So Kevin Spacey was on Letterman last night, and during part of his interview tried to explain Twitter to Dave. No luck:
The same thing happens when my parents try to explain the Internet or Cell Phones to my grandparents. Smiles and nods, but no real comprehension.
Oh Dave. You’re so cute when you’re old and grumpy.
Ok. I was willing to give it a chance. But after reading this brief little blurb in Time:
Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs …
… and now I’m mad. What a load of crap!
Twitter, as far as I can tell, is totally and completely worthless. For me. And for pretty much everyone I’ve talked to in my circle of friends.
It seems to be a revolutionary new way for people I don’t care about to say things I don’t care about and listen to the opinions of still more people I don’t care about.
While the aggregation of all of the posts on Twitter could amount to ‘the next wave of culture’ or ‘news’ you could say that about anything. I could say that about the blogs I follow via Google Reader. Or about the items on McDonald’s Value Menu. Twitter is just data. Mass amounts of unweighted, subjective data. And while, yes, it does give you ‘access’ to people you otherwise might not get access to, I’d still say you’re fooling yourself if you think that access is unfiltered.
Do you really think Sarah Palin updates her own Twitter account? Oprah? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ashton Kutcher? Maybe. But it could just as easily be their press agents. Or their interns.
To call it social networking is a lie. It’s almost entirely anti-social. You post talking points and assume someone somewhere cares. The ‘conversation’ barely exists (unlike Facebook, where conversation is the whole point).
So fine. Let the media people all hang on each others’ words until their heads explode. Let the teeny-boppers follow Ashton Kuscher. Let the Republicans follow Sarah Palin. But count me out.
I don’t see anything Twitter has to offer me that hasn’t already been rolled into Facebook’s latest update, or into something like FriendFeed (that aggregates everything people have already posted). And I already have a blog, thank you. I appreciate that I don’t feel lazy or uncreative enough to feel daunted by word count potentially greater than 140 characters. I like writing.
And the funniest thing is that Twitter’s platform is still completely unstable. People have complained about their service being jittery nonstop for the past year. And now, even in light of all of this media attention, they still can’t seem to get it together.
I’m not making any predictions because… sadly… I’ll probably be wrong. But let’s just say I wouldn’t mind if Twitter turns out to be a bad trend (like 80s neon and AOL) that people just try to forget they were excited about after 3 months.
Maybe we can focus our attention on more curious things like the supposedly game-changing Wolfram Alpha, and what on earth that could be.
UPDATE: Oh great. Anyone have any guesses as to why Apple is now, so to speak, sucking Twitter’s dick? I’m sorry…. a Triumph of Humanity? Come on! A cure for cancer. That’d be a triumph of humanity. The judges would even accept ‘a cure for Swine Flu.’ But Twitter? What, did the same guy who wrote the Time article write this one too? Maybe he gets paid to publish in bulk.
Man, I didn’t like you before, Twitter. But now…
This is Sarah Palin’s new Twitter account (any wagers on whether Sarah knows how to post to Twitter?):
Note the text:
Bio: Creating New Energy for Alaskans as governor of the 49th state!
As pointed out by Gawker, this blatantly violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, a big no-no as far as reality and existence in this dimension goes. Physicists and chemists everywhere should write Palin to inform her that she is toying with forces she couldn’t possibly understand.
Thanks for this, Gawker. You’re always so trashy, but sometimes your trash smells oh so sweet.
Interestingly, while I was poking around on Twitter, I found California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s Twitter page (he’s one of the 7 people that Sarah Palin follows, along with Karl Rove and Newt Gengrich. What a classy great group of people.), and noticed that he’s following almost as many people as follow him ( Following 43,369, Followers: 55,117). That seems a little out of character for a public figure (Newt, for example, follows 92 people, while 214,506 lost souls follow him), but maybe that’s how Arnold keeps up with all of his many, many, many friends?