Twitter: Better than Rotoworld?

[Bodhizefa]

Guys, I'm ashamed to admit that I have very recently become a Twitter addict. For a while, I used it to follow some select celebrities and some Mariner folk, but I didn't understand its usefulness toward good baseball intel until the last month or so. And it just keeps getting better, too. I now find I am getting information before Rotoworld and similar sites post it on their page. It is quickly becoming the de facto standard for news updates -- be it baseball or anything else -- which is weird and crazy, but also kindof cool.

I suggest anyone who uses it helps out here to form a good list of all baseball information Twitterers. As soon as I get home tonight, I'll start adding some names to the list (and in fact, I can compile a list that we can link to with all the names ready to add on Twitter to make it easy for newbies -- and if you don't understand what I just meant, I'll explain that when I do it, too!)

[Todd Zola]

We talked about this at the Arizona First Pitch Forum. I was on a "Fantasy Information Panel", playing the part of the common user and made three observations relating to the Twitter explosion:

1. Established message forums that used to have a lot of traffic based on the members posting news are not as "busy".

2. While the quality of the corresponding analysis at the free sites has always been sketchy at best, now the accuracy of some news items is becoming compromised as sites want to be first to post.

3. HOPEFULLY -- with Twitter dominating news dissemination, boards such as this can return to their roots, a place for intelligent discussion revolving around analysis and implications of the news and not a place to get the news.

[JP Kastner]

Actually, this could be a very useful project. Let me see what I can do with the Twitter API's. We could probably host a page with nothing but Twitter comments from all around the baseball world.


JP

[Bodhizefa]

Actually, this could be a very useful project. Let me see what I can do with the Twitter API's. We could probably host a page with nothing but Twitter comments from all around the baseball world.


JP

Sounds like a plan, Stan. I'm currently amassing a list on Twitter at the moment that encapsulates all the guys I know who report on baseball. I'm sure there are tons more, too.

[JP Kastner]

I am able to integrate the Twitter API into the site. I can envision a series of web pages dedicated by subject to allow our non-Twitter friends to have access to this information.


JP

[brian]

I would just reinforce one of Todd's concerns mentioned above. Just yesterday, someone initiated a false rumor that the Marlins turned down an offer for Josh Johnson from the Rangers for Smoak and Feliz. It must have been tweeted and re-tweeted 200 times before someone actually checked and debunked it.

Later, Peter Gammons' decision to leave ESPN again generated scores of basically-identical tweets. And finally, the grandaddy of them all, the Granderson trade. How many links to analysis pieces critical of Josh Byrnes do we need to see?

I am not suggesting that Twitter is a bad thing, but perhaps more than most other apps, it requires judicious use of filters. I suggest being selective in who you follow, set up lists to separate your subject areas of interest and consider an aggregation front end like Tweetdeck to help better organize the chaos. While there is good information, there is a lot of clutter, too. Like anything else, if you let it, Twitter can chew up a lot of time.

By the way, if you are interested in my views of the St. Louis Cardinals majors and minors, you can follow me on Twitter...

Brian Walton

[JP Kastner]

It is certainly not without risks. We will have to make it clear that the information posted there is very raw. Still, not everyone is savvy enough to want to use Twitter or go through the trouble of figuring out who to follow or not. We could do that for them.