Twitter('s) For Dummies

Twitter is retarded.

I didn't understand it at first but now I'm pretty sure what it is. And it's dumb.




From what I understand, it's supposed to be a way for like a group of 20 or so close friends to keep in touch. Like a mass text message thing to enable you to say stuff like "Hey, I'm gonna be at the mall, who wants to meet me there?" and stuff like that, without the hassle of, I don't know, adding people individually to a text message.

That's the impression I got from the people who run Twitter a little over a year ago when I applied to write ad copy for them.

And I barely got that impression. I'm not kidding when I say that even as I applied for the gig I had no idea what it was. That's probably why I didn't get the job, but whatever, that's a whole other thing.

The other thing that bothers me about this phenomenon is the fact that anybody can sign up to listen in on your messages to your friends. So that alone makes it the creepiest of the social networking things, and aside from that, you can add thousands of people to your list of people to send messages to.

So if you didn't know, that's pretty much it: You are sent updates from tons of people while other people, who you don't even know, are being sent your updates.

And that's where it gets silly.

So now you have, lets say 80 people following you. And you're following 90 people. At this point, it's almost impossible to keep track of what's happening because with that many people talking (twittering, twatting, tweeting, whatever) at the same time, your homepage ends up looking like a string of incoherent random thoughts from people who may or may not be talking to you.



You can hardly see who's talking to you directly or what the hell they're talking about in general. I know personally, I see messages on my front page that say "@" before them, like:

"jane_doe@joe_shmoe:oh man, you're funny, i agree with your point!"

Meanwhile, I don't know who the fuck "joe_shmoe" is, or what his point was, but because my friend jane_doe knows him, I have to see their conversation, and maybe that update bumped a comment made directly to me off my front page.

So if you're friends are friends with each other, your page just ends up flooded with twits between the two of them that have nothing to do with you.



What's the purpose then? At this point nothing. It's just "cool" and new, I get its popularity, I don't get the purpose. Granted, a purpose was probably thought out and planned but it's clearly mutated from it's initial purpose just like Myspace, which was supposed to be a way for indie bands to promote their music, and Facebook, which actually got classier for its mutation as I'm pretty sure I read a quote where the guy who developed it admitted that it was created so he and his friends can meet chicks.

At the end of the day, people love to be heard and seen and acknowledged and twitter does that.

Just like all the other "social networking" bullshit sites. Nobody is really keeping in touch, people keep in touch with their real friends through the phone, or email or text, or Myspace or Facebook or IM.

I have been thinking about this for a while, I just didn't want to shit on it right out the gate, but after a few weeks of looking at this thing, I noticed that I don't need it and I can't imagine that other people need it, and after logging on and realizing that I'm just eavesdropping on peoples comments to other people I became convinced that it's just the corny, hip thing of the moment to be into and that's it. It's like a slinky or a hula hoop. If we're as smart as I think we are in general, this will disappear soon.



I guess a smarter person can make the observation about how Twitter and things like it make it easy to communicate without really interacting with people. And like, how maybe people need that now because as a society we're becoming more narcissistic and maybe twitter satiates the need people have to talk and express without really listening or connecting or blah, blah, blah.

That's not really our shtick here, I'm just gonna say it's lame. It makes me feel like I'm in a crowed room with a bunch of people and I'm overhearing what they're saying to other people.

It's a cool way to promote stuff though, I'm pretty sure of that, so whatever.

By the way, check out our stupid Twitter page so you can be alerted when we post new stuff on here, or if we say something funny randomly, you can be privy to that too. Also, if I want to tell you something or if I have a question that I want everyone to hear, I'll ask or tell it on there.

Since apparently, that's what's hot on the net right now.

you people disgust me.