Tweeting Twitter

The other day I was listening to my usual podcast and finally caved into their constant barrage of twitter this and twitter that. It made me think, what is this "twitter" you guys always speak of. So I went and had a look. If you haven't seen it yourself, feel free to click here.

If you've seen it, then you'll probably agree with everything I have to say. The weird part is, you'll also disagree with everything I say.

In a nutshell, twitter is a website that you create an account with, log in and start dribbling on about what you are up to. It's not really like a blog so much, because you're not really keeping a journal or diary and it doesn't allow you to recount your entire days or weeks worth of events in a story-telling-like fashion. What twitter aims for is to quickly jot down what you're doing now. It's perfect fuel for the Gen Y people I discussed in my last story. After all, they do want everything now. Anything later is too late.

So, what do you do on twitter?

6:14am - Waking up

6:17am - Taking a dump

6:30am - Taking a shower

6:45am - I forgot to wash my hands again. Realised while eating breakfast

7:00am - Sitting on my arse watching Kochie on Sunrise

8:00am - Getting dressed and ready for work

9:00am - Driving

9:01am - Crashing

9:02am - I'm dead

So, can you imagine, this is what you do with your life now. You tell the world what you do with your life. I can't see the logic though. I mean, every time you're doing something, you have to stop doing that in order to tweet what you're doing. But all you're doing is freaking tweeting all day. Tweeting is what is known as the process of making twitter entries in your twitter account. Which is what you'll be doing forever now that you've created an account.

In fact, the only realistic, logical and honest thing I see being put into every twitter account around the world is "I'm tweeting".

If you're doing otherwise, you wouldn't be tweeting at all. And if you're multitasking, then you'd write that down and include tweeting in the same sentence.

You often hear office workers talk about how they're always bogged down with email. Then there's blogs, people write them, people read them. You also have things like Facebook which allow your "friends" to see what you're up to, but not like twitter. With Facebook, they have the decency to give you a break. They let you go and do other stuff, take photos and have a chance to lead your normal life. They when you come home, or sit at your desk on your lunch break you can post something about what happened so far today as opposed to what's happening right now.

Yes, Facebook has a clear, logical approach.... let the user write about what they did, not what they're doing. That's just silly.

Besides Facebook there are apparently a host of other "social" networking websites which I'll be honest and say I know little or nothing about. They mostly allow the same functionality. But twitter is different. It's a device that allows people that need to tell the world what they're doing this instant..... this instant, and satisfies the cravings of readers who need to know about what you're doing right now because there's nothing happening in theirs.

Is it just me, or is it sad that this is all really useless?

I mean, email is an improvement on snail mail. Skype is an improvement of phone calls, and those illusive video phone calls they talked about on Beyond 2000 back in 1985. These are Internet technologies that make sense. They are improvements and good, forward progress of technology we already had. Twitter? Hmmm, I can't see what they've improved. I can't even see their point at all.

Maybe it's because I'm too old. Maybe I'm not hip with it, I don't have a Facebook account, or a MySpace page. I don't blog often. Maybe I don't get twitter because twitter isn't for me. I'm happy to accept that, but are all those twitterers happy to accept what they're getting themselves into?

Your anti-twitter friend,

pip