Twitter?

Okay, so I’m really wondering exactly what all of the fuss is about.

I’ve been stumbling across a lot of chatter on line where people are talking about Twitter, and I’m very skeptical about the whole thing. Thanks to the information superhighway, we’re already deluged with data to the point that we don’t really know what to do with all of it. Of course, there are a lot of companies out there trying to make money by helping us to organize it or otherwise interface with it.

So, the question is why do we even have a service like this, and why should any of us use it. I remember a few years ago some friends of mine wanted me to join up with this cell phone text-messaging service – I don’t immediately recall the name – that gave short updates similar to Twitter that talked about where people were and what they were doing.

One of my innumerable nerdy friends wanted me to try it out, and I found myself on the receiving end of notices from people I didn’t even care about that much about much of the pointless minutiae of their lives.

I mean, I don’t really need to know that you’re standing in line at Burger King.

From what people say, though, you learn to find out a lot about other people when you begin to get all kinds of frequent updates from them on what exactly they’re doing, which could be fascinating on one hand.

However, this assumes that you really want to know what these other people are doing on a very granular level. The Internet is very good for creating a large web of very shallow (and I don’t mean this to sound pejorative at all) relationships, which can be extremely valuable. At the same time, I don’t really want to know what these folks are doing each minute of their lives.

Yes, I can control how I access the data through a service like Twitter, but I think that people that you “follow” really need to be very interesting on some type of level. Just like bloggers, they need to be able to use the medium well – otherwise it’s just adding to all of the noise in the background.

I don’t think it’s dissimilar to what’s happened to sites like Reddit, where you have moments of revelation, a few fascinating updates on current memes, shocking stories the mainstream media is intentionally ignoring or hasn’t caught up to. But mostly it’s a whole lotta stupid pics, whining, slightly amusing dirty pictures, and lolcats thrown in.

All of my skepticsm aside, I signed up for an account anyway earlier today, if only to just better keep an eye on what’s going on there and see if it really is going to catch on among my circle of friends, which is really the only group that would be remotely interested in anything I have to say anyway. (Insert SHOUTOUT to all my buddies here: ) But all of them are all pretty much on Facebook anyway, and they can read my status updates there.

So, if any of you all use Twitter and can tell me how it is such a breakthrough, I’m all ears – or eyes – or whatever.