Officekami

Previously in BarCamp KL, I did make a short comparison between Twitter & Yahoo Messenger inside my slideshow, at slide no 43.

Inside this article, I will share with you on my opinion about this two services.

Let me start by explaining a bit both of the service.

Yahoo! Messenger (YM) is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Messenger is provided free of charge and can be downloaded and used with a generic “Yahoo! ID” which also allows access to other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail, where users can be automatically notified when they receive new email. Yahoo! also offers PC-PC, PC-Phone and Phone-to-PC service, file transfers, webcam hosting, text messaging service, and chat rooms in various categories. //– from Wikipedia

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees. // — from Wikipedia

While both of them serve almost the same thing, messaging, but in timely manner, I found Twitter is more useful rather than YM. Now all the following points are based on my humble opinion.

1. Followers isn’t same with just mere contacts

In Twitter, you’ll have some followers, or subscribers to your updates. This means those who follow you are eager want to know about you. They want to know what you’re up into. But dangerously, they might want to stalk you but fret not, there’s an option for you to set your status to private and hide it from Twitter Public Timeline, where strangers can see your updates.

as for this, your follower doesn’t need to engage you in chatting prior to YM, where I usually will ask, “who is this?” . In twitter, I just click at their profile, and decide, if I want to follow them or not.

2. Choose who you want to follow

This is another point scored by Twitter. Looking at my YM friend list, there’s about 300-400 list but, truthfully, everyday I just chat with certain people, mostly officemate, and job-related. During night I’ll be ‘Available’ but again it’s either I’m unfriendly or I can’t supply much joy of chatting towards chit-chatters. And when you decide to follow someone on YM? it’s not following, it’s chit chatting and you’ll be screwed if the person you wanted to follow ( or even stalk ) will questioning you.

It’s just like building a relationship, LOL.

With twitter, it’s just one click button and even the person you followed doesn’t follow you back, doesn’t matter.You might want to see their latest discoveries about some technology, news updates, whatever. You want to know about him/her. So don’t bother if they didn’t follow you back.  I followed Grant Imahara and he doesn’t follow me. of course I’m just another fan and he has to blowing up something.

but beware, if you following too much people, you’ll later have to spend more time to read their twits. Still, you decide to read or not.

3. What are you doing?

I tend to set an attractive YM-Status to attract my long-list of contacts but, I failed! As for twitter, it was based on one question

“What are you doing?”

And based on that question, everytime I said  something, my followers, who’ve been following, if that tweets match their interest, would instantly reply. Sweet. Afterall, Keep It Simple Stupid!

4. Timely manners

If you’re chatting, high chances that you’ll stuck on the conversation. Depends on yourself, I find myself will stuck in long conversation if I’m chatting with person. But more over, actually you’ll waste time to picking up what are both of you into. In the process, you’ll wait for another response and there goes, seconds, minutes, and hours.

For twitter, for me, I’m using Twhirl so everytime it buzzing, I’ll check my Twhirl if those who I’m following twitting something interesting. That’s it.

I’m also ask my twit-friend Reuben Thum, because he previously work as server at Vintry, the restaurant and I still get his updates. I mean, YM of course cannot chat LOL. Here’s my question to him.

Me: wanna ask.. previously in vintry, did u twit while u work? u work as server am I correct ?

ReubenThum: Yeah, tweeted during work. Without degrading the service, that is. What’s up?

Me: I want to wrote about twitter vs YM for working environment for officekami.com . and ur response is totally valuable thanks a lot!

See,  did you YM on handphone? even if you did, I think it will took a lot of time. I think this is another valid reason why most of the offices blocked Internet and yes, Yahoo Messenger, distractions.

5. Virtual officemate

Try this at your office. Go talk bullcrap with your office mate and see  if your boss gets angry. of course but on daily basis, our chats with our office mate will go like

• hey what’s up for lunch?
  
• can you help me with this code?
• hey you know ah that girl… I like her lol!

The normal cycle of real chit-chat in office will usually go like that.Tit for tat. it will not drag like YM chats.  and the same to twitter, because of the character limit. For me, my virtual officemate is my twitter friends. If they didn’t follow up with my twits, I can always reply their twits back.

My Opinion

For me, Twitter wins. I now didn’t run YM on the day, but only when requested by my friend to online. Save laptop energy too. If you’re new to twitter, and want some suggestion for who you want to follow or need a virtual officemate, here are 10 people I suggest.

1. @kamal – he twits about Ruby & Git. If his tweets aren’t programming, he tweets awesome funny things.
   
2. @ramesstudios – he’s another photoshopper. be amazed with his funny witty photomontage.
3. @izuddinhelmi – he’s a wordpress theme designer that won Woothemes WordPress thingy
4. @limyh – Twitter-Elite + Social Media guy that run GreyReview. Good stuff to read.
5. @cerventus – barcamper activist. and while people listen to lightning talk, he reads onemanga.com :p
6. @hadramie – has his own brand coffee – Haddadcafe, that @thechannelc jokingly said Kiasu coffee, because 9 in 1 For The Win! ROFL! But really, his instant coffee real strong.
   
7. @bfmradio – if you listen to BFM, then follow their tweet as they’ll upload their podcast later.
   
8. @nazroll – anything google and cool stuff as Music 2.0 presos.
   
9. @bytebot – many different stuff he talks about, from bashing telcos, to utilizing his Google Latitude
   
10. @cheeaun – he talks manga, killing ‘bug’s, and heart free geek tshirts.
    

Oh and the person I’m asking about his experience is fun to follow to. Random stuff, Reuben Thum. I want to suggest more person but since they put their twits on private, I better not. If you want to stalk me, clicky but let me remind you that I’m a bit picky and choosy :p

//follow twitter @officekami to get latest updates + places + resources

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 2:17 AM and is filed under Article, English, Productivity Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.