Unless you’ve been living under a rock–which might not entirely be a bad thing–you know what Twitter is, and you probably have heard about tweeting. Twitter is the newest “social networking” craze to follow in the wake of Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, etc. The difference with Twitter, however, is that you don’t have a page with pictures and information and all of the other so-called intricacies that go along with those other sites. Instead, Twitter users are allowed a certain number of characters to write sentences, telling their followers what they are doing. And yes, users can follow other users so they get notifications whenever there is an update (I don’t use Twitter so someone correct me if I am spouting inaccuracies here!)
Is it just me or does the entire idea seem incredibly narcissistic?
Yes, I definitely get the irony of the previous sentence, especially since I have a blog where I can talk about me all day long, if I so desire. I get it. But what I don’t get is why anyone would be interested in having a slew of followers know there every move of every day. (And some of my facebook friends are just as bad…..85 status updates in one day is a little excessive) I look at some of my friends’ tweets–their postings to Twitter–and I have a few that are pretty addicted to the service.
10:02: Headed to the store to buy some food for the bbq
10:41: Must be a sale on Doritos!
11:17: I better get home before it starts to pour!
1:19: Anyone have any great ideas for tonight?
2:37: Movie night! Can’t wait to see Transformers 2!
And on and on. You get the point. Is that interesting for people to read? And more so, why would you want a bunch of people to know all of that? Yes, I just don’t get it.
My friend Greta shed a little light on this topic for me, however, and I guess she explained it in a way that I can MAYBE begin to understand the craze a little bit. She said that she too was anti-Twitter until she tried it…and then got addicted. She said that her friends post pics and links to sites and mentions of cool places that help her to learn more and broaden her horizons. She gets to learn about cool new stuff that she may not have if her friends hadn’t been tweeting all day. So I guess I can understand that a little bit. Maybe. But maybe not. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just watch and wait and see if I ever fall into the Twitter abyss. On the bright side, if I was a Twitter member, I could at least tweet right now about how I don’t understand the necessity of tweeting. Hmm, ironic.
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