I wonder about things. I wonder why I need so many half consumed jars of jam. I wonder why the rise of the internet, the economic bubble and its bursting are all related. I wonder why no one seems to notice that. And I wonder why Twitter is taking off, jumping the shark and about to become (in Mr. James’s words or – better – something like them) the usenet of the 2010’s. Remember usenet? It was so great. People being all Web 2.0 a decade and more before Web 2.0? Now people are being all 25% usenet fifteen years or more later. What is up?
Anyway, being ticked that the Whitehouse apparently really really discovered Twitter last night and finding 30 or so of the last 50 posts I had to wade through were about policy and Obama girls, I deleted that feed. I have been spending much of my Twitter time in the last two weeks deleting feeds. I even had a show trial of a brewer whose pace of twitting was far too manic. I bet that really stung. Being unhappy with Twitter has given rise to a few observations which I trust you will confirm in their entirety:
- People consider the haiku moment of Twitter to be the restriction to 140 characters. I would prefer 50 characters myself. I had no idea that people could actually go on with only 140 units at their disposal.
- Twitter is now full of spam. Twitter spam is of two sorts:repeating the posts of others when any one with any sense would plagiarizer a good idea and straight up commercial blabbery. Are people now so accustomed to spam that they don’t notice it is spam?
- A more annoying constraint is the limit to the number of posts I can view meaning that a twitting blabber mouth can monopolize your view screen. I say view screen as it is a more accurate 1964 way of describing the screen you view. For you stuck in the 90s please refer to the GUI. If you post more than 4 times a day, you are cluttering your readers’ view screens.
- There is something really really sad about news media discussing Twitter. But it might equally be said that it is very sad when bloggers write about Twitter.
- Twitter is incredibly anti-social for social software. It is entirely isolating, insulating and, if one were hooked, immersing. Stephen Fry may well be playing out his addiction in public and one wonders what it means to “follow” 55,243 feeds. Surely, the format is simply broken at that point.
So, is Twitter the widget that is so simple yet dysfunctional that no one actually has to admit it does not really work except as a Borg training device?. And why is it so apt for people in the time of recession? What does it speak to in a time of doubt and uncertainty? Is it like Depression-era eating goldfish or dancing non-stop contests without a prize?
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