Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 3, 2014 Deadline March 2014 Issue Social Media Getting Older, Losing Its Cool Social media are losing their “cool” factor, becoming a part of the largely ignored information static in our daily lives. Automated “bots” dominate Twitter, sending out so many tweets that it takes an effort to find any value. A small group of real, human users remain entertaining and informative, but searching and sorting tweets requires too much effort to be fun anymore. If you follow sports scores, news alerts or special events then Twitter is a wonderful tool. My friends who participate in fantasy sports leagues rely on Twitter for breaking news, at least on game days. They seldom send tweets, except to trade barbs with other “team owners” in the leagues. Twitter was supposed to make “texting” more social and more engaging, but the sheer volume of traffic renders Twitter useless. For most of us, hashtags, those “#WordsToFollow” that need a secret decode...
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