I deleted my Twitter account. Gone; done; terminated; boxed; flushed; whacked; finished. There are probably endless euphemisms for it. In any case, I cogitated long and hard and I made the decision to eliminate it.
I don’t recall getting any phishing emails as a direct result of my Twitter account, though I did get my share of spam.
Why did I do it? It reminded me too much of electronic high-school. Maybe junior high. There’s just too much “oooh, my coworkers are doing this, hee hee”; “I’m peeing”; “I’m so tired today”; “So-and-so is wearing pink shoes.” Seriously. This is what the girls giggled about in high school, folks. Add to that the cliques – oh and there are cliques, you best believe – and the deal is closed.
For me, the signal-to-noise ratio was unbelievably low; I derived no benefit from it whatsoever, and in fact it was detrimental to both my work and my free time. I was following somewhere around 70 people give or take a few, and had about 80 followers. There’s no way I could find the time to sift through the banter to find the one nugget of useful information that may have slipped past me three hours ago while I was building 8.0, fetching 7.2, closing bug tickets, and writing functional specs and reading design specs. To further complicate matters tweets become conversations and you have to follow entire threads of tweets to figure out what a dozen people are discussing, only to discover it started with someone flaming imperative programming languages.
Maybe I wasn’t following the right people. That’s a tough argument to make; I believe I was. It just never materialized into anything other than a time sink – a giant sucking sound as my life was drained from me. Sure, I’m guilty for tweeting my share of inane drivel. But the whole concept of Twitter – expressing something meaningful and useful in 140 characters or less is just… well, nuts. The whole point of Twitter is “exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Who cares? Maybe I’m sleeping. Maybe I’m dropping a deuce, do you really care? It answers the question, though. Does anyone really care who is wearing pink shoes, or who is typing a Twitter-flame right now? Probably not. I don’t, anyway. I can’t possibly believe that people who are following more than 50 other people derive anything more than simple chatty pleasure from it. There can be no way to justify the maintenance costs to get a minimal amount of useful information.
It is said (by Dr. Brian Cox) of the Large Hadron Collider during a collision that it generates the equivalent of “10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica’s a second.” I believe Twitter is the human analog of the LHC. There is more data being generated by the hundreds of thousands of users than can be distilled into anything meaningful by a single person in real time. When more than one person tries, it becomes recursive Twitter.
Twitter does seem to have some redeeming qualities. If you live in your parent’s basement for example, it’s a 21st century chat room. It seems useful for people who have a lot of free time at work – the kind of people who either get paid to talk to other people for a living or who will be replaced by software soon. To say the least, Twitter seems to have found it’s niche in the social networking world, but it’s just not a place that I want to hang out. I have friends, a family, kids, and hobbies (way too many hobbies) and perhaps most importantly a job. I just don’t have the time currency to sink into a losing investment.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch paint dry.
Goody