….Why Twitter is Inane
1. Who really cares about “what are you doing”? Does anyone really care if you’re waiting in the dental office or eating a bad sandwich or watching the snow fall?
2. For all the growing concerns about online privacy, there are people using Twitter who more than happy to share everything - both personal and professional - with just about anyone. These people are anti-privacy because they clearly believe everything should be public. Strange, very strange.
3. It’s mostly a ego-driven, vanity exercise because you think whatever you’re doing is worth the time to write about it. Strange, very strange.
4. You can only write 140-character messages so Twitter is, at best, communications “lite”. At worse, it’s just digital burps - falling short of an instant message or far below an e-mail.
5. Twitter has no business model. It’s a free service that, nevertheless, attracted venture capital based on the idea if that eyeballs are valuable, which is so Web 1.0.
For good, objective look at Twitter, check out twopiearr, who explores the “Twitter hate” phenomena. TimvanderWiede provides some insight into how he “effectively uses Twitter”, which seems like an oxymoron.
Update: Scott Karp, a well-known media/tech blogger, has a post on why he quit Twitter. It turns out there was too much “noise”. Ha, told you so!
Technorati Tags: Twitter
December 7th, 2007 at 2:25 am
Sure, many people are always going to be self-indulgent with blogs, Twitter or anything remotely social. You don’t have to listen to those people.
There certainly are ways to ‘effectively’ use Twitter, when you realize it’s not all about emo-driven microblogging.
Many web applications are hooking into Twitter to provide remote control functionality through IMs or SMS. I think that’s certainly one option Twitter has for monetizing their model for ‘providers’ without ever charging ‘readers’.