newprotest.org: MY OWN TWITTER

MY OWN TWITTER

June 03, 2007
by: jovial_cynic
A coworker recently pointed me to an article on MSNBC about twitter, the hyper-social networking site that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately. Long story short, it allows users to write very short posts about what they're doing or thinking at the moment.

They're a bit like text messages... and in fact, they allow you to subscribe to another user's post via RSS feed which can also be sent to a phone.

Anyhow, the MSNBC article goes on to state that a lot of old-school bloggers are quite anti-twitter, siting the differences between sarcastic and jaded Gen X and and youthful optimistic Gen Y.

I’m betting the majority of all these Twitter-hatin’ cranks are war-torn veterans of Web 1.0. They’ve been through the bubble and bust. They experienced the unbridled excitement of wicked-cool technology with all it promises … and they got burned. Bearing all the cynicism that typifies Generation X, these Twitter-haters sneer at un-jaded Generation Y with anticipatory schadenfreude and jealousy. Yes, jealously. Admit it or not, inability to immediately embrace Twitter means you’re old.

However, I think the reality of the anti-twitter movement is that folks like me think the following posts found on twitter's home page are a waste of web space:

Kicking back and relaxing

"Are you the walrus?" by Furthermore is a great song

my god, the rain is crazy

going to board the flight. see ya on the left coast.

Learning up zombie's and how to survive...

... etc., etc.


This isn't social networking. Social networking is people gathering around a shared interest. It's about minds coming together over a particular medium and forming tribes and sharing intellectual resources. Twitter, on the other hand, is people vomiting their thoughts. It's the worst of high school English stream-of-consciousness exercises, combined with clever Web 2.0 technology that allows people to share their vomit with one another.

No thanks. I signed up to see what it was all about, and promptly deleted my account 15 minutes into it.

My momentary Twitter experience did give me an idea, though. I like to write down my thoughts so I don't forget them, but they often don't really contain enough content to constitute an entire blog post. I have tons of post-it notes everywhere with my ideas or thoughts, and I tend to lose them each time I clean out my desk or my notebook. By having a "momentary musings" section on the side navigation, I can post my post-it note thoughts on my site, and I figure that folks who are reading my blog are generally people who actually want to know what my thoughts are anyway.

We'll see how it goes. If it gets obnoxious to me, I'll pull it down, but we'll see.
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