Goodbye Twitter

Last March, I read an article in the Economist about the social network site Twitter and decided I’d test it out.  It isn’t that I have a love for social networks, but I do think it is important to be aware of the tools being used by your friends and neighbors.  Also, ten years from now when VH 1 is doing some I Love the 2000s show, I’d like to be able to relate to the poorly delivered jokes.

For those still in the dark, Twitter is a micro-blogging site.  Messages are restricted to 140 characters.  You follow the messages (Tweets) sent by people you follow.  And your friends (or strangers) can follow your Tweets.

Although a lot of the members use their cell phones to enter their messages, I use a FireFox browser plugin called TwitterFox.  As I would get Tweets, a little window would increment a message count and then pop up with the details once that number was clicked.  And if I wanted to fire off a Tweet, I would just move my cursor to that corner and a window would pop up and I’d start typing.  So simple.

I honestly did not think I would like Twitter as much as I did.  It quickly became addicting.  Almost too addicting.  My pal Stuart from Brainmower said this about Twitter:

If I could, I would grind Twitter up into a fine dust, purify it with a lighter on the back of a spoon and then inject it straight into my eyeball.

It should be noted that Brainmower has only been updated once since in the past two months.  And therein lies the problem.  Twitter is a time suck and as I’ve discovered – a complete waste of time. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?  After all, I’ve entered over 1000 Tweets since March.  I guess I held out hope that the very next Tweet would be useful and interesting.  And it almost never was.

Recently, I shared the post Signal vs Noise – Consume vs Create.  For a full understanding of that thesis, go read it now.   Let us review the chart below.

Twitter is almost pure noise.  Although it may sound good in theory to be updated when your friends are doing something interesting, you eventually discover what you find interesting and they find interesting are often two different things.  You are consuming noise (C) and creating noise (D).

I was hoping to read a Tweet like this:

Down at PIKE MARKET.  It appears there is some model shoot going on.  Could b Maxim?

Instead I was bombarded with Tweets like this:

Decided to eat a bagel for breakfast.

In the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron, thought interrupters (headphones with distracting noises) are placed on the citizens with higher intelligence in an effort to make them as dumb as those with low intelligence.  Twitter is the modern day thought interrupter.

I’m sorry, but I don’t care what you had to eat.  Or that you just arrived to the office.  Or that you are meeting with a vendor.  And forgive me if I don’t want to see some crappy photo you just took from your cell phone.

I suppose one could always UNFOLLOW a friend with tedious posts.  But that action is very public and could lead to hurt feelings.  Most of my friends are very interesting – if you give them more than 140 characters.  Almost none of them are at 140 or less.

For a while I thought I could just use Twitter to drive traffic to this site, but discovered it was highly ineffective.  My site stats show no real difference in traffic between posts that go out as Tweets and those that don’t.

Twitter could have a useful purpose in sharing information during a crisis, such as the California wildfires.  Maybe Twitter would be useful for a helpline situation, where questions were being actively answered.  But I really don’t care to read your reaction to some baseball game in progress and you probably don’t care to read my reaction to the stock market.

Maybe I’ll change my mind someday.  Anything is possible.  But for now, it is too much noise and I’m turning it off.  Goodbye Twitter.

NOTE: I will continue using my 2nd Twitter account for INeedCoffee – just to announce new articles.  At some point, I will write some code to auto-post those announcements.