[WalterBright]

I discovered that Twitter replaces having an email list for business. You aren't spamming people, they sign up to follow you. The idea is to keep your tweets interesting to people who are using your products and services.

A corollary is to not use it to post personal stuff or politics.

I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights.

[huhtenberg]

That's the way to use it for disseminating the information, 100%.

Been doing it for a while for several projects and it's a fantastic broadcast tool to keep interested people updated on news they want to hear. The main trick is to never waver off topic.

This doesn't replace a mailing list though. Not even close. There are simply parts of the target audience that aren't on Twitter. So Twitter needs to be combined with the newsletter, the RSS feed, a dedicated sub on Reddit and what have you. Together these result in a lot of reach. They also cross-pollinate well.

[lapcat]

> I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights.

You need a very large muted keywords list.

[xen2xen1]

Seconded. I've tried to follow technical / subject folks, but the politics is constantly there. Maybe next try I'll block the folks who crap out the politics so I don't follow them again, which I've done multiple times.

[WalterBright]

It's not that I mind them tweeting their politics that much, it's that I don't want them annoying my followers.

[altdataseller]

It's a good supplement for an email list, but having it replace your email list would be a huge business risk. What if they implement some sort of algorithm change that dramatically reduces how often your tweets appear in timelines? You control your email list, but Twitter controls your twitter profile.

[bachmeier]

> I wish the technical people I follow on Twitter would leave the politics out, I follow them for their technical insights.

I think this is a significant flaw in the design of Twitter. You should be able to follow a subset of someone else's tweets rather than the binary all/nothing we have now.

[munificent]

Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans.

When interacting with a human, I did not sign up for them being a complete holistic personality with hopes, dreams, beliefs, history, etc. I just want direct access to some personally chosen subset of their brain. Why do I have to deal with their messy... ugh... peopleness?

[bachmeier]

> Honestly, it's a significant flaw in the design of humans.

Yes. And they do wonderful things with technology these days that can help us get around those flaws.

[tootie]

The addressable market of Twitter users is probably 1% that of email.