Twitter is just a cacophony

Twitter describes itself as a micro-blogging service, which tends to be a bit misleading in my opinion. To me, a blog is (amongst other things) a personal journal with which you can share anything, from emotions to ideas. I guess I could use Twitter for that purpose, but the shortness of the tweets (140 letters limit) gives me the impression it is better suited for advertisement and petty conversations. 

As I mentionned in a previous post, I really like what I write to remain pertinent troughout time and Twitter just drops the ball on this; I do not care about my opinion of the weather a few months ago (people tweet about this a lot it seems(and it’s the alma matter of office conversations)). There is no blogging whatsoever involved in twittering my state, or else, I should be able to consider all the content that sits in /var/log (on unix machines) to be blogging.

A blog post gives me the opportunity to sit back and think about specific events, thoughts or places that marked an otherwise normal day; its intellectual retrospection and makes me a better individual. On top of that, my thoughts might even interest someone that happens to be in the same situation or just curious about the same subject. Generally, every well formed blog post will share something with the rest of the web, be it insight or information. Twitter, on the other hand, is just another vehicle for web exhibitionism; I do not see anything immediately useful that can be derived from a twitter feed except some social (trends is one example) data you can get through search engine statistics anyway.

Every one wants to know how their friends are doing, sure, but I like the communication to be in the form of an e-mail or a conversation. Twitter does not fall short of updating indiviudals with their relatives’ status, but it does so in a way that demotes spending quality time interacting with others or with our own self. I have no hard feeling towards people on Twitter, I am just someone that likes to ask himself how and why rather than what and from the point of view of an outsider, Twitter is just another service that adds to the information noise the web is increasingly drowning into. It promotes this technologically induced attention deficit disorder my generation is increasingly being affected by.

I might end up on twitter one day. It could be that I don’t get it, that I am just too old (what ?) to do it on my own accord, for business, who knows? But right now, when I see Twitter, I do not figure a bunch of birds perched on an electrical wire and twitterring to each other, I see the droppings they leave behind.