Technology is the rise of communicating less more

When people ask me why I don't have an account on Twitter I give them the look I usually reserve for people who ask me why I don't watch Ready, Steady Cook. Why would I have an account on Twitter? I just don't get it and neither it seems, does anyone I know.

Before writing this post I asked all of my IM contacts who were on-line to tell me in ten words or less what they thought of Twitter. Some were more effusive than others and were unable to restrain themselves to the arbritrary word limit.

Here are a few of their responses:

"Pointless wankery for people who think their opinions matter." - Senior software developer

"Some people seem to like it - I don't see point (would have preferred 11 words...)" - Software Architect

"I don't even know what Twitter is." - Musician

"What the fuck is twitter? That's what I think." - Digital Photographer

"Maybe it should be called Twatter. A word lacking from the English language which should mean the banal mutterings of people that believe they are part of the digital ecosphere as they reach out for similarly socially retarded wastrels in a quest for mutual justification." - Software Developer

Interestingly not a single one (of those that had heard of it) thought that Twitter was a good idea, not that this alone proves it isn't. The last comment also raises a good point, it's about 'group-think' isn't it? Communicating without actually saying anything, symptomatic of today's feeling without thinking mindset. Twitter, at least to me, appears to be the epoch of knee-jerk reactionism - a sure sign that we're turning into a world of attention defecit infovores. Quick! I've been Twittered @, best think up (or better still copy) someone's opinion and broadcast it to anyone that cares, which fortunately, doesn't appear to be many.

Twitter is reasonably popular, it has 959,558 users worldwide today which in UK terms gives it about as many users as the Daily Telegraph has readers - multiply that by 7 and you're getting close the readership for The Sun which can just about influence an election in the UK on a good day.

Of course, 7 million users scattered across the globe are unlikely to influence much - if Facebook, with 39 million users, is anything to go by they will most likely spend their time pretending to be virtual zombies or playing Scrabble. What's more, most of Twitter's users are likely ultra-hip, web 2.0 types who spend a large portion of their time celebrating themselves, perhaps as the comment puts it "in a quest for mutual justification". I like to imagine Twitter as the virtual equivalent of a sports hall full of Nathan Barley's shouting at each other.

Years ago I used to work with live news feeds and I'll admit that the constant gratification of knowing something before almost anyone else can be a rush. I watched tickertape wars break out, tickertape oil tankers crash slowly into sandy, puffin infested beaches and tickertape commercial jets nosedive into tower blocks. I suspect, Twitter in part, fulfils this role by constantly alerting people (to web 2.0 micro-events) and keeping them connected. I'm also sure it has it's own heirarchies and communities and people like to be in those (particularly at the top).

But how useful a resource is peer generated news after all? Does anyone still look at Digg these days? I still frequently read reddit, but more for diversion in times of boredom and most certainly not for news. Much like Reality TV left people gasping for salaried actors and scriptwriters, I predict Reality News will leave us sorely missing real editors and chain-smoking, drunken, opinionated columnists.

So, what else does Twitter achieve? Well, it doesn't have any apparent way of making a profit. I use the word apparent because it's not always immediately obvious how these kind of ventures plan to make a profit. I'm sure that if they can solve the problem of adding more users without their servers falling over then there are plenty of ways to sell the user database they're creating. There have been rumous that the US Central Intelligence Agency uses (and possibly sponsors) Facebook and vast databases of 'who's who' and 'who knows who' will almost certainly be of interest to someone.

Collecting data seems to be one of the passions of our age, however if Twitter posts were Java fields I'd probably mark them @Transient (@Best).

The title for this post was taken from a piece of art made by an old friend of mine Mr. Captain Wardrobe.