think our different perspectives on this would be due to our different usage of Twitter. Most of my climate-related Twitter usage in the last three months has been clicking on Andrew's feed (the web page @aDissentient, not through any mobile app or anything fancy like that) and then the "View conversation" option on tweets - often hours if not days after the event. That way I seldom get to see anonymous tweeters at all, let alone rants. But you, I assume much more in the moment, obviously do.

I think one has to say that it's a real strength of the latest Twitter software that it filters out so much of this stuff as it reconstructs 'conversations'. Just the first step of putting Humpty together again. And never a replacement for blogs - hence the 'and', not 'or', in the title of this thread (and the fact that I didn't try to do this as a series of tweets).

David Ross: thanks so much for stopping by.

I don't follow Mann's social media. I'm not even registered with Facebook and Twitter.

Funnily enough I read this just after taking in Why I’m Quitting Instagram by Ryan Block (which means he's also quitting Facebook). I recommend the whole article but he concludes:

We’d all be much better off simplifying our technological footprints and consolidating our trust in the few services that provide us the greatest value with the fewest unintended side effects. In the end, I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m a quitter.

And you should be, too. People wondering what there is to gain by thinning their online accounts sometimes ask: “Why quit?” Instead, I think every once in a while we should all ask ourselves: “Why stay?”

Like Stephen Fry and myself Block much prefers Twitter and LinkedIn to Facebook, because of the complete control they give you over your 'outward appearance'.

There is much else we could discuss, not least how Mike Mann has messed up on social media, and I hope we do spend time on that, but that's how my slow-moving brain was whirring as I saw your post. Your example shows it can be smart to be a watcher, not a participant, in many of these services. Welcome!

TBYJ: Was just editing that paragraph when I saw your question. I am a very sporadic user of both FB and LinkedIn and, as such, I don't have a very comprehensive answer to your question. In that paragraph, I was really reflecting Ryan Block's view:

This is in contrast to Facebook and any other social tool that allows any user in its social graph to associate you with all manner of unrelated career- (or even potentially life-) changing posts or images.

I have some experience of what he means on FB and I don't think the same has happened to me on LinkedIn, so I trust his judgment, but he's the expert I'm leaning on, more than my own experience. He may be thinking of the massive majority of us who don't try and twiddle the knobs of permissioning and visibility. His wider point, going back to Friendster, backs this up: none of us have the time to track such things, including terms of service and ownership changes, except for a very small set of services.

Ha, I'm editing old posts as you comment on them. First time that's happened to me here since I became a registered user on BH, which was a surprisingly short time ago. I often choose the vanilla version of a service - and in the case of Facebook that certainly is true. If you've been cleverer than me there, great. But like Fry I prefer Twitter and that's where I will tend to learn the system more, because I like it more.

Block may have been unfair to FB - feel free to put him right on that on his own blog. But the Twitter model remains much simpler to me.

David: very valuable. I need to process that and I hope others will. Stay tuned.

Of all people, I will be the last to volunteer. I have my reputation to consider :)

But a very good experiment, if some folks less identified with the dark side of real names want to pick it up. Report on a new discussion thread? (A big compliment, not a brush-off. This could go somewhere.)

As far as I know, or certainly have experience of, Philip, blocking has to be done individually. Not wanting to imply that Mr Mann is paranoid or anything of course. I assume he has an assistant for such tiresome tasks.

The tweet stream set off by Richard Betts correcting @BarackObama that John Cook's paper didn't say 'dangerous' is notable in a number of ways, not least that real names on Twitter aren't always what they seem.