Thing 5: Twitter

I have been using Twitter enthusiastically since April 2009, not only from my own account but in tweeting for the Haddon Library, the Cambridge Philharmonic Society and Global Justice Cambridge.  What has changed since I blogged about Twitter in my coursework for those earlier rounds of 23things in 2010 and 2011?

Advanced search: this facility had dropped off my account, perhaps because of some Twitter re-setting.  I've now reinstated it, though I think in a slightly different form that requires me to open Twitter and search proactively rather than expect updates delivered to my email.  But the amount of material this search seems likely to retrieve is as small as I found it in 2010.

Twitter ban at work: in March 2010, I imposed a rule on myself that I should avoid Twitter at work when anything remained in my email inbox. I haven't had Inbox Zero since 2011.  My rule therefore now amounts, for practical purposes, to a requirement that I should not use Twitter at work.  I've kept to this pretty rigorously, and Twitterfeed continues to post to the Haddon Twitter stream from our blog.  Additionally, now, acknowledgment of some of the books we receive as gifts is made using Facebook and Twitter as well as email.

And what about Twitter's potential benefits to research?  It will do for sharing research once published, or semi-published: you can tweet links to journal articles, conference presentations and blog posts.  Searching Twitter will give some idea of what kinds of opinion are doing the rounds.

I did a few searches just now, to support amateur curiosity not research.  I wanted to find out if the inventor(s) of the 1935 Notificator, often likened to Twitter, had lived to see or support later developments in communications technology.  I wanted to know if other people were as much troubled by the sight of misplaced solicitude as I am.  I wanted to know if pre-emptive criticism, which I think we should all avoid, was a thing that troubled others.  I'll spare you blow-by-blow accounts of the search strategies I used, but I can say that I got no answer to the Notificator one, that tweets incorporating the phrase "misplaced solicitude" had been written by me alone, and that pre-emptive criticism is a thing.  Further research needed.

Thing 5: Doodle

Screenshot shows evidence for my use of Doodle. I think I first came across this device when Rowland Thomas at the Marshall used it to schedule a meeting, and I have been using it myself, probably, for a couple of years now.

I have looked briefly at the other meeting schedulers referred to in the Cam23 blog: Meet-O-Matic and Tungle. I once took part in a Meet-O-Matic poll, and was struck by how very 1950s it seemed, in its name and in the font for its name. Unlike Doodle, Meet-O-Matic seems to offer no option for letting participants see one another's choices, and that is a drawback.

I might come to look at Tungle more closely, and I dare say I will soon be taking part in polls organised by people for whom it is their Doodle.

I admit that, on my first or perhaps second encounter with Doodle, I experienced some disappointment at its simplicity. It lets you take people's votes, as to a date, or a policy, or some other decision. It doesn't, as I'd started to imagine, let you key in factors or criteria & offer suggestions towards the decision. Is that a fantasy of mine, or have I heard of web sites that do as I describe? Phil Bradley's list of Web 2 sites doesn't appear to include anything quite like that. Do you know of any?

But what Doodle does is indispensable, and Doodle does it better than the other means that are available. I remember trying to organise meetings by means of birdcages.