Why Twitter Sucks
Mooney would probably call this "twatter," because I'm about to be a twat about Twitter. If you had the misfortune to be absent from the inaugural Worst Practices Lotusphere session, where Paul uttered his now legendary expletive, use your imagination (just make sure to say it in an Irish accent, bear in mind that to him it's hardly objectionable at all, and picture Peter Pan-level boyish charm in full force at the time...). I come not to praise Twitter, but to bury it (I should be so lucky).
Susan Bulloch had a very insightful post on the subject of geeks twittering (and IMing and surfing, etc) while those around them were trying to be social in the Real World (aka MeatSpace). I'm not going to be that deep about it, butI am officially coming out of the proverbial closet as a Twitter hater. Twitter bugs me, for lots of reasons. Here are a few of them:
- There are no unread marks. Oh, I know, lots of things don't have unread marks. But guess what does (besides Notes)? RSS Readers. It is soooooo much easier to keep up with blogs than it is to keep up with a Twitter stream. I only "follow" about 50 people, of whom about 15 post updates regularly, but I still find myself annoyed by how much I have to wade through to try to keep up. I read several hundred blogs via RSS with no such problem.
- People use it to say the most inane things. I'm not going to call out any of the Tweeters in our community, so if you see yourself in here it's coincidental (really - if I want to call you out, I will), so these examples come from the public stream - do we all really need to know what somebody had for breakfast, which pair of shoes they are wearing, that they posted something on their blog (there's this funny little thing called RSS, you may have heard of it...), how many unread messages there were that morning, or what TV show they're about to watch? Really?!?
- Conversations are unbelievably disjointed. Between a post and its response, dozens of others appear, to the point where following the conversation requires several hops back and forward through the stream. I've seen people use it to collaborate, and successfully too, but I am amazed they went through so much trouble when a simple email or chat thread would have been much easier for them. And I realize that it's not hard to follow a conversation if people correctly use the @tweeter convention, but given the number of typos I see in twitter names, it's definitely not foolproof. Following it when you're a casual observer, though? Not reasonable. In which case it would be better off out of the Twitter stream, since its only real benefit IS the fact that many people can see it at once.
- 140 characters?!? Seriously, fuck that.
- Not only are there no unread marks, there isn't even a concept of the stopping and starting point from day to day. The most recent tweets are at the top, and unless you are constantly online in Twitter (and some are, I know, but some of us have actual work to do during the day), you have to scroll through backwards to find the place you stopped yesterday, and scroll forwards again to catch up. I usually can't be bothered, it's way too annoying, so I miss about 70% of the tweets. And yet, somehow I'm not crushed.
- People tie their Twitter posts to their Facebook status updates. I know why they do it (why do essentially the same update in two places?), but as the information consumer it is very annoying. Facebook status updates and tweets serve two different purposes. One gives friends and family a brief snapshot of what's important to you at that moment. The other is a stream of electronic diarrhea containing every random useless thought that crosses your mind. Crossing streams? Always a bad idea...
- Because not everyone follows everyone else (even in our self-absorbed little corner of the internets), we all get to see responses that don't make any sense because we didn't see the original post.
- People claim there's no spam in Twitter, but they're fooling themselves. It's there, and it's only going to get worse. Even if it's just a "can I follow you?" request, think of what will happen when you get dozens a day.
- People tweet instead of blogging. Oh, not major posts, but little things that they otherwise would have expanded into medium sized blog entries, definitely. Count the number of blog postings while the Twitter use in our community went up - it definitely went down, and significantly, too. There is a finite amount of time and energy available for creation of content on the interweb, and every hour spent on Twitter is less time available for blogging. And yet, Blog postings are much more likely to be really useful, both in terms of immediate effect (more people read your blog than follow you on twitter - guaranteed) AND in terms of long-term availability via Google. So to the extent that Twitter reduces blogging, it goes from being an annoyance to being an actual problem.
In short? It sucks. Not to beat around the bush or anything. :P
I'm aware that there are useful Twitter add-ons that address some of my issues. I tried some of them, but to use them on a regular basis would mean investing more time in Twitter than I think it's worth. I'm not completely avoiding it, mind. I use Twhirl on my Mac, and it's decent at showing me recent entries. TwitNotes allows me to connect from work, if I choose (which I rarely do). And I tried the phone alerts, but they drove me absolutely insane; I already get my work and personal email on my Blackberry, adding Twitter meant the thing was vibrating more often than not (keep the dirty jokes to yourself, Julian).
So color me a Luddite, I guess. Or would that be a Twuddite?
PS Now everyone on my list of "followees" will think I'm annoyed by them. And sometimes I suppose I am. Heck, sometimes I'm annoyed by myself (and I'm hardly alone there...). But if I was truly irritated by anyone, I'd just stop following them. I'm really annoyed by the tool. Really. And yes, it's entirely possible I'll just dump it.
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Comments
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 08:45:57 AM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Tony Palmer At 10:45:13 AM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
Maybe I'll be lucky, and this fad will have come and gone before I have to spend any time figuring out whether or not I have an opinion about it. That would be cool, like Betamax....
Posted by Bob Balaban At 11:55:41 AM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
Facebook updates - I agree with you there. There should not be a connect when you use twitter beyond standard status updates - it doesn't make sense.
Twitter for me is public IM. You can see the chatter - get involved if you want - ignore if you don't. As a homeworker it does help remove some of the "Island Steve" that you can feel sometimes.
Unlike direct IM your time using Twitter is completely by choice. In/out as time allows or you want to be involved - or not. So like most things in life - if you don't like it - you don't need to do it - but doesn't always make it suck. Right now I'm liking it. But I liked facebook for a week or two. :)
Posted by Steve Castledine At 06:49:06 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
I tried Mikkel's TwitNotes plug-in and it's a fine piece of work. I uninstalled it because it seemed pointless.
Posted by Keith Smillie At 09:08:35 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
{ Link }
Posted by Greyhawk68 At 10:26:31 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
<Susan keeps herself in the electronic hand grenade toss. What are they saying about us on Twitter?>
Posted by Susan Bulloch At 10:51:46 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
The way that Twitter pollutes Facebook really annoys me too: the "So and so is twittering: my socks are on fire" type of update drives me mad. I don't care that you're using Twitter , so please stop telling me.
@3 - Yes, it feels like a fad to me too. Facebook, on the other hand, is a way of life.
Posted by Julian Woodward At 11:55:12 PM On 05/05/2008 | - Website - |
-Grey
Posted by Greyhawk68 At 12:17:55 AM On 05/06/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Yancy Lent At 02:31:07 AM On 05/06/2008 | - Website - |
@9 The messages aren't the same, though, Grey, as I've mentioned on your blog. Qualitatively, they're different. People just don't update FB 35 times in one day, but they are happy to update Twitter 35 times. So if they DO bother to update FB, they usually put something more relevant than "Good morning" on there.
@8 Yep. Although FB has serious issues of its own. Hm, another rant coming up, maybe? heh
@7 What are they saying about us on Twitter? Mostly nothing. But then, that's what people usually say about everything on Twitter: nothing...
@6 Yeah, I know, but at least we agree on the important stuff, like good beer, good cigars, and hot women, right? :D
@5 I keep TwitNotes, but I use it about twice a week, when I have about 2 minutes to kill at work. Otherwise? Yeah, not so much. Great work by Mikkel, no doubt about it.
@4 Steve, I use twhirl, too. I just want the unread marks to follow me from one machine to another, like they do in Google Reader. If I worked out of my house, I wouldn't have that issue, you're right. Twhirl would be perfectly fine. And I hear what you're saying about not needing to read back through the stream - it just seems to me that, if I'm supposed to pay attention at all, I should pay attention to all of it. If I can ignore most of it freely, why do I bother to go there at all? Dunno. I'm an obsessive compulsive control freak, with depression and anxiety thrown into the cocktail just for fun, so maybe I'm not the target audience. *chuckle*
@3 I don't think it's that much of a fad, it's been around for a few years. I think the obsessive tweeting might wear off, though, at which point it would be more useful to me. We'll see.
@2 Stay away, sir, you're not missing much.
@1 That's my objection, ultimately, the communication (and collaboration) model doesn't work for me. But it's more fun to say, "Twitter sucks!" :D :D
Posted by Captain O At 06:45:38 AM On 05/06/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Richard Schwartz At 10:32:02 AM On 05/06/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Captain O At 11:01:00 AM On 05/06/2008 | - Website - |
If you want to get facnier to see them all, simply use a springwidget or better Yahoo Pipes and make a feed of everyone you follow and hit that with the reader. Problem solved.
Posted by Chris Miller At 12:31:25 AM On 05/07/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Joe G. At 04:46:27 AM On 05/07/2008 | - Website - |
I'm trying real hard to like Twitter but just not sure I'm getting it. I guess for somethings it's OK, but I still like good, old-fashioned Blogs to get me the details and information that I need.
I guess I don't follow it enough on my Blackberry to really care real-time what is going on everywhere. I use Blogs mostly for the information they leave behind that allows me to find a solution or an answer to a question I'm searching on.
Posted by Denny Russell At 05:24:42 AM On 03/23/2009 | - Website - |
Posted by jefreh At 04:54:52 PM On 04/24/2009 | - Website - |
Another thing is that people don't protect their privacy anymore on social networking websites..oh wait they haven't done that at all. Twitter allows you to see a person's pattern if you know them. If I get coffee at a cafe at a certain time, everyday, I am letting people know my pattern. Or maybe that's me and my paranoia.
It's just a fad that will soon die out and be replaced with another. All these knock-offs are just as annoying and I'm tired of people bashing that site just to promote a complete replica, if not worse than Twitter. This is not the end of the narcissistic culture of the internet... pretty soon we'll be able to have video-like Twitter websites that are shorter than the average YT video.
Oh crap..I might've gave someone an idea.
Posted by Sepphora At 11:53:06 PM On 05/18/2009 | - Website - |
If you are tired of facebook or twitter but still want to connect with your friends then pick up the phone...
Posted by Sam Hamilton At 12:58:12 PM On 05/29/2009 | - Website - |