I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now SHUT UP!

Image via CrunchBase

I have been an avid Twitter user for a couple years now.  The quick 140 character bursts give me the opportunity to post my randomness as I think of it.  When I first got into blogging 12 years ago (on my old Geocities account, which is sadly dying…  RIP) I would update it when I had a chance and included a “Random Thought” portion of just quick things that I noticed and thought were funny or a song I heard that I liked.  But, waiting to post these things for the chance that I had to put up a full blog post usually meant that I’d forget half of the things I wanted to mention.  The immediacy of Twitter makes it so that when I see a video of a naked wizard getting tased on Digg link>, I can turn around and post a tweet so that my friends can watch a video of a naked wizard getting tased <link>.  I loved the service but got sick long ago of trying to explain why it was cool, and for a while, it kind of wasn’t.  People only tweeted sporadically and nobody followed me, so I didn’t really feel a need post tweets or check the website to see what others were doing.  I think it was when Twitter mobile apps went live, that people actually started getting into it, posting where they were and what they were doing at the time.

However, for some reason, earlier this year Twitter has blown up.  I don’t know what the impetus of this spike was, but now everywhere you look and no matter what you’re doing, someone’s bringing up Twitter.  You read articles one week about “Twitter is stupid and nobody should use it” just for the same writer to post a couple weeks later “Twitter is a great tool and I can’t live without it” I’m looking at you David Pogue).  You hear ad nauseum about what celebrities are putting in their tweets, another “Intro to Twitter” guide and the Twitter-snobs decrying how unhip the service is becoming because it’s being raided by the mainstream.  Frankly, I’m of the more the merrier set, I just have one quick request.  PLEASE SHUT UP!  For people who love it, you don’t have to constantly write about why you do to justify it to your friends who don’t get it.  For those who don’t get it, you don’t have to keep writing about how stupid something you don’t even use is.  Just enough, already!  The conversation about if Twitter is useful or not has been ongoing since the service launched.  I just watched a video from Attack of the Show from 2007 arguing if Twitter is useful or not (oddly enough, Kevin Pereira and Natali Del Conte, two users I love to follow on Twitter, are dogging it back then).  Link>  So you’re not adding anything to the conversation.  And, frankly, hearing the whole “I’m eating breakfast” argument is tired.  While, in the early days you did see this, most actually use their thread for some really interesting stuff. 

Just had to get this feeling off of my chest, and I do realize the irony of decrying the chatter around Twitter by writing my own thoughts, so I’ll keep it at this.  If you’re new to Twitter, there are hundreds of how-tos and intros.  You don’t have to write your own.  If you don’t like Twitter, that’s fine.  Don’t use it.  For those of us who do use the service, we don’t want to hear your nonsense about how it’s useless.  ENOUGH!