Secondly, people do not actually want to know what others are doing every minute of the day. Additionally, most people do not care enough to post what they are doing at every minute of everyday. So, to say that having an application that automatically writes tweets for the user would be useful is wrong. Many people have concerns about internet privacy. For example, some people really do not like it that Google's ads in Gmail are, or used to be, based on actual email content. Such a Flutter application would eliminate internet privacy on a whole new level. Now, not only would ads be targeted at your browsing habits, but also at your daily habits. Furthermore, there are some activities that others just do not need to know about. For example, the fact that a user went to the bathroom at 10:30 pm does not need to be made public. Flutter is ridiculous.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Flutter
Flutter makes two assumptions. It assumes that people think that Tweets are too long, and it assumes that people actually want others to know exactly what they are doing every minute of the day. First of all, one of the reasons that people like Twitter is because of the length of the Tweets. Twitter encourages users to make smaller posts, as opposed to blogs, which generally call for closer to article-length posts. The length of Tweets is encouraging because it is a short message that does not take too much time to write. But to say that people would be happier writing only 26 characters is absurd. You can cannot say all that much in 26 characters. Although it only takes a glance to read a Flap, during that glance you have gained little to zero information. At least a Tweet gives the user some room to write a full sentence.
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I completely agree that Flutter is ridiculously absurd. However I took Flutter as more of a joke than an actual upgrade from Twitter. It would be absolutely awful if Flutter was not a joke and people were actually trying to make that. I also agree with your position on automatic updates to Flutter. It is hilarious the way they presented it as a joke, but the actual idea is terrible. Why would anyone EVER want to know that you entered and exited a bathroom? I hope Twitter or anything like it never comes to that.
ReplyDeleteAlthough you point out assumptions made in the video, I think you made an assumption of the video that is not entirely correct. The video, in my interpretation, is a satire of Twitter and attempts to poke fun at the popular website. When Flutter says it only uses 26 characters, this is not supposed to be an actual advantage to Twitter. Instead, it is supposed to point to the ludicrous nature of limiting people to very short 140 character messages. By cutting it down to so few characters, V Slate is showing how little can be expressed in such a small fragment.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I agree with you that people do not want to know what someone is doing every second of the day. However, V Slate agrees with us too on this topic. When they say the iPhone App can auto-update your Flutter to tell people what you are doing, they are taking updating your status to the very extreme. At the end of your post, you state "Flutter is ridiculous," and that is exactly what it is meant to be.
Flutter was trying to make a statement about Twitter, as follows: at what point do we, as a society, draw the line? When do we say that enough is enough when dealing with such issues as privacy or unnecessary communication? This is what made the Flutter video so successful as a satire--it ridiculed all of the aspects of Twitter that Ben mentionned by exaggerating its limitations.
ReplyDeleteI agree that people don't want to know what you are doing each and every second. The mocking example in the mockumentary about the lady announcing she is going to the bathroom definitely gets the point across. I for one hope people don't announce what they are doing every second because, when you do meet in person, you'd want something to talk with them about.
ReplyDeleteI agree most with the point that twenty-six characters is not nearly enough to update people on your happenings of the day. However, I did take this to be more of a joke to point out the ridiculousness of Twitter rather than an actual business idea. I also like the point that the Iphone application idea would infringe upon one's privacy to the point where no one would want their lives to be made that public and no one would want to know about everything their friends and family are doing.
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