Why Twitter is Irrelevant (To Me)

Just had to get that off my chest.  I don’t hate Twitter, or think that it should never be used.  I just don’t find it very relevant to my life.  And I have good reasons for that.  Other people have good reasons why it is the best online tool in their digital life.  And they find pretty cool uses for it.

For example, they find Twitter a great source of news and information.  For me, I am still an avid blog reader, now addicted to Google Reader.  At least half of the Tweets I get from friends are “awesome blog post here: ______”  or – even worse – a re-tweet (RT) of someone else pointing out a cool blog post.  But since I use Google Reader, I have already read that blog post, or another one on the same subject, about 90% of the time.  I know everyone says blogs have died or will die – but then what would most people tweet about?  Really – I just don’t see Twitter being anything without regular, old blogs.

Speaking of which – what is up with all of the RT’s?  It seems like some people don’t do anything but RT someone else pointing to a cool blog post somewhere.  But where is the original content, or even some commentary, or even a haiku of original material?  Only two people that I follow on Twitter actually Tweet original content on a consistent basis: the local weather guy, and George Siemens.  Oh, if only more people could Tweet like George.

Well, okay – there are more than two.  But the others that have original content all do the other thing that makes Twitter irrelevant to me – they sync their Tweets with their FaceBook status.  Why would I read what you are doing for dinner on Twitter or a smart phone or whatever when I can go to a much more interesting place like FaceBook and play some games and argue about conspiracy theories all at the same time?  Yes, I know some people think FaceBook games are pretty pointless, but I guess I am different.  I call someone a friend because I am interested in getting to know them.  If I am not interested, I don’t accept the request.  But accepting that request means that yes, I am interested in knowing what 80’s song you are, or how you feel about Obamacare, or what not.  That is how I treat friends – I care about the real news and the trivial in their life.   Too many misanthropes out there gripping about FaceBook, in my opinion.

Anyway – I should stop to explain my history with Twitter.  I started following Twitter day 1 when Odeo originally announced they were starting it.  I didn’t request a Beta account then – I thought it looked boring.  In fact, if you are one of the five people that have been reading this blog for a while, you probably remember when we raved about Jaiku at first.  Jaiku was a cool Twitter competitor that had little mood icons, groups, and much cooler badges than Twitter in the early days.  But Google bought Jaiku and killed them as a serious competitor.  But I still remember when everyone asked “Twitter or Jaiku?”

Speaking of Jaiku, there are many other sites that do Twitter much better than Twitter does.  I mean – seriously – why do I have to take up a chunk of my 140 characters to insert a link or a link to a pic or whatever?  It is 2009 – when is Twitter going to catch up with where email was in 1989 and allow attachments, like other micro-blog services do so well?  Just wondering.

There is some hope for me using Twitter.  The local weather guy Tweeting updates is one of them – finally some good content that I haven’t already read on FaceBook or five other blogs.  That will keep me coming back to Twitter each day.  A few magazines have caught on to that too, as well as celebrity writers/bloggers like David Pogue.

Well, Pogue made me want to petition for the banishment of RT’s from Twitter all together, but that is another story :)

But should we abandon Twitter, just because I find it boring?  Never!  That is one huge problem I see in Ed Tech circles: someone doesn’t like something, so they trash others that use it, and try to convince as many as they can that it is bad to use.  Many people use Twitter for some cool things in online education.  I keep my Twitter account around because I like to see how people use it, even though I probably never will in the classes I teach. I get the bigger picture, and I think Twitter has a place in the bigger picture.

RT’s on the other hand….

4 thoughts on “Why Twitter is Irrelevant (To Me)

  1. Twitter definitely has its pro’s and cons for the classroom so I can understand reasonable critiques such as yours. The odd vehemently anti-Twitter person I have seen on forums like TES dont seem to understand that services like this could have there place as long as they are not dismissed out of hand – which many seem to do.

    It certainly has its use for teaching students about up to date communication methods (and stalking as well – I had one year 11 who confessed to signing up to twitter purely so she could tweet some random male celeb)

  2. Like much of the ed technology that is out there…it needs to be useful to be used right? Not just use it because its the hip thing to do!!

  3. But, Erika – didn’t you hear? Twitter is for old people now :)

    Brian, I think you have hit on one of my hidden motives for this article. Well, to some point I wanted to have some fun pointing out some of the cons of the way Twitter is used. But in reality this was a thinly veiled slam against those that post the “odd vehemently anti-Twitter” post here and there (with a slight jab at the anti-FaceBook people, too).

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