Small Fish, Big Pond

I have to say I totally agree with Devin Coldewey’s post at TechCrunch about why he’s a Tweetotaller and as I’ve said here in the past I’m one too (I think my first post reviving this blog was why I’d rather blog than tweet).

I don’t like bad mouthing things, I feel like I do it too much, but as with most social networking I think Twitter has more to do with the vain action of drawing attention to yourself by shouting at the top of your lungs and less with actually getting information out.

Although I’ve seen a few examples where twitter works or has some marginal benefit, for the most part it’s a cacophony of useless input from people I don’t care to listen to. There just isn’t enough benefit for the waste of my time to sift through the chaff for the marginal nuggets of info.

How to use twitter for marketing and PR

And I’m sorry to be so pompous but I barely have time to run down my RSS feed and email in a day to bother keeping up in real time with somebody who has way more time than me and can spend their day posting their every action. I don’t even watch TV or play video games anymore and I still go to bed at night feeling like there was 4 hours too little time to get things done during the day.

For an interesting experiment take how many hours you spend reading or using twitter, multiply it by your hourly wage, and decide if you’re getting a good return on investment for losing your free time (remember time=money).

Personally I think everybody else will tire of it too; I feel the same way about twitter as I did about Myspace shouts. Eventually the next big social networking thing will come along and people will migrate over to it. Think about it, the sub-20 year old crowd can’t even get excited with twitter, how long before the novelty wears off for the rest of us?

Then again never underestimate the appeal of people thinking that having 50 followers (or 1000 “friends”, or 560 unique page views…) makes it feel like people are actually listening to you.