I just turned off Twitterrific. I didn’t turn the Twitter tool off because it wasn’t working, or because it was causing problems with my computer. The reason I turned it off was because it was working as it was designed. It connected me to Twitter, something I find less and less interesting.
Mind you, while I love me some short–form outbursts of insight, and I love a good sarcastic subtitle, the chatter tends to get old, fast. It gets that way the quickest when people use it more as a public internet messaging session than status messages. When they added the @username convention, things got really bad.
It moved from being something followed to an incestuous popularity contest. I could see the reasoning for the @username, a way to cite other tweets — but it became a way to yammer on like that lady yelling to the person on the other side of the cellphone. If I wanted to listen to half of a conversation, I’d use Verizon. The best feature related to @username replies is in your settings: the ability to hide them.
A few days ago, Twitter moved off Joyent servers, and nothing really changed. It’s still not all that fast. In fact, until they switched hosts, I never cared one way or the other. But now its apparent that it wasn’t where they were that was the problem, it was what they were.
I’ve added quite a few people who either said interesting things, or were ‘internet fabulous.’ The people on the A–list, the ones with all the followers. I mean — come on, if they weren’t interesting, why’d they have so many followers? I’m still trying to figure that out. It was those A–lister types that got the masses to sign up, and that’s when whatever Twitter is proved to be incapable of handling the success.
Too popular, too large, and still too slow. And, paradoxically, it was never an issue with me until the big switch. Now it’s too convenient an excuse not to use.
What this is really about is that I’m not excited to wake up to a hot cup of other people’s status messages. While it was all…er…terrific tweeting, when the novelty wears off, it’s just a bulletin board of people I don’t really know. Maybe if I was a famous A–lister type I’d feel more compelled to continue the chatter — for the good of the people.
But I’m not. So I turned if off. Here’s to being quiet.
