things kevin hates

The past few years have seen an inundation of different social networking sites. And I admit I was always something of a late adopter on all of them. First there was myspace. Then came facebook. Then came twitter. The last of these three is something of an unusual creature. It’s clearly not a full-out social networking site like facebook or myspace. It’s good for short messages, links, and maybe a few snapshots from your cell phone. It’s not a bad idea per se, although it has its flaws. The biggest problem is that there’s no real consensus (as far as I can tell) on exactly how to use it.

Social networking sites depend just as much on user behavior for their value as they do on the site itself. Obviously, you need a critical mass of users, but once you have that, people have to arrive at some sort of understanding about how to use the site. People (at least in my circle) have arrived at that understanding on facebook. I never find myself thinking, “Gee, I’ve seen eight billion status updates in the past two hours from person X. Shut up already!” Some people don’t post very much, some post a lot, but people aren’t terribly obnoxious. And the things that are annoying are easy to block. (I’m talking to you, Farmville. I’m so glad I don’t have to hear about anybody’s cows anymore.) But with twitter, I have three or four people who post a hundred times a day, and a few people who rarely post. Now, part of the problem is that I don’t follow very many people on twitter—45 people compared to a couple hundred facebook friends. So the mass-volume tweeters stand out. I don’t mind that they tweet so much—I could just quit following them, after all. (Although some people—I won’t name names—probably could scale back a wee bit.) I mind that we haven’t yet arrived at a consensus about how to use twitter, where everyone tends to tweet roughly the same amount, so that I’m not overloaded with a couple of people. And I suppose I need to follow more people.

Another problem is that you only have 140 characters. This doesn’t matter much if I’m tweeting from my cell phone with a snappy one-liner, a brief account of my current activities, and so on; but if I’m sitting in front of my computer it’s pretty tough to compress my thoughts that much. So much of what I find myself posting on facebook statuses or twitter updates tends to be much longer reactions to what I’m watching on TV or something that just happened or whatever. And asking me to work with 140 characters is sheer torture. How am I supposed to fit any adjectives in? Long words? Forget about it. It sucks. Facebook statuses (three times as long) are just about the perfect size. Any time I run long, I can usually truncate things to get to a better, more concise status.

Another problem is that people feel the need to post their location every five minutes. It’s like saying to they internet, “Hey! Come break into my house!” I exaggerate slightly, but it amazes me how careless people are about that.

Finally, twitter is supposed to have some use in showing what the rest of the world is talking about, with trending topics, hashtags, and so forth, but this feature usually ends up being close to useless. Any popular topic is usually completely overwhelmed with hundreds of tweets a minute, so it’s not like you can converse with strangers about the World Cup or a Glee episode or whatever.

So to make a long story short, I may have a twitter account, but I still don’t “get” it.