I can’t say I’m necessary surprised. There’s this terrible tendency for people to see something truthful and beneficial and take it too its logical extreme, however inane. Certainly email trumps snail-mail and I can even see the value in away messages, whether they be in AIM, Facebook, or Gmail, as I went to college during an era when one could use there AIM away message to signal which frat party (of several) they were most likely to attend, solicit laughs from their peers using witty banter, and share links to newly discovered websites. To this day, I find these features helpful.
However, someone caught on to the trend and decided the future for all of us to give an account of minute-by-minute play of our lives. Wrong.
First off, who wants to read anything called a tweet? Tweeting? Seriously?
Secondly, I could read a well written post by Richard Posner, find out some interesting information/research being distributed by Tyler Cowen, or I could read 10-30 tweets from my family and friends which would yield such insights as:
Steve I love lamp
Large Marge Scrambling eggs
Sandman88 Meh
I don’t think I’m doing out on a limb by extrapolating those hypothetical tweets would be similarly uninspiring for the majority of the population, leading me to conclude that the value of Twitter to the consumer is close to zero, and to the producer it’s all a big ego boost.
If I would graph the frequency of tweets a given individual makes, I could accurately predict how much of a narcissist they are likely to be, and also the likelihood that I would enjoy spending time with that person (Fun Index), which has an inverse relationship with the Narcissist Index.
Narcissist index (y-axis), tweets per month (y-axis)
I’ll let Twitter defend itself and I’ll make commentary. Twitter proffers the following examples of why anyone in their right mind would benefit from this tool:
Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
Any mother checking their offspring’s twitter account to see if they are eating soup or not should be executed
Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
If you’re running late to a meeting the onus is on YOU to call your co-workers to inform them of your status, not on THEM to check on YOUR status. Twitter is adding an extra step here that says “I’m too good to call you, please check on what I have posted online about what I’m doing” One word comes to mind when thinking about the mentality of a twitter user: gross
Partying? Your friends may want to join you.
Again, I have a party; I call, text, or email my friends that I want to join. I don’t tweet the location to every person on the planet, expecting them to follow me around like goddamn groupies
If any of you are still not convinced that Twitter is valueless then please sign-up for my latest idea: Pher
We’ll take the concept one step further, grunts of emotions, boiled down to binary expressions of positive of negative, with a slight inclination of what motivated said emotion.
Officially, when using Pher one is actually “phing” (verb) or posting a “ph” (noun)
What?
Pher is yah, people!
Why?
Info is yah, people!
No pajamas, meh.
Party yah, Richards!
How?
With Pher, you can meh or yah, totally!
It’s the modern antidote to information overload. War is Peace. Fair and Balanced.
However, someone caught on to the trend and decided the future for all of us to give an account of minute-by-minute play of our lives. Wrong.
First off, who wants to read anything called a tweet? Tweeting? Seriously?
Secondly, I could read a well written post by Richard Posner, find out some interesting information/research being distributed by Tyler Cowen, or I could read 10-30 tweets from my family and friends which would yield such insights as:
Steve I love lamp
Large Marge Scrambling eggs
Sandman88 Meh
I don’t think I’m doing out on a limb by extrapolating those hypothetical tweets would be similarly uninspiring for the majority of the population, leading me to conclude that the value of Twitter to the consumer is close to zero, and to the producer it’s all a big ego boost.
If I would graph the frequency of tweets a given individual makes, I could accurately predict how much of a narcissist they are likely to be, and also the likelihood that I would enjoy spending time with that person (Fun Index), which has an inverse relationship with the Narcissist Index.
Narcissist index (y-axis), tweets per month (y-axis)
I’ll let Twitter defend itself and I’ll make commentary. Twitter proffers the following examples of why anyone in their right mind would benefit from this tool:
Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
Any mother checking their offspring’s twitter account to see if they are eating soup or not should be executed
Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
If you’re running late to a meeting the onus is on YOU to call your co-workers to inform them of your status, not on THEM to check on YOUR status. Twitter is adding an extra step here that says “I’m too good to call you, please check on what I have posted online about what I’m doing” One word comes to mind when thinking about the mentality of a twitter user: gross
Partying? Your friends may want to join you.
Again, I have a party; I call, text, or email my friends that I want to join. I don’t tweet the location to every person on the planet, expecting them to follow me around like goddamn groupies
If any of you are still not convinced that Twitter is valueless then please sign-up for my latest idea: Pher
We’ll take the concept one step further, grunts of emotions, boiled down to binary expressions of positive of negative, with a slight inclination of what motivated said emotion.
Officially, when using Pher one is actually “phing” (verb) or posting a “ph” (noun)
What?
Pher is yah, people!
Why?
Info is yah, people!
No pajamas, meh.
Party yah, Richards!
How?
With Pher, you can meh or yah, totally!
It’s the modern antidote to information overload. War is Peace. Fair and Balanced.
