So, I dusted off the long-neglected @rpgblog2 twitter, and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on who to follow for RPG-related news/chat/discussion? I know many are of the opinion that twitter is about as useful as a fart in a tornado, but I thought I'd at least ask.

Additionally, if you have any positive or negative (meltdown) stories regarding gaming and Twitter, let's hear them!

I'm on twitter.

@Silverlionprime.


Nothing big going on.

@Airlock14 - big traveller guy
@thefreerpgblog - runs the free RPG blog, kind of annoying (PLAY SOMETHING WITH MAGIC IN IT ROB) but a good man
@Darien_Mason - steampunker
@firestormink - game designer

I never really got into twitter myself, it serves a purpose for a particular cachet. Maybe in future.

All the cool gamers are apparently using Google+ now, or so I'm told.

I'm on Google+ as well. You should come over Tommy.

Quote from: Silverlion;600798I'm on Google+ as well. You should come over Tommy.

Don't you have to do some sort of fancy ritual like bathe in a pool of mithril/blood of virgins under the light of the third new moon of the year in order to use G+ though?

Quote from: pandesmos;600799Don't you have to do some sort of fancy ritual like bathe in a pool of mithril/blood of virgins under the light of the third new moon of the year in order to use G+ though?

I ain't saying. Nope.

More seriously, you can just sign up. I did.

Quote from: Silverlion;600798I'm on Google+ as well. You should come over Tommy.

...I've been there, since the very early days...just not impressed with it.

Hrrmm? Not on Twitter any more. Closed my account just about a year ago. I had over a thousand followers on my main account and was following almost 1,200 twitter accounts. I tweeted out a request instead of a resource, for a change of pace, and received exactly zero responses. ...on Twitter.

I follow about 250 folks and have 80 followers on G+ and if I post a question or request at least three or four folks respond, more if I hashtag it. Folks even respond to my comments on G+. That's when I figured out that the majority of people on Twitter aren't reading the bulk of the tweets, and I would have to hashtag every question or post.

I just don't have enough time to put into that to make it amenable. That and Twitters war on 3rd party tweeting tools. G+ is open, you can look at the data six ways to Sunday, to figure out trends and patterns, and all kinds of neat stuff. The G+ advanced search options are quite useful for research as well. On G+ you can post, ask questions, and add comments to specific circles of people (Circles that are interested in specific subjects) which greatly increases the number of likely responses since the posts are actually being read.

Twitter also changed their search tools on their streams. I would use two different accounts to search the twitter stream using the same hashtag and got random results that weren't even close to matching, so the algorithims they are using for search are heavily biased, so heavily biased, I believe I'm missing some important posts there, and not by accident. Also they tightened up the date range on Twitter search. Used to be I could look at the entire hashtag stream from a convention or game show and see every tweet. Now, if it's more than 24 hours old, it is excluded from the search results making historical data gathering very difficult. You have to be on events for the entire duration of the event to collect the relevant tweets. It was really great from 2008 to 2010 or so, and there's a couple folks whose Tweets I miss. Can still look them up though from time-to-time and see what they are up to.

I can't express the depth of my annoyance at G+ becoming the center of gravity for our little hobby.

Ugh.

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;600839...I've been there, since the very early days...just not impressed with it.

It needs the ability to centrally focus topic--so only topics tagged with my interested show up..

G+ Photo of the day for gaming goodness!

https://plus.google.com/photos/101244862096579455055/albums/5812964526991997089/5812964534379830338

The stream it came from. All open.

https://plus.google.com/101244862096579455055/posts

Quote from: Silverlion;601104It needs the ability to centrally focus topic--so only topics tagged with my interested show up..

Thats what circles are for. For example, I have an RPG circle with 160 or so in it.

I click on that circle, the only feeds I get from G+ are RPG streams.

You can always click n another of your circles, or choose "home" to get all the streams.

Best part is you get to decide who's in the circles so the signal to noise ratio is very high. High quality posts by dedicated gamers, and lots of them.

You only have to do this once. With Twitter and hashtags, you have to hashtag every one of your own posts, and maybe someone else who is interested in gaming will see it through all the other Tweets and respond.

Less work. More quality posts. It is the future.

Quote from: GameDaddy;601321Thats what circles are for. For example, I have an RPG circle with 160 or so in it.

I click on that circle, the only feeds I get from G+ are RPG streams.

You can always click n another of your circles, or choose "home" to get all the streams.

Best part is you get to decide who's in the circles so the signal to noise ratio is very high. High quality posts by dedicated gamers, and lots of them.

You only have to do this once. With Twitter and hashtags, you have to hashtag every one of your own posts, and maybe someone else who is interested in gaming will see it through all the other Tweets and respond.

Less work. More quality posts. It is the future.

It's good, but I don't know if it really is the future.

It requires a hunt to find these quality circles.

Then it takes a rep grind to become included.

Finally, because the circles are inherently closed systems, often with content that cannot be viewed by the non-initiated and un-invited the knowledge will become lost as the groups ultimately begin to fragment apart due to drama or natural attrition.

It's good because it's very narrowly focused, but if ideas don't spread beyond it they're basically dead ideas.

Please understand, I'm not saying that your group doesn't share or anything like that, I'm just trying to point out that while G+ is good, I think it's ultimately creating specialized mini clerisies, or walled gardens of thought.

As far as I'm aware, that gamer, disgruntled with D&D 12th edition isn't ever going to be able to rediscover the great ideas discussed in most of these G+ circles.

Sorry if that got a little out there, but the history major/crazy archivist in me has been thinking about this a lot lately.

I am also on Google+, but just haven't posted much. I don't like the interface with my iPhone, for one, but when I first started, there wasn't a lot of quality content. I think that's changed quite a bit, but I still mainly lurk.