@Twitter: Too Much and Not Enough ...

Essay
Once upon a time, Douglas Adams observed that, in an apparent attempt to keep our brains from working, humans have a habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day”, or “You’re very tall”, or “Oh dear, you seem to have fallen down a 30-foot well, are you all right?”.

Today, the echo in that 30-foot well rings “Twitter-itter-itter-itter”.


Aptly named, Twitter is a network for twits that have little to say about less than nothing. The free service makes it easy for people to post a micro-blog in 140 characters or less that can be read by anyone who cares to follow along. The Twitter cachet went over the top on 24 Feb 2009 when Congress posted back-channel tweets during President Obama’s speech. Twitter has been careening toward the populist gutter ever since, until today, the coolness of tweeting rivals sweater vests and baseball caps.


Twitter is the most ironic, moronic waste of time since Trivial Pursuit. Twitter not only pursues trivia, it runs it over, backs up, and runs over it again. Even at 140 characters or less, Twitter is the biggest bandwidth boondoggle since Sarah Palin’s stump speeches. Twitter exposes a new depth of gibber-jabber that should bore to tears even the people gibbering the jabber.


My favorite irony is O’Reilly’s plans for a Twitter book. Besides the incongruity of a 280+ page book about 140- character micro blogging system, Publisher Tim O’Reilly is one of the world’s worst Twitterer. O’Reilly approaches Twitter like James Joyce approached Ulysses – Stream of conciseness. (Sic.) No filter. No ID. On my screen, out the door. Hour by harrowing hour. All trees, no forest. Hint@Tim: More is not more.

My favorite feed used to be Chris Walken. Sadly, the person writing it was not actually the actor Christopher Walken, and Twitter censored the feed … weeding orchids and fertilizing dandelions.


Of course, Twitter doesn’t have to be mindless. It could be a cool technology again … if more people would stop tweeting like they were talking to the family parakeet. (“That’s a pretty girl. Polly wanna cracker?”)


Truth be told, I’ve enjoyed tweets from friends doing even mildly interesting things. (I’m looking at you, @Schwebbie!) But, bandwidth is bandwidth, and people with nothing to say, shouldn’t say it over Twitter. Reporting from the back of the Emperor’s closet, here’s some easy tweeting guidelines:


What to tweet:
  • Accepted a proposal.
  • Finished a book.

  • Bought a car.

    What not to tweet:

  • Good meeting!

  • Yummy lunch!

  • Huge dump!

    Or, for the ADD enabled, the micro-version:

  • What to tweet: Milestones.

  • What not to tweet: Minutia.

To be fair, it’s not just the people using Twitter. As a web application, Twitter sucks eggs. It does one thing, and does it poorly. Given a robust and featureful platform, we might attract a better class of twit.

Happily, third parties are busily writing improved Twitter clients and applications, but that doesn’t excuse Twitter’s own lack of innovation. (Or inability to pick a business model to fund innovation.)

Here’s the ten most obvious features that a competent micro-blogging network should offer out-of-the-box (most of which have already been invented):

9. Twits often use tweets as polls, but we have to tabulate the votes by hand (StrawPollNow).

8. Twitter is a micro-blog, and people also have regular blogs, but we have to post our own tweet when we post a blog (PingTwitter).

7. People post URLs in tweets, but what are the most popular URLs being posted? (TwittURLs)

6. Twits have followers, which follow other twits, but Twitter doesn’t recommend which twits we should be following (Twubble).

5. Twits like to follow their own followers, but Twitter doesn’t have an autofollow feature (TweetBots).

4. People like to re-tweet, but there’s no re-tweet feature, and no handy list of tweets most re-tweeted. (Can you dig it?) (ReTweetRank)

3. We can mark tweets as favorites, but where’s the list of the most favored tweets on the network?

2. The tweet feed is an generic chronology. Where are the categories? The personas? The tags? The Web 2.0? (Twemes)

1. The platform is so not scalable that people have time to get a “Twitter is Busy“ tattoo waiting for it come back online.

My prediction for 2010? Twitter becomes MySpace so-yesterday, and a new site with a reasonable feature set becomes the next socially transmitted dementia.