Twitter: The next Friendster

by Aaron Mystery

Just because I don't like Twitter doesn't mean that I'm not hip. I've signed up and tried it and tried it and... it's useless. It reminds me of the Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Ends up applying to most networking sites.

But Twitter is the lowest common denominator. It's like walking into a room, and a bunch of people are screaming to each other, maybe they're shouting out a link, or what they're working on, or what they just ate for lunch. At first, I thought Twitter was crap. Then, I got into it a teeny little bit, and thought - hey, there's some comic book artists and animators on here - wow, this could be cool.

Problem is, comic book artists and animators and celebs (real and pretend) and media personalities are just as bland as the rest of us, or at least they Twitter that way. There is simply nothing sensible or useful to be gleaned from Twitter (unless you count ten other people posting the fact that Natasha Richardson died after you already got a tweet from Huffington Post and an email from CNN). If hating Twitter is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Even if you think it will be good for self-promotion of one of your projects, forget it. Your replies to other people's random tweets will show up with as much emphasis as "My new vid is great, and you can watch it here!" So, you either use Twitter as a bulletin board nobody reads because everything moves down the list as more tweets come up, or you tweet back and forth and your profile looks like a record of your last IM conversation.

If that weren't bad enough, the site is always running over capacity and has a lot of glitches, from photo uploads to losing tweets. Searching for people can only be done on a "by name" or "by email" basis, so you can't easily connect with people in your industry or that share the same tastes.

Stay away from Twitter. Maybe it'll evolve one day. But that would just make it MySpace.