Qwitter
Posted at 3:11 pm on Monday, June 15, 2009, in Technology, and tagged cnn, facebook, twitter.
Am I ashamed to quit Twitter? No, not really; it just wasn’t my thing. To effectively use my analogy, I walked into the bar, heard the conversation, and decided that the conversation was lame. (Well, the conversation was not lame; the bar was. The conversation didn’t help.) No offense to those “talking,” but the idea of sending messages to people in a public venue (even if you set your profile to private, as I did) is not for me. It is the same issue I had with posting messages on a person’s Facebook wall (if the wall even exists anymore).
Maybe I’m being too harsh. I could see the service being useful for those interested in broadcasting their lives. Although one may argue that this blog — or any personal blog — is a form of broadcasting, and there is merit to that argument, there is much more control (of content, value, etc.) with a personal blog. Twitter in a way reminds me of a newsgroup (say, Yahoo! Groups). Every message is regarded with the same value, and treated as such, even when that is clearly not the case. Here is an example…
I tweet “I love the Knicks.” I don’t; this is just for argument’s sake. A follower of mine — maybe a friend, acquaintance, or some internet stalker (and a person I cannot deny as a follower because I accept everyone who asks; I have 500 close “friends” on Facebook) — retweets or replies, and says, “@prefidentBUSH You’re a liberal douchebag.” I am, but that is beside the point I am trying to make. Substitute a more benign username — like fredwilson — and the issue becomes more clear. (I should mention that the idea of “following” someone is inherently stalker-ish.)
I have no control over that reply tweet. I can delete my original tweet, and that reply may still exist (unless the user also deletes it). If someone searches @prefidentBUSH (or whatever your Twitter handle* is), which is easy to do using Twitter, they will find this. They may also find other one-sides of conversations that I was or was not a part of. It’s as if the opportunity to enter and close a conversation does not exist, because it doesn’t. The bar is filled, and people are talking; you can choose not to listen, but the words are being recorded.
Without context, individual statements can only provide distraction, and with Twitter’s policy of making all tweets equal, all the more dangerous. Even if my account was private (it was), and my messages were not published to web-pages available for search on Google, the other half of the conversation (the other half that I do not control) may be public since that user may not opt for the private mode. So if I tweeted “I got a job offer,” and a follower replies, “@fredwilson congrats on the new job,” I would only hope that my two weeks notice was already submitted.
I’m looking for control, and Twitter has everything but. If I were big into texting, I can see using Twitter more. If I were looking to create a rather large but shallow following, I cold see using Twitter to do just that. But blindly publishing little tweets — without the back-story, without the control — is dangerous. I understand that that may be the point of Twitter (and Facebook, etc.), that users these days do not want control (until it is too late). But I do.
On the home front, this means that I will be able to delete the apps that I’d used while I tweeted my life away: TweetDeck and Tweetie (the free version). Of the two, I’m not sure which one to recommend. Although the two do the exact same thing — publish and sort tweets — they do it so differently, they are nearly impossible to compare.
I had a Friendster account way back when. I even had a MySpace account for two months. No more Facebook. And now, no more Twitter. All I have left is my Gmail and LinkedIn, but honestly, LinkedIn is on the chopping block too. (Become useful, or else.)
I guess my one regret is that I will never have one of my brilliant, witty tweets read on CNN, but that is okay, because people like me, and know me for who I am, in person, not my Twitter feed (or so I think). The curtain is coming to a close anyway.
* Funny. I thought we were trying to get away from handles and avatars.
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