Saturday, April 3, 2010

Twitter, bah humbug


 I have 2 twitter accounts, one for this blog which is 3 weeks old and has 3 tweets (so consider it stuffed in a back corner), and one that is about 8 months old that has 33 tweets, mostly used to rip on Arthur Kade's absurd tweets and to follow a few people who are really interesting or funny like Stephen[Colbert]AtHome.

Now and then I get an email that someone is following me on twitter (up to 5 followers suddenly, woah!) and you can bet if I don't follow them back within a week they unfollow me. It is a weird numbers game for a lot of people which I don't get and I won't play along with. If the person is interesting, I will be overjoyed and will be happy to follow them too. Otherwise leave me out of it. This week I was followed and unfollowed by a person with these twitter stats:

2000 followers
13 tweets*
following 2192 people

Um...

Twitter is basically bullshit when all is said and done. 99.9% of tweeters are spending their time trying to gain followers as though there was a prize in it for them and/or they are spending it over-sharing and passing on absolutely pointless information. Often reams of it. (in 140 character chunks) I try to imagine what it would be like to hang with these people who are glued to their phone texting every 15 minutes or the second something in the scenery changes. I wouldn't hang around for long.

I won't throw Twitter out however, because there are a few gems in the morass of meaninglessness. The people who use it to say new posts are up or new things are made or an interesting news article should be seen or to give out a short bit of suddenly realized wit are worth checking in on. You don't even need to be a registered twitter user to read what is posted, just to reply. For that, points. For the rest, ugh.

*(the 13 tweets were retweets and pure nonsense)

2 comments:

wanderingpilgrim said...

Hey, where are your older posts? Did your tweet ex-followers flush them down the hole? A tweet is just what it sounds like, for the birds of little to say.

Hypnogogial said...

Not sure what you mean about my posts being gone. I can still see them.