| Great update. I agree about Twitter. I have a Twitter page for my website, but personally I don't ever post anything on my personal Twitter. I don't even care what I had for dinner when I'm done, why the heck would anyone else, lol. Even for my website, trying to fit important data into 140 characters is a nightmare. You can post an image with a lot more text (which the NWS offices actually do superbly on social media), but that takes a lot more effort, especially when things can change rapidly. (When an advisory comes out I might spend five to ten minutes just trying to narrow down what will amount to be a handful of words and likely a link to the NHC front page.) Plus I don't like to have my site try to have important info through social media anyway. I have been posting updates sometimes when a storm is strengthening, but if I am not around I can't post the latest update about anything so I really hate doing that too much. That is why I always keep things vague in my tweets. Like, the storm continues to strengthen or saying watches and warnings have been issued and try, if room, to always link to the NHC home page. I don't ever say when a storm is weakening, and rarely if ever on CaneTalk too, in case something changes. I like to highlight when it is strengthening, but I don't want to say it is weakening and then for someone to see that hours later when something unexpected happens and maybe it is a lot stronger then and I am not around to post about it. Most people obviously know that social media is not the place to go for the latest info, but then again, with people using social media so much, maybe they forget. If there is not a tornado warning in my news feed on whatever device I am looking at, maybe I'm fine. Maybe some people would falsely believe something like that. I actually don't ever look at any weather content myself on Twitter. I do on Facebook, but Twitter just has so little info. I don't know if I have ever spent more than 15 seconds on whatever you would call Twitter's equivalent of the news feed. I do post personal stuff on Facebook because it is easier to control privacy settings (well, kind of). Facebook can kind of be a problem for the latest info, maybe not so much Twitter which may be more in order I don't use it enough to know. I think on Facebook things gets mixed around sometimes, old content and new content. I don't look specifically at how new or old data is because most of what I follow is stuff where the date doesn't matter too much. It's interesting content, the date does not matter. But, if you use social media solely for weather info, you might be getting something old before something new. And, as one met loves to complain about here in Tampa, a lot of information never appears in a Facebook feed. You could post something about an important imminent weather event, but you might not ever see it, or see it days later. That is why I hate to even put out too much on social media like that, even though it seems like a lot of people use info like that. It just shouldn't be relied on so heavily by people. Then again, I don't check Facebook hourly. Sometimes I go many days so there is so much stuff in there you would never find anything. Maybe for people who use it more often current stuff pops up more often near the top. One of these days I would like to have my recon system post things automatically to a Twitter feed, but it would be so prone to error, there would have to be warnings all over it about how unreliable it is. But I am so behind on updating my systems. I always go back and forth on whether I would. I know people would love it, but I think it would be so easy for bad info to get out and people would not pay attention to disclaimers. That is the worst thing about social media. False information can get out so immediately. There was a smash and grab robbery like a week ago here in Tampa. Within the hour of it happening the name of the mall was trending worldwide on Twitter because people mistook glass breaking for gunshots. All sorts of law enforcement descended on the mall and people were scared, but in reality the thieves were long gone and there were no gunshots. But then again on the opposite side of things, if it had been real, nothing is more immediate than Twitter to get info. (you just have to be cautious about believing what is put out there) In this particular case, the police were tweeting that there were no gunshots long before anyone else talked about it. And while watching some of the local news which had nothing but the same things talked about again and again, which annoyed me, I decided to look at Twitter where I found out more info about it than anywhere else. New stories don't get published that fast. Breaking news updates from police and news media came first on social media and then were posted as new stories and being on the tv news. Then you can read about it in the newspaper tomorrow. (It's amazing how information gets out compared with decades ago. My dad still gets the paper, mostly for coupons. I just use https://news.google.com/ often throughout the day to keep up to date on stuff.) So, social media can be useful, but it's kind of like Wikipedia. You have to verify it first. On Wikipedia, look for a footnote. On social media, well, that can be a lot more difficult when breaking news happens. I have a feeling there is a lot more spam on Twitter than those percentages. Then again, pointless babble to me probably has a lot of spam. Spam is what I don't want, so pointless babble is considered spam in my opinion. I don't follow much of anybody on Twitter either. Actually I only follow government and a few meteorologists who I see are on Twitter. It's almost as if you are publicly endorsing someone if you follow them publicly. Not true, but it kind of seems that way. About paying for followers, Twitter recently purged a lot of fake accounts. Some of the people with millions of followers lost millions of followers. I always find people begging for followers or subscribers rather funny. I see that on YouTube a lot. Then again, there views are more easily turned into money with revenue sharing between Google and the person who uploads a video. I was taking a look at why there is a 140 character limit. I thought it had something to do with text messages and apparently it kind of does: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-basics-why-140-characters-and-how-to-write-more_b1124 Contact someone at Facebook... hilarious. There is a small bug with my personal profile that other people have a problem on their profiles with too and I haven't bothered trying to contact Facebook. I know how fun that would probably be. Plus, I think some of my personal data at Facebook was gathered someone by someone and I'm still kind of angry about it. I really need to change my email because I still get email from spammers that spoof friends from Facebook. A tip, use a special email address when you signup for Facebook. If/when I change my email, I'll have an email specifically for Facebook that will forward to my real email. If there is ever a problem, I simply change the email registered through Facebook. |