Hung Truong: The Blog!

Twitter? I Hardly Know Her!

Sometimes it’s fun to go look at what I wrote, say, two years ago and compare it to how I feel now. Case in point: Twitter. Almost two years ago, I wrote that:

Now, I actually use the Facebook updates now and then, but it seems like people who use Twitter do this to the max. Like they update multiple times a day. Are these people so self-centered that they think everyone needs to know what they’re doing?

…

In Twitter, the ability to update is the entire application itself. To me, Twitter is simply a subset of what Facebook already provides. Why would you ever need both?

This historical post is both illuminating and funny for a number of reasons. Apparently in the past I hardly updated my Facebook status at all. These days I probably do so at least once a day, and usually multiple times a day. I guess that’s just an indicator of how social norms have changed in regards to sharing personal information online: what was thought of as “oversharing” in the past is basically normal now. It’s also funny that I recognized that Twitter was a subset of Facebook. Recently I’ve come to believe that being a subset is actually a feature.

I think Twitter hit critical mass for me somewhere in the last few months. So really, my previous opinions of it being pointless weren’t necessarily incorrect. It just didn’t hold any value for me. Now that the value of Twitter (in my own usage) is improving due to network effects, I use it more often.

I think the appeal of Twitter comes down to this: There is a much better signal-to-noise ratio at this point using Twitter versus Facebook. On Facebook I get updates about everything that everyone I have ever known (and befriended) has ever done! I don’t care about pictures of drunk cheerleaders who I was friends with in undergrad. But Facebook feeds them to me. I really should remove them at some point, but oh well, such is social networking.

For now, Twitter has a much more relevant set of messages. I’ve also noticed that people are much more likely to respond to me via Twitter, versus commenting on a Facebook status. Probably due to the noise/signal thing again. It’s easy for me to simply “unfollow” someone who is not providing me with relevant or funny information. Sadly, the relevance factor of Twitter is probably a temporary quality. Facebook used to have a low S/N ratio until everyone joined it. Twitter may face the same problem if it can grow like Facebook did (lol at scaling).

It’s interesting to look at all of this in the context of history. I used ujournal before I used Xanga before I used livejournal before I used MySpace (ick) before I used Facebook before I used Twitter before I used (fill in the blank)…

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in Ann Arbor 3/10/09

Last year I was lucky enough to see the LCJO with Wynton Marsalis. This year I was also just as lucky, and I was able to go with some friends, too!

For the first half of the show, they played stuff from the Thelonious Monk book. Thelonious Monk is typically kind of hard to listen to, but the arrangements that they played were pretty listenable. The only one whose name I remember is Criss Cross.

The second half, they played songs out of the Blue Note label. When Wynton announced that they were gonna play “Blues Walk,” I expected a pretty uptempo major straightahead bebop blues. But apparently there is a difference between Blues Walk and The Blues Walk.

Wynton is pretty good at telling random stories. Like he talked about Lee Morgan and his funny-named albums: “Delightfulee,” “Cornbread,” “The Rumproller.” One of the band members mentioned “The Gigolo” and then Wynton Marsalis made a quip about how that’s why Lee Morgan isn’t here with us today (he was cheating on his girlfriend and she shot him. Sometimes, though, I really think that Wynton is making shit up! Okay, not really. He just knows a lot about Jazz and Jazz history. And classical music. He’s pretty much a genius.

The musical aptitude of the whole group was pretty damn good. Seeing guys play this well makes me wish I played Piano, Drums, Saxophone, etc. And it makes me want to practice my trumpet some more. Maybe I can work on my chops after graduation…

Going To SXSW!

In a few days, I am going to SXSW with my company, Troubadour Mobile. It’ll be cool. It’ll be awesome. I’ll miss lots of school.

Ever since I heard of SXSW, probably from Valleywag, I’ve wanted to go. There’ll be cool music, parties, swag, nerds, etc. I’m pretty stoked.

If you are also going to SXSW and you want to “follow” me (on the custom social network for conference attendees, my.sxsw.com, which is kinda cool), you can find me here.

Jonathan Coulton Show in Ann Arbor (The Ark) 3/6/09

Managing Rejection (And Success!)

Over the past few years, I've found myself in a number of situations where I've been rejected. I read an article via BoingBoing on why some people see failure as crippling, while others see it as a motivator. Pretty interesting stuff. I guess I fall into the latter category as I haven't really let my numerous failures drag me down. When I was fresh out of college (for the first time), I got an amazing opportunity to interview at Google. If you were a CS major in 2006, Google was pretty much the holy grail. In my mind, it definitely was (well, maybe second to Facebook, but they never got back to me). Like many of my adventures, I wrote about this in a blog post. Long story short, I was rejected. I think at that point I was a bit cocky and thought Google was a sure thing. You should never have a sense of entitlement; that leads down a pretty depressing path. Getting rejected was a good wake-up call that I needed to improve myself if I wanted to end up with my dream job. At the time I thought I had missed an amazing opportunity. This may have been true; I'll never know what my life would be like if I had started working at Google. Looking back, though, I think the rejection was really a blessing. More …