Without a Traceroute

In the past, I have referred offhandedly to my distaste for the microblogging service, but I feel the time is ripe for me to make a full and public denunciation. This way, in 3-6 months, at least I’ll be able to link to this post and say, “Well, I was hating Twitter before it was cool.”

Sadly, the reason this post is necessary is that Twitter is fast approaching a tipping point in public consciousness. Oprah has a Twitter account now, as do dozens of members of Congress; the New York Times has published an article instructing their readers on the finer points of “tweeting”. Next, one of two things will happen. Either Twitter will be abandoned en masse by the members of the trendwhoring geek intelligentsia that made it popular in the first place (who will then tell you how they always hated it as much as Friendster and Pets.com), or, alternatively, it will become a permanent fixture of the culture. We’ve seen this pattern before: in 1985, having an email address meant you were either a scientist or a truly hardcore geek, in 1995, having an email address meant you were a cutting-edge first-adopter type; by 2005, having an email address just meant you were a person in a first-world nation. There should probably be some sort of official rule of pop-culture: once Oprah does something, it is no longer cool.

In many ways, Twitter is like a horrifying chimera bred from the worst aspects of a variety of new(ish) communication technologies. Take the mangled language and limited expression that comes with SMS texts, combine that with the time-sucking, life-draining aspect of an email inbox always filled with new messages, cross that with the desperate self-promotion and attention whoring of social networking sites, and finish it off with a heaping helping of the echo-chamber circle-jerking commentary-without-content that is the hallmark of the so-called blogosphere. Oh, and just for fun, you can top it with a pinch of good, old-fashioned celebrity worship.

If you’re looking to understand what’s wrong with Twitter, this godawful blog post (don’t even click it, I’ll “re-tweet” it so I won’t be responsible for giving him any more hits) by part-time Digg founder and full-time toolbox, Kevin Rose is a pretty good place to start.

‘”RT” or “retweeting” is simply taking a twitter post from someone else and forwarding (rebroadcasting) it to your followers. Here are a few common ways to retweet a message (all do the same thing):

RT @originalsender: original message
retweet @originalsender: original message
retweeting @originalsender: original message

Retweeting can be a great way to add followers, as it pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, which in turn results in clicks back to your profile. Make sure to track your retweets using retweetist.

To retweet this post, type:
RT @kevinrose: Retweeting (RT) explained: http://tinyurl.com/whatisrt

If you enjoyed this post, add me at twitter.com/kevinrose – thanks!’

For those of you not fluent in douchebag, allow me to summarize: an acceptable (even encouraged) activity on Twitter is to copy-paste somebody else’s one-sentence post, add nothing of value, and repost it. You will want to do this so that more people will pay attention to you and your heretofore worthless life will have value. It’s the web 2.0 version of buying the same lunchbox as the popular kid at school.

One thing I find particularly baffling about Twitter is the way people who are otherwise staunch advocates of free software, open standards and non-proprietary protocols are nevertheless huge fans of Twitter, which pretty much epitomizes centralized and proprietary. If Twitter decides to start censoring messages, banning accounts for Terms of Service Violations, or (more likely) just go bankrupt and shut down, you’re pretty much screwed. If these people really are relying on Twitter for meaningful communication, as they claim, then they should think this through. As it stands, Twitter seems to be skating by under what I like to call the “Apple exception” where proprietary issues that would normally be deal-breakers are ignored when the company in question is hip and trendy.

I could go on at (even greater?) length about everything that’s wrong with Twitter, but it pretty much all boils down to this: Twitter is a stupid idea. It solves a problem that doesn’t exist, and it does so in an irritating fashion. Restricting people to 140 characters based on an obsolete technical limitation virtually guarantees that nothing worthwhile will ever get said on Twitter. And it’s not like the internet was short on rapid-fire gibberish in the pre-Twitter era, anyway.

Nobody at Twitter has figured out how to make money yet, and they’re not going to. If Facebook can’t figure out how to make money despite perceiving our thoughts from afar, discerning our going out and our lying down, and being familiar with all our ways, then there’s no way Twitter stands a chance. You can’t spin gold out of a billion irrelevant tweets. The sooner Twitter goes the way of Second Life, the better.

Oh, if you enjoyed this post…TELL NO ONE AND DO NOT FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER.