Friday 1 July 2011

Why I Dislike Twitter (or Why Twitter Sucks)

Google+ seems to be making lots of people extremely excited! I'm just wondering how it'll work out after Google Wave died a natural death. I'm not wishing it won't work well; I'm just a little skeptical.

However, with regard to social networking sites, the one thing that I still find completely incredible is the popularity of Twitter. Really, what does it do? It's like a facebook (thanks to the logo, I always end up spelling it without a capital "F") where you can't do much except update your status message, once every hour if you're a compulsive, er, Tweeter, and about once a month if you're like me.

I agreed to give it a shot because some of my best friends gnawed at my brains until I did told me to, and I thought, why not? I was told I would get used to it, but that hasn't happened so far, and I don't think it ever will. There are several things about that site which annoy me no end, but I'll stick with just a few main things.

Character limit: 140
Why? If you don't have much to say, you won't say much, whatever the limit may be. And if someone does have a lot to say, isn't it better to let one say it in one message instead of four consecutive messages? (Oh, so sorry, I meant tweets. Meh.)
For some strange reason, when I do tweet (I still cringe at that word being used in this context) I always have exactly 140 characters, but I don't think anyone cares.

Too many irrelevant "tweets"
Like I mentioned earlier, small character limit = more tweets. And so you open up your home page and keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep scrolling down until you realize it's not worth it. There's nothing there to see. Come back next month.
Of course, this also makes anything your tweet less important, so what do you do? Tweet some more. Vicious cycle, see?

Time for an example:





 
Had to have separate pictures because when I made it one long picture (like the actual webpage you have to scroll down) it took FOREVER to load, and refused to be a readable size.
I don't like Twitter, Twitter makes life hard for me. Fair enough, I suppose.

Anyway, getting back to the point, like I said, blah blah blah... and where is my beloved Markus Feehily? Shame! (Because he’s the one and only reason I’m still on Twitter)
By the way, this is how it is when I’m following just 12 people, which, as many of you would realize, is really, really low by Twitter standards. I don’t see everything those 12 people write, so how do you see what the 100-1000-[insert number] people are saying? Oh wait, you don’t. Do you even care? I guess not.

I wonder how long it’ll be before people turn to something else, but until then, for whatever inscrutable reason, Twitter works for a lot of people (or that’s what they claim), so if they’re satisfied with the pointlessness, who am I to complain, right? I’ll just stay away and visit about once a month, as usual. I can’t promise that I won’t write similar posts, though. 

PS - Hey Twitter, you're welcome for all the free publicity.

2 comments:

  1. Amen! I feel the same about Twitter. And the picture doesn't get much bigger if you click on it, unfortunately :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. I know :( What a nuisance!
    It's fixed now :)

    ReplyDelete