Programming

15 Million Reasons Why Twitter Sucks…

    Shayne Tilley
    Share

    Or does it?

    Throw the question “What do you think of Twitter” to a room full of geeks and you’ll soon realize that Twitter’s one of those unique creations that you either love to death or just can’t stand hearing about. There’s no fence sitting when it comes to Twitter!

    Recent suggestions that they just scored $15 Million in additional VC funding got me thinking – are these Venture Capitalists crazy or is there something in this thing called Twitter?

    Here’s my take on it…

    Twitter is nothing more than a waste of bandwidth, and here’s why:

    • You must be egotistical or insecure or both!Get over yourself. Nobody really cares about what you’re up to, or how you’re feeling, or what brand of jeans you just bought. Your Twitter pals are too busy typing their own BS to read yours. It doesn’t make you popular, it just makes you sad. Stop typing and get some fresh air!
    • It sucks you into a false sense of security!While you might think you’re having a conversation with a close group of friends, in reality you’re shouting out to the entire world. I’ve seen too many work colleagues and friends tweet something that has come back to bite them, and hard.
    • It’s a time waster!Just think about the valuable time you’re wasting twittering, setting up tiny urls, and watching others. You only live once. How else you could you spend those hours? What are you really getting out of it?
    • It never works anyway!Downtime – yeah we all know, Twitter is a message system trapped in a CMS. It’s widely documented the road twitters got ahead of them, and I hope they can turn it around. But nevertheless, if we had the sort of downtime Twitter does, we would have put a set of concrete boots on our sys admin and threw him in a river long ago.

    Then I started thinking about the flip side. Perhaps there is something in this after all …

    • Granted, Twitter is one of the fastest ways to spread the wordFrom the perspective of a Marketing Manager, there’s no faster way to spread the word and see what people think about your products. Just look at the pages of tweets for our current Photoshop giveaway. 10 times better than formal press feeds I’ve paid a fortune for in the past.
    • And it’s not all crap if you know where to lookWith a little energy, and the right group of people, you can tap into to an everlasting newsreel of stuff you’re interested in. What’s even better is you’re not stuck listening to the full story, you read the tweet, if you’re interested, go from there.
    • And let’s face it, there’s a voyeur in us allYou can’t deny that dropping in on conversations can be fun, especially when they’re talking about someone or something you know well. It kind of puts you in a crazy left of centre perspective which I think is kind of cool.

    So where does this leave us? What’s the future for Twitter?

    Personally I think it’s a fad that will go away soon enough – something bigger and better is sure to replace it before they get their act together. But I can’t wait to see how they spend their $15 million. Imagine the parties!