I have a Twitter account. I have a Tumblr blog. I just… never really use them, and maybe these are the reasons. This post is about Twitter.
1. Do people care?
I cannot come up with a reason why people would like to know what’s on my mind. A number of celebrities have Twitter accounts, which are generally used for good causes due to their large following. People do care about what famous people are saying. Me? Not so much. Do I have anything of value to say? Rarely. For friends and people who are close to me, we have other ways to communicate and exchange ideas.
2. 140 characters are not enough.
Contrary to how it looks on my blog, I enjoy blogging. What I love the most about it is expression and elaboration. I like the traditional way of stating a point and then bringing up the arguments and evidence to support my point. The suspense of someone stating something and leave it at that kills me. I am interested to know why people think/do things. I want to tell people why I think/do certain things, and 140 characters are not enough.
3. The danger of being spammed.
This is a semi-ranty point. In attempt to “get Twitter” and “get into Twitter”, I used to have a Firefox plugin which instantly updated me with people’s tweets. In the end, the overwhelming number of tweets getting through froze my browser too many times.1 I also constantly got actual spam messages from “people” who wanted to recommend weight loss meds. All of that aside, although I love reading tweets from Stephen Fry, he tweets just a bit too much that I fail to keep up.
Perhaps this old lady here is not using it properly, but I just cannot get into Twitter. I understand why it has gained such importance but not why it is relevant to me. I know a lot of my friends are going to disagree on this one, though. Feel free to enlighten me. 
- There was also a Twitter contest organised by NameCheap.com. I regrettably participated in it. I went back and deleted my responding tweets afterward, but it didn’t stop my tweets from participating in the immobilization of my laptop. [↩]
7 Comments
Things that aren’t important or interesting enough to warrant its own entry or a targeted message to a friend go to my Twitter and Plurk. I put them there exactly because no one cares.
Oh, the dreaded Namecheap content. I won’t elaborate.
I like Twitter, but I get where you’re coming from. I used to have those same annoyances. Mostly with people tweeting CONSTANTLY (I’ve since gotten over my fear of them hating me if I unfollowed them and it’s made my life way simpler). And then my browser crashing. TwitterFox used to do that constantly for me, so a few months of last year, I just… stopped watching it.
Not really sure where I’m going with this. But I’ve grown to like Twitter. I like being able to keep up with the friends and few celebrities that I care about.
Though I wouldn’t consider myself one of your friends, I still won’t argue how much you don’t “get Twitter”. Like every application on the web, some people will love it, some people will hate it (and then there’s those inbetween).
I am with you, on the merits of blogging. Like you, I like executing my point, following by explanations, theories and arguments – and yes, 140 characters just can’t do that. I am one of those people who will write two or three tweets on a subject, but that’s usually to clear something up, something that doesn’t need to go in a blog – I should get out of the habit, though.
I get where you’re coming from, at least to a certain extent. As much as I like Twitter, I do have some issues with it – and let’s not even get into the fucking NameCheap contest D:
I use Twitter for whatever thoughts/observations I have that aren’t poignant or interesting enough to turn into a full-fledged blog entry. If I saved every little thought in my head for a blog entry rather than sorting out which should be blogged and which should be microblogged, my blog would get totally bogged down in half-assed thoughts that belong on Twitter, not my blog.
I had people I was really annoyed with on my Twitter list cause they tweeted about crap I didn’t care 24/7, so I just unfollowed them. I’m not bothered if people do that to me either – no one says you HAVE to follow back those that follow you. If they think you’re interesting, they’ll follow you, and if not, they won’t. Simple as that.
As for TwitterFox/EchoFon, I stopped using it a long time ago. I use Tweetie now, which is a Twitter app. Not sure what options there are for PCs, but for Macs I definitely recommend it!
I think Twitter is definitely not something everybody SHOULD enjoy. If you don’t think Twitter can be entertaining, useful or ’something’ to you… you should definitely not use it.
I love Twitter … but I use Twitter on a my own personal way. I don’t think everybody has the same use for Twitter. Some people see it as a spam / marketing tool, others like to bitch on Twitter and there are people that actually say pretty interesting stuff (at least I think so).
I’m not sure if I can enlighten you … and make you enjoy Twitter more. I just think if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t use it. It would be a waste of your time.
Personally, I find Twitter to be a fun way to stay on top of stupid links my friends find, play fun thought games (again, with friends), and watch certain celebrities be professionally insane (Warren Ellis, Stan Lee, etc). That said, sometimes I just ignore everything on there save direct messages/responses to me.
I guess it’s all your mood and your feelings. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course, if it’s crashing your browser, you’re probably following too many people.
As you know I stopped using twitter a while ago. It was mainly because my account kept getting hacked, but it was also due to boredum and a sense of pointlessness. Some people love it, and that’s fine. But for me, 140 characters is limiting and a bit lazy. There’s already Facebook for posting short status updates to friends. I am sure Twitter, like a lot of online fads, will soon die out.