OK
Anything that can prevent twats from tweeting is OK by me.
Twitterers wanting to prevent the next British Constitutional crisis, or just keep the world informed on today's lunch selection, are advised to hang fire before undergoing any identity crises this week. The microblogging and freedom-preserving service warned users late yesterday that it was "researching username, password …
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?"
"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."
Douglas Adams should have put this theory to work and invented twatter himself. This short passage puts tawtter in a nutshell.
The problem with twats is not so much that they want to tell the world about every pointless thing that they do, nor is it that they think they are so important that people want to read about it. It's that they all think that twatter is incredibly significant in the whole scheme of human existence when it is, in fact, a minor distraction at best. What twats need is keeping away from twatter in order that they may realise that there are more important things in the world.
The same applies to social networking as a whole and those idiots who can't seem to stop texting.
"in order that they may realise that there are more important things in the world."
Those more important things being what, exactly?
Saving the planet?
Feeding the poor?
Curing disease?
or maybe...
Playing video games?
A game of footie?
Reading a book?
Once again, those who would attack twitter simply fail to understand how to leverage it.
I follow people who post useful snippets of info, often with links.
I follow friends I actually know in person, we share jokes and plan to meet.
The entire internet is FULL of crap. It's knowing how to circumnavigate that crap that's important.
By making the assumption that twitter is only for pointless communication or marketing, your entirely missing the point. A webpage can be full of pointless content and marketing crud, you can choose to visit it or not, as the case may be.
With Twitter, you can choose who you want to follow and who gets to follow you.
Very simple, very useful, but only if you have a brain...
I used to use LiveJournal (waits for the scorn to pile on) to keep in contact with people I actually knew. That is, I have roughly 20 friends, all but two of which I've known in person for years. Used that way, to keep in contact with people you actually know, but often have moved across the nation, it was a good way to keep in contact with everyone, start conversations, etc. Not a replacement for seeing people in person, but a nice tool to help stay in touch a little more.
Now, about half of those people use twitter, and have their twitter feed posted automatically into LJ every day. It's crap. I don't get anything out of it, there is no "conversation" around these twitter digests, and the line after line of short little messages fail to communicate any deep thought or meaning. I've actually thought about filtering out everyone on my friend's list who auto-imports their daily twitter junk, just so I don't have to see it and be annoyed with it all the time.
I really don't care what people do when it doesn't involve me. However, twitter has managed to encroach itself like a cancer on a service which worked very well for me for years. If it weren't for that one aspect, I really couldn't care less.
-Daniel
What harm does Twitter cause you?
Like television, radio or the internet, you don't have to watch or look at it. That's the beauty of an address bar in your browser, it means you can choose to look at the BBC news website instead of tweeple twittering (yep, I used that word 'tweeple' just to annoy you some more). You have that choice and we live in a free society that allows those of who choose to tweet to do so without internet-nazi's like you deciding how we communicate between ourselves.
Seems like you're the biggest twat here because you don't know how to make these choices, then rant and rave like a looney at other folks just minding their own business in the tweeto-sphere (another word that I hope ruins your circadian rythms). I bet you're one of these people who use words like Winblows, M$, Facefart etc as well.
"Seems like you're the biggest twat here because you don't know how to make these choices, then rant and rave like a looney at other folks just minding their own business in the tweeto-sphere "
That made me laugh, but not for the reasons you intended. The whole point of twitter is that it is all about *not* minding your own business, but minding other people's business. If people did mind their own business on twitter there would be no tweets.
The problem with twitter is not so much that people use it to broadcast their every deed and thought, but that the media take it so seriously and expect everybody else to do so too and I don't suppose that's twitter's fault. Given the sort of people who work in the popular media I'm not surpised that they think twitter is so significant. The problem with all this is that no matter how you try to avoid twitter it gets thrust at you.
And that is what most people object to about twitter; the fact that twitter is thrust at you by the popular media at every turn, not twitter itself.