Why I Hate Twitter by Alex Madison

All right, we've all felt the lure or Twitter at some point. Really, who wouldn't? The idea seems wonderful at first. You pen, type really, but I'm being old fashioned here, a witty bon mot, hit send and suddenly millions of people around the world are chuckling at your brilliance.

Only it doesn't work that way at all.

In reality, for the vast majority of people, Twitter means sitting and desperately shouting into the long, dark "Tweet Hallway".

You know what that is, don't you?

For those that don't, here's an image for you. Imagine a nicely decorated (to your own taste) room. It has pretty pictures on the wall and in front of you lined up carefully, are all the daily messages of your friends and yourself scrolling downward like rain drops.

Coming up with a fairly brilliant idea, you write it in a little box. Be careful though, you only get 140 characters, which includes spaces. All right, you have it now. It's even decent. You think so anyway.

Now you hit send.

This is akin to shoving your tiny, newly fledged, words into a river of other such words. Thousands of them. Millions.

Unless your celebrity is already assured, no one will ever here you, except your tiny group of friends...

But if you wanted to talk to the same seven to twenty people all the time, you could do it via e-mail and actually say something useful.

Now Twitter isn't all bad. Like facebook it delivers a sense of belonging and enough feedback to let you pretend to being relevant and liked.

It gives an automatic rewards every time someone answers you to, which has to be a huge ego boost if your one of the hundred or so Hyper-Twitters, normally big company CEO's or television stars already, who have over a million followers...

But do they really have that? Even if they do, most of those millions will see their words only as one more voice in a stream of falling rain on their screen.

In a way the whole thing is a little sad when you stop and think about it. Like the man in a bar that's telling his stories, too far gone to realize that everyone else has pretty much walked away. Sure he lights up when the bartender or another patron walks by and mutters "is that so?" gently into his ear, but ultimately no one cares.

OK, why am I taking off after poor Twitter right now? After all, Twitter didn't steal my lunch money in school or even turn me down for a date, Did he? No, of course not.

But my publisher at Orange Cat, Alicen Clark is trying to insist that all the Authors get Twitter accounts. Apparently the idea of screaming down a hallway makes good sense for advertising.

I told her that I'd just whine about it here which would at least be seen by one or two people.

(More when they scream at me about the wonders of Twitter no doubt!)

At least at GLP the man upstairs occasionally thumps on the floor and tells you to shut up.

Last Edited by Alex A Madison on 08/05/2011 02:23 AM