Kathleen Parker seems vaguely annoyed by the Twitter phenomenon.
Shorter than a blog posting, a “tweet” consists of a concise sentence or two and essentially answers the question: What are you doing?
[…]
On Planet Facebook, nothing in one’s life is not worth mentioning. To what end, one can only surmise. I am, therefore I am, therefore I am. But what are friends for, if not to feign interest in what’s not the least bit interesting?
Serious twitter subscribers expect more than a mood update, I’m told, and presumably won’t stick around long for less. Or will they? I recently created an account at Twitter.com. Nary a tweet have I posted thus far, yet already I have a dozen subscribers.
Parker’s mildly famous and says interesting things; a handful of subscribers are just a sign that people are curious. I’ve had a Twitter account for months, which I use mostly to push OTB and New Atlanticist posts and have 357 followers.
I’m only following 95 people but, in all honestly, am “following” them in the same sense that I’m quite sure a sizable number of my “followers” are “following” me: Not very closely. Here’s what they’re saying right now:
It turns out that, by very carefully chosing whom one “follows,” there’s a sizable amount of good information available. At least half those tweets have info worth my checking out and about half the rest are mildly interesting.
Still, like Steven Taylor, I only “half-get” Twitter myself. While I check email too often, I just haven’t made it a priority to check my tweets with any regularity and I’ve made a couple of concerted efforts to be more engaged in the community and found it not worth the tremendous time investment. Steven’s also right that mainstream coverage of these technological “revolutions” are ridiculously overblown.
