Twitter has been becoming fairly popular lately, which makes sense as it seems to be a blog for the terminally lazy and uninspired. I believe Twitter was initially meant as a sort of permanent away message; especially given its tagline, “What are you doing?” Notice it is not, “What are you thinking,” or, “What are your soicetal philosophies governing your existence broken down into a one-liner?” Yet, much like most other Internet fads, people will use it and twist it to their will. Not that this is a bad thing. In fact, that can be the very foundation for inovation.
The problem with Twitter, though, is that it’s function is basically limited to the essence of the Internet’s fundamental problem: noise. E.g., it encourages people to believe that I, or anyone for that matter, care what they’re doing/thinking at any point in the day, let alone every goddamned second. When you think about it, Twitter is an incredibly simple idea, and it encompasses many of the things that can be right with the Internet – usability, simplicity, and social networking. On the other hand, these typically used to be the secondary traits of a good service, not the service itself. In other words, Twitter stripped away every substantial aspect of a good product and left only the bells and whistles. It is the reality TV of the Internet.
And naturally people flocked to it because it allows you to express your thoughts without having to explain or defend them. When blogs caught on, there was an impetus for people to write more than a single sentence. Blogs compelled the user to learn how to string together a coherent line of thought and opinion into a work of some intrinsic value worth reading. And although too many seemed to use blogs in a similar way to Twitter, they didn’t have the 140-character limit as an excuse and you weren’t left with stupid shit like 140it.
It seems, though, that Twitter is beginning to fall prey to the same forces that caused the downfall of the of Myspace, Second Life, and Crocs. No, not child molestors, but publicity. When a comedian bitching about a nonexistent word is enough to write a news story about, or when congress is too busy wasting their time to do their goddamned job, you know the grassroots elements that supported Twitter are no longer there. As such, I wouldn’t be surprised at an impending implosion of Twitter and the coinciding rise in some other endearing and worthless service. At least until the media stomps all over that too.
If you only use twitter to describe your breakfast it will clearly have it’s limitations. But… I read this post-
http://toddnash.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/why-i-was-wrong-about-twitter/
… and I kinda agree with him. Nice blog though, but I would kinda like to read an ‘About’ page or something. I’m assuming it’s a conscious decision on your part not to include one?
Thanks for the comment, Jon. I read the article you cited and I can now understand a bit more why people might like Twitter. But to me, it still seems to be a sort of amalgamation of preexisting services with nothing really new to offer. Where Twitter seems to shine is in its unbridled simplicity. Many of the best products were evolutions of good ideas that lacked proper execution; and I’ll be the last person to take some sort of ideological high ground in favor some schmuck who had a good idea but nothing else.
Where my beef stands is largely from a marketing standpoint. For example, after you commented, I went looking for evidence of Twitter’s usefulness, but all it seemed to communicate to me by itself was that it existed solely as service that facilitates a layman’s type of RSS feed of their daily bullshit. This could be a result of the hellbent desire to appear as stupidly simple as possible. On the other hand, the law of unintended consequences has come up with all sorts of revolutionary things that no single person could have predicted; and clearly that has happened here. Unfortunately, for all my research I understand Twitter’s potential in some sort of hazy, ephemeral way, but in practice it has yet to convince me that it possesses any real innovative features that haven’t already been fleshed out more fully elsewhere.
Thanks for reading and thanks again for the comment!