Twitter experiment ended
I posted up about my Twitter experiment a few months back. Well, I’ve decided to call an end to it; as good as it is from a technological point of view, it’s a fairly redundant communications channel in the circles I move in - at least for me. It’s just too untargeted a medium. A shot gun approach to communication.
You could say the same of blogging I suppose, but blogs often contain information of importance (not always I’ll grant you) and most publish about a topic or set of topics. Twitters on the other hand, or micro blogs as they are sometimes called, seem to be 100% banal at best and trash at worst, and a single twitterer can post whatever is in their train of thought at the time, as random and uninteresting as it may be.
The private communication mechanism motive is still there - online whilst you’re offline if you like - and I found that quite evocative, but it’s no longer a mechanism for updating your mates to say you’re at the pub, when you’ve got people following your twitters from across the globe.
I sometimes think that the Internet and Web 2.0 ala social media in particular is losing it’s way - with users participating, but not fully understanding what they are involved in and why, perhaps just because some of their peers are. In a way that’s why I started my experiment - I didn’t get it, and actually I still don’t. But knowing this, I also know the best thing to do is leave it alone and move on.
