Microblogging

I don't get twitter. If you've never heard ot it, twitter has been described as a "micro-blog". Basically, you join up and then you can post things, just like with a blog. But each thing you post (called a "tweet", I kid you not) can be no longer than 140 characters, and can't contain pictures or videos or stuff like that. You can add people to your friends list and then when you log in, you'll see what they've posted and people can subscribe to your feed as well. You can update your twitter from your cell phone as well, so you can keep the world up-to-date on everything from anywhere.

This seems to me like overkill. In particular circumstances, I can see it being useful or interesting — say your favourite IT journalist is attending MacWorld or some similar conference, and is "twittering" about some things he's seeing. A full-blown blog entry about each thing would take too long, so if he updates his twitter every few minutes or half an hour or whatever, that's kind of neat. Similarly, a TSN reporter wrote a blog on NHL trade deadline day. He was at home watching the TSN coverage, and wrote one article and kept updating it every few minutes, whether to talk about a new trade or rumour, or analyze a previous trade, or to comment on something someone said, or just to joke about an announcer's tie. Dave Barry has been known to "live-blog" during episodes of 24. Those kind of things lend themselves to twitter rather nicely.

But I'm guessing that the vast majority of twitter users are posting what they're having for dinner and what they're watching on TV and "just finished working out, now I'm going to have a shower" or other pointless crap like that. The stuff I write here is mostly my opinions or observations on stuff, not just what's happening in my day-to-day life, because I figure nobody would be interested in that. With twitter, you can have an hour-by-hour or even minute-by-minute account of someone's day, and I just don't see the point. I already waste enough time online working on my blog, facebook, or wikipedia, so I really don't need to add twitter to that list.