Apr
21
On twits and twitter
April 21, 2009 | 2 Comments
Ed Morrissey has a post up at Hot Air that serves as a useful jumping off point for something I’ve been meaning to write for a few weeks but hadn’t had the chance to quite yet.
Ed begins:
There are two phenomena that I confess to not “getting” these days: Twitter and Meghan McCain. Both of them seem to be fun and diverting, but neither seem to serve much purpose outside of entertainment. Both converged in an odd story which made me wonder exactly what Ms. McCain thinks that Twitter does:
Ed proceeds to quote Meghan McCain, who finds it “creepy” that Karl Rove follows here on Twitter. Meghan dear, Karl Rove follows me on Twitter. In fact, Karl Rove follows pretty much who follows him. Mr. Rove appears to be one of the more famous practitioners of the follow back – the unspoken rule that you follow anyone who follows you – a trend I’ll get to in a moment. As the gal who penned the theme to The Spy Who Loved Me would say, you’re so vain, you think this follow is about you.
Ed continues.
So Megan started out following Rove’s tweets, found them boring, and apparently stopped following them. That’s certainly no big deal; I did the same with Meghan’s tweets, which may be fascinating to some but are almost entirely content-free updates on her personal likes and dislikes. Which is fine, of course — that’s pretty much what you get with a 140-character limit. But I’d say, after following Meghan McCain myself for a while, that having her complain about substance-free Twitter feeds is somewhat akin to having Paris Hilton complain about the incredible lightness of being Nicole Ritchie.
Besides, isn’t the point of posting Twitter updates to attract a following? She created the Twitter feed to get people to read her updates. Unless I’ve missed some key feature at Twitter, there isn’t exactly a screening process for followers to hurdle to add a feed to their list, so I don’t think that there’s anything “creepy” about one user following another. Not to overdo the analogies, but that’s like belting out a show tune at a karaoke joint and then complaining about all the attention you got.
What Ms. McCain really did was take a cheap shot at someone who doesn’t enjoy a great deal of popularity, and the only reason some people cheered it was because they don’t like him, either. It’s mean-spirited and highly calculated to make herself one of the Kool Kidz.
Meghan McCain has embarked on a thrilling project to take back a party that up to a few months ago no person realized she was a member of. Evidently this is all part of that master plan which will no doubt come to fruition by the end of Bobby Jindal’s second term as US President in 2028.
At any rate, this reminds me of what I’ve been meaning to say: Twitter is a completely useless technology that sadly will only become more popular. I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now, and have even downloaded the Tweet Deck on both my home and work computers in order to organize messages. I have not even opened Tweet Deck on either computer since Friday. Many days pass without me opening it up or bothering to “tweet.” It has been six days since I tweeted (just typing the word makes me cringe). That’s not atypical. Yet I continue to get email messages that people are following me. Once an automatic for me, I no longer follow back.
Here’s the problem with Twitter. Even with Tweet Deck, where you can arrange folders so as to read only the messages of those you are most interested in reading, there is an “all friends” folder containing the tweets of everyone you follow. And man, are there some people not worth following. There are people on Twitter who seem to be believe that every thought that runs through their head must be tweeted. In the course of a day there are some twitterers who must tweet (do you see how stupid this whole thing is!) hundreds of times per day. When I see such people it makes me think of William Shattner on SNL appearing at a Trek convention – “Have you ever kissed a girl?”
Now, most people are not this bad, and most of the friends that I follow seem to have a more reasonable way of approaching Twitter. But even used well, it’s still fairly pointless. Perhaps the only real benefit of the platform is the fact that it forces you to be more concise. After all, you’ve only got 140 characters at your disposal. So, it’s got that going for it.
I probably won’t completely give up twitter. For every thousand or so messages that come accross my screen, there are a few interesting ones that have even led to some good blog posts. And it does allow me to keep track of a few friends and see what they’re up to. Hopefully, they don’t find me too creepy.
But if you see people writing or commenting about how stupid Twitter is – take it from me: they are right.
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2 Comments so far
I don’t get Twitter. Heck, not sure I understand the value of Facebook. All of these things will likely in time seem like the 8 track tape on the path to the CD’s.
Just for sh*ts and giggles, you should replace “tweet” and “twitter” with “smurf”.