So, on February 24th, 2009, I signed up on Twitter to experiment with it. To see what it offered me. To see if it was - in any way - a useful or exciting digital tool. I’ve been trying to use it as much as possible in that time, and have created the following list of pros and cons that reflect my experience.
FANFARE
Pro: Senseless fun is definitely plentiful. I spent about an hour and a half on #zombietalk, reading everyone’s opinions about different types of zombies, zombie films, zombie anatomy, “What do you do in situation X?”, etc, etc. And it was fun. It felt like being in an entertaining chat room.
Con: It felt like an entertaining chatroom that I had to click refresh in order to read any updates, and sometimes the updates were so plentiful that they pushed stuff I was trying to follow off of the main page. It was - on occasion - frustrating.
Con: It doesn’t seem like anyone actually reads or pays attention to people’s updates. I mean…a lot of people have something like 60+ followers, but it seems that these followers are an even more bloated group than your average assortment of Facebook friends.
Some people seem to be around just based on obligation. The mentality is you’re following me, I guess I should follow you. Seems fair, but I doubt anyone cares about reading everyone else’s tweets. Seems kind of pointless, and if people tweet too often, who wants to wade through all your meaningless bits and pieces (I removed someone specifically for this reason).
Another thing I noticed is that a lot of followers are - essentially - telemarketers. Tiger Direct? Barack Obama? Random advertisements for web apps and iPhone apps? Twitter is essentially the Facebook of advertisers, and when a third of the people following you aren’t real people…what’s the point? If you like this, then your idea of a good time must be hanging out with a dozen answering machines, three unplugged televisions, and 7 blow up dolls, because you are getting largely the same companionship on Twitter, it seems.
Con: You don’t get the impression that anyone is reading. I like seeing the comments people leave in a blog, and commenting back. Out of a total of 89 tweets, I received very few responses. Kind of sucky. Here at The Box, the ratio of posts to comments is slightly more than 1:3 (I’d say I have about 3.5 comments per post on average, not counting spam comments).
I consider the discussions that result from my posts - even if they disagree with what I’m saying wholeheartedly - to be a good thing. It makes it more interesting to write something and know that people have read it and have reacted because of it.
Point: Not really a pro or a con, but - lets face it - Twitter is simply the status portion of Facebook made into its own separate website. Go to Facebook (those of you who still have it), Click ‘Home’, and then select the tab labelled ‘Status Updates’.
Oh snap. Twitter. Except on this Twitter you can also keep track of upcoming events that your friends have invited you too, and the whole thing involving viewing other people’s images and videos is so much easier than going to the various Twitter themed video and image hosting places.
This isn’t necessarily a con. It is just something I want to point out. Twitter is no different than Facebook statuses. It is simply a different social community.
Con: Twitter is a different social community. So different, in fact, that I hardly know anyone on it. The number of people on Twitter who I know is 5. FIVE. You heard me. The third largest prime number. Kind of lame, and not exactly social. Although, Twitter is great if you want to follow and be followed by randoms…although that just seems very creepy.
Pro: Tweeting is MUCH easier than blogging when it comes to informing people about your status/life/etc. Rather than writing a gigantic post every week, you throw out a few dozen tweets and - ideally - everyone is in the loop. That being said, I’d challenge those who have Twitter to find the number of tweets that I made relevant to my actual life, and not some form of digital entertainment.
Then again, I’d challenge those who read my blog to find the number of posts that I have made relevant to my actual life, and not some form of digital entertainment.
Con: 140 Characters is a cage! Once you throw in any sort of humorous link and a reply tag to a specific user, you’re sitting with 80 characters left. I had to frequently go back and dumb down my tweets or trim things out entirely because of that cap. Where is the fun in that? If tweeting is supposed to be about capturing something in the moment, and about being quick (since many do it by cell phone), shouldn’t the character limit be slightly higher so that someone doesn’t have to backspace frequently to complete an update?
Conclusion: Twitter is not for me. Trying it out was interesting, but it confirmed my suspicions. Twitter is yet another thing that eats up a whole lot of time with virtually nothing to show for it. And - after using Twitter so frequently over the past week - I realized something. Twitter is the exact thing I’ve hated doing for years. But it hasn’t been in the same form as Twitter. I’m talking about documenting every little thing in life constantly.
During my family vacations when I was younger, I was always the one who had to record it all on the video camera. Plenty of video footage. Plenty of photos taken. But ultimately, it meant that I was watching our vacations through the lens of a camera.
The sad thing was that I rarely got to experience much on vacations because I was capturing it all for future review. The worst part of all was that since returning from many many vacations, these tapes have never been viewed. I think some of them may have even been recorded over. Why oh why did I waste so much time recording every little detail when no one even cared?
I get the same feeling from Twitter and even from my blog. I spend all this time writing and writing and writing, but no one is reading. No one actually cares. And no one is going to care. So, can anyone explain to me why I am spending so much time documenting life instead of living it? Where is the benefit in all of this stuff?