I Just Don’t Get Twitter - Tue, 7 Apr 2009

Its popularity is soaring and I don’t understand why.

Blogs make sense to me. You write a complete story that expresses your thoughts or opinions about something that is meaningful to you, that you hope will be meaningful to others as well. They can follow you by RSS or find your your post via a search engine.

Twitter is sort of like blogging, but only a line at a time. And the line is so short that you have to abbreviate almost everything. It’s sort of like text messaging which, other than for informing “I’m here now” or “Also buy butter”, makes no sense to me to just spew out random thoughts.

The only person I follow on Twitter is Tamura Jones. Tamura doesn’t have a blog, but tweets instead. Rather than joining Twitter (which Tamura has tried to get me to do on more than one occasion), I just read Tamura’s tweets via RSS. And I must say I don’t really enjoy reading messages like: http://twitpic.com/2zgwe - #genealogy #art Dutch forensic genealogy: Night Watch with names.

Twitter seems like a great place to spend (waste?) a lot of time. Sending off 20 tweets a day wouldn’t take long, no longer than a blog entry like this one. But following 100 twits (can I call them that?) and their 2000 messages a day would take a lot longer. As it is, it takes me 15 minutes a day to read the fifteen RSS feeds that are updated each day out of the 60 that I am following. I really don’t need to spend another 60 minutes a day twittling my time away.