I feel the exact same way when I see everyone flipping out on these tweets (follow me @ctinsley12) 140 characters, quick and to the point on info regarding our team, everyone tries to twist and turn a real reporters tweets into something its not and then meltdown occurs and spreads like a California wild fire. Couldn’t agree with you more.

and I’m down to BCB. That’s enough for me, call me old fashioned but I would rather read it here. As I typed this it made me think how old fashioned the newspaper business is. Anything in the paper is a couple days older than a tweet. Times have changed, at least I have a choice how to change with them.

Every comment must be 140 ch or less. You too Dan. Poor Ivy Walls…
Why isn’t BLou on Tw? Guess hitting hack is only 18 chs

It had a picture of Michael J. Fox and said “Determined to outfox Parkinson’s-Optimism-Pass it on”.

Al, I love your optimistic take on things. Keep it up.

Great post. If you don’t realize that things like Guzman’s shoulder and Lilly’s fever every freaking spring, why are you paying such close attention this year?

(Although to be fair to Twitter, last year it would have been blog posts by the beat writers. And the year before that, it would have been late afternoon stories filed and posted early on newspaper websites. You probably have to go back a few years before you’d find these “stories” buried deep in a once-every-two-or-three-days spring camp update)

But get off of my lawn anyway.

George Bush hates Twitter.

As do I.

You should not let Twitter – or any information medium – dampen your enthusiasm for the return of baseball. I’ve found Twitter to be a great tool for driving enormous amounts of very timely information to my attention – and getting it to me much more quickly than any one Web site could. But I’ve also learned not to overreact to any “breaking news” item I read on Twitter, because it could easily be revised or refuted within minutes or hours.

That said, I don’t quite see how Ozzie’s tweets are hurting anyone’s optimism. They’re either intentionally or unintentionally hilarious – just like Ozzie himself. And I don’t think the John Smoltz thing has anything to do with Twitter – he’s just a high-profile name who’s still out there. I also still think Smoltz’s usefulness to the Cubs would be much less as a starter than as a set-up guy/backup closer for Marmol. But I digress…

Twitter is simply a tool. Use the tool – don’t let it use you.

Because Spring Training records are a clear harbinger of things to come April-October.

Tweeter will continue to prove this. Given a keyboard many people can quickly show their lack of intelligence

lost in here somewhere is a much more subtle dialogue that I’d be interested to see you expand on, as I don’t quite see the correlation between tweeting, and the Cubs prospects for a season. What exactly is your thesis? That tweeting makes ledge jumpers jump quicker? That it creates more ledge jumpers?

You say the point is optimism, but new technologies haven’t deterred fan interest over the last decade, and if anything, has actually increased it. Fans love that level of access, they love the debate that it inspires, and they love the bi-lateral communication that it allows. What’s really interesting is that what really make Bleed Cubbie Blue what it is is the forums. Members here in many instances repost news here almost immediately on baseball matters of the day. Strange that you’d take umbrage to a technology that basically does the same, while leveraging that very behavior behind it to enhance your success.

Fans aren’t going to stop hoping for the very best for their respective teams because of a few tweets in February. They’re just going to go through a few more of their own personal emotional roller coasters, which for me is neither here nor there.

Anybody who uses Twitter at all should know that, but I find it difficult to believe that the blogosphere wouldn’t go similarly apeshit if the news about Guzman or Theriot had officially broken on the radio or in the newspaper.

Twitter is a valuable tool for beat writers and other observers to get their observations out to the public as quickly as television or radio can. You are telling me that a tweet from Wittenmyer is more dangerous than a breathless update from Kaplan breaking into the John Williams show on WGN? Or a Bruce Levine exclusive update on ESPN radio?

The problem is not with Twitter itself. The problem is with people who read a singlular sentence and then draw conclusions out to the nth degree. The problem is with people who tweet not recognizing the absolute clusterf*ck they will set off by hyping relatively mundane happenings like a tweaked shoulder or HBP.

Like any other tool, Twitter can be misused, but it is hardly ruining anything.

change baseball, now twitter??

After I read Al’s post, I withdraw my statement I made in an earlier post about twitter accounts maybe being ok for Cub’s athletes. I didn’t know the madness that was really going on with twitter. Really though who is considering twitter being a credible source of information?? If Theriot got hit by a pitch, got on twitter and said, “I’ve got a huge bruise, could be a fracture”. Then that’s credible…but when you have Gordo and others getting on there and making post, well they’re just trying to gain attention, views, and popularity with their post. How come there can’t be a happy medium? I thought individual Cub’s players blogging on the Cub’s web’s week by week was good enough for me at one time.

the problem isn’t with Twitter. The problem is how people mis-use it, either as members of the press or as fans overreacting and overextrapolating from info in a format designed from the ground up to limit the content of a message.

I enjoy Twitter throughly, but being aware that something like 95% is noise and maybe 5% is real information, means I do NOT use it as a source for News, etc.

And Twitter won’t have an affect upon my inherint optimism that, somehow, this is The Year.

is the be the first to report something, not to necessarily report the facts, but to report something first. Bothers the hell out of me.

I do have an RSS feed (explanation) which is how I get most of my news. I have a few sites giving me feeds, sports included. I find that this is a great way of finding out information. Except for ESPN, the feeds have enough information to get the story and the basic information. If I want to know more, I go to google.

Before my discovery of RSS feeds, I simply was using my phone to check MLBTR, ESPN, etc all the time. That is still sufficient, although a little more time consuming.

For me, Twitter is a big “Why do I care?!” Frankly, I don’t care that you like oranges or think you look cute in a blouse. I have a facebook for that kind of stuff and even then it’s a little much. Generally I use those status’s to start conversation or to send out relevant information to my friends/family. I don’t think my cousin in England wants to know my eggs are a little runny this morning.

Why does a company, organization, etc have to post their news on a 3rd-party website? Why not just post “quick” news through your aforementioned site?

On a more relative note to this post, Twitter is helping to ruin the English language as well.

I just clicked on the BCB logo and it took longer than usual to reload. Now usually while the hourglass is displayed, I’m checking out the status bar to see what’s being loaded and from where. It’s an interesting way to pass the time and yes, I’m easily amused.

Anyway like I said, this time was taking a lot longer than usual. So I glance down to see who the culprit is and I see

Waiting for twitter.com…

Hell hath no fury like a technology scorned…

Twitter is ruining Spring Training because of…lack of optimism? I thought this was a Cubs blog. What is there to be optimistic about?

Twitter provides info about the Cubs spring training and you’re bashing it? I don’t see any useful info about the cubs on BCS outside of pointless “community projections”

when is enough, enough. Information overload. I am old school, I don’t tex message, I don’t do facebook and I don’t Twitter. So call me an old dog, so be it.
 I love BCB, MLB network and Baseball reference.com.

Go Cubs

C’mon, I can’t wait anymore for game action.

I have an el cheapo Virgin Mobile pay as you go cell phone. I never use it unless I’m on the road, which isn’t often enough. I don’t follow Twitter for a second and only visit BCB every few days or so. My grandly complicated life keeps me going in other directions.

I’m not so wired that I have an iphone with apps that pump whatever kind of information I want every time a feed goes off. I understand the technology enough to know I don’t want to be inundated with stimulation and information all the time .. so when I choose to unplug from the Matrix and do my own thing, I feel completely at hand.

I started that thread on Smoltz Al cited at the top of the hour here not in knee jerk reaction to some frenetic tweeting, but in the recognition that Guzman is a fragile guy, may well show issues down the road and that I think his tires are worth kicking again. What if the Shark doesn’t quite pan out? What if Z or Demp or Lilly get a good spanking when they aren’t “on” for their start — what if it happens if they crap out over two or three days? Wouldn’t having a guy like him in there to help pick things up be worth the exploration? I think so, but this is no hill I’m gonna die on.

So tweeting – for me, of the old school – just isn’t my inspiration in Cubs ST. Sure, it can provide insights that are valuable, but the nature of the medium itself is enough for those who want context that brings clarification. And when driven by a hungry media who want the headlines, it’s a monster that needs to be reigned in.