twitter – rubbish

Twitter is rubbish.  There … I’ve said it.

Really though, Twitter really is a bunch of old arse.  Micro-blogging? Inane verbal diarrhoea is more accurate.  Logging in every ten minutes to say “Mike is having breakfast”, and then face reading 50+ messages from other people I know who are saying much the same thing – that’s neither fun nor constructive; it’s bloody stupid.

I get the concept of Twitter, I really do.  I’d go so far as to say that allowing people to comment on the highlights of their day in short message form has real potential.  But that’s not what happens, is it?  What actually happens is that you ‘follow’ people you barely know, and then – depending upon their level of Twitter commitment- spend the rest of your life reading about every aspect of their lives, in all their mundane glory.  And there’s definitely a direct negative correlation between how well you know someone and how often they use Twitter to ‘share’; your closest friends aren’t even on Twitter, while vague acquaintances share every waking moment.

There’s another problem. Several of those I follow on Twitter are people I’ve ‘met’ online through a professional (well, sometimes professional) email list. I’ve never actually met them, but I have spent lots of time with them – in a pretty specific context over the past couple of years. They are professional writers, intelligent, erudite and witty. Put simply, they are good at writing things on Twitter. However, because I’ve never met them, an awful lot of what they say about what they’re doing, watching and thinking means absolutely nothing to me. And Twitter provides no way of filtering messages at all – you either follow someone and accept everything they say, or you drop them and see nothing. Not ideal.

And exactly why is micro-blogging better than normal blogging anyway?  On a proper blog I can still follow people I like, but with the added advantage of not having their thoughts shoved down my throat.  And if I follow someone I think is interesting, they get to write more than 140 characters, post pictures, sound and video as part of their interestingness, permit many different people to add to interesting stuff with comments, and – most simply – write their interesting thoughts down at length if they want to. I can dip in and out of their blog at my leisure, and the interesting things they do, say or think are kept on there, in easy-to-find form, for as long as they want.

So there it is.  I’m not going to bother with Twitter any more, because I don’t like it.  Moreover, I’d personally like to see everyone who uses Twitter stop immediately, and replace it with a proper blog.  Then you can flourish, instead of condensing your interestingness into 140-character ‘Tweet’ format.  Death to Twitter – bring back the blog!