I actually agree with Vallywag: No one uses Twitter

28 Dec 2008

**Update from the future (Jan 2012):* Not surprisingly, my prediction that follows didn’t stand the test of time. Three years later, I’m a strong advocate of many different uses of Twitter. I’m sure my past self would scoff.*

I’ve always been a bit confused about the reckless amount of hyper surrounding Twitter. The functionality it provides is nothing more than 90s era IRC with cute animated birds and a 140 character limit. I was convinced the people who live and breath Twitter were making general assumptions about the reach of Twitter based on their smaller social group. Turns out Vallywag thinks so too.

Said Vallywag post is titled “Do You Twitter? How Adorable” and it makes the point that Twitter has “consumed the media elite”, but their view of it’s success is distorted because they only see how their colleges use it. “By the numbers, though, Twitter is an inconsequential nothing.”

My Twitter page is essentially tweets from a handful of variably frequent posters and the few dozen remaining followers that do nothing other than add icons to my followers list. I do very little tweeting myself excepting the odd response at one of those aforementioned heavy Twits.

Twitter, for me, is just one more site I need to check every day. My followers/following list is without exception, a subset of the social graph I already have represented in Facebook or Google. The only thing Twitter serves to do is further segregate the conversation I have with my friends.

For my part, I’ve been building a small script that polls and synchronizes my status across Facebook, Twitter, and GTalk (I’d like to add Live Messenger too, but there’s no easy API to get/set, *hint* for those MSofties reading this). Of course, that only solves my side of the conversation. The other direction remains fragmented.