Microblogging and Twitter Shitters
I love Penny Arcade's take on Twitter, especially Tycho's to-the-point commentary:
It's not that I don't get it. I do.
. . .
The last "tweet" I ever did really explains it all, for me. I was up in Vancouver, and I put up a message saying so, and what kinds of activities I was engaged in. After I did it, I heard a voice - my own voice - saying, "Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you that you can force your Goddamned minutia on other people, your stupid bullshit, your stone-ground artisanal condiments? How dare you. You should be ashamed." And I was.
I've noted that my gaming friends have reacted significantly different to the microblogging phenomena than my blogging-geek friends. Amongst the gamers, there's a collective shrug. My gf summed up the perspective:
I don't need to be informed that you're at the bus stop, now you're on the bus, now you're at your stop.
Amongst the bloggers, it's this whole 'important' social tool concept. Doesn't that make you roll your eyes? I used to love this stuff, I don't know what's happening to me, but I'm finding myself opting out of these kind of social circles. Like Tycho, it's not that I don't see the usefulness, it's that I don't see it applied to me.
Some of my friends are shocked I don't Twitter, Facebook or use a host of other popular-at-the-moment super-connected social toys. After all, I was trying to find ways to hook my toaster up to the 'net since the early 90's (and every other thing remotely resembling an appliance since I'd heard about CMU's coke machine). I had to get bored of the obsession sooner or later I suppose. =P
May 4, 2008 8:42am
Maybe you're just getting old? *ducks*
What's wrong with Facebook?
May 4, 2008 9:48am
It's migrating topics and this could be a full blog post, but-- My history with social websites goes something like this:
1999: "You should join LiveJournal"
Me: "Okay... wait, what's with these annoying signups? I'll just write on my own website."
2002: "Come make friends lists on Friendster!"
Me: "Okay... wait, this is dumb, I'm just getting silly messages from people I already IM on a daily basis, or annoyed from an extended group of people that I didn't have on my IM for a reason. Plus it's really slow."
2004: "Join communities on Orkut!"
Me: "This is just like someone mashed Friendster and Yahoo! Groups together."
2005: "Make a page on MySpace!"
Me: "Ewwwww, it's like Geocities all over again, only with friend's lists. My eyes hurt from the crappy pages and my ears bleed from the emo music on every one of them."
2007: "You have to join Facebook or I won't talk with you online!"
Me: Wasn't this just for college students to find each other and share homework? Now it's world domination eh? This is starting to look familiar.
I don't have any problems with online communities, I just think they make more sense revolving around specific interests. One giant site that tries to cover every possible interest group is a big turn-off for me. It's generic, annoying and a big collection of full names ripe for identity-theft.
Maybe if they had more tools to migrate and interconnect with the rest of the web, but that's wishful thinking because these things breed on trying to lock you in lest some competitor gets the pageviews. I've heard lots of rhetoric about Facebook applications opening up their network, but it's a completely one-way gate.
These social network sites are only convenient as the one-stop-shop until the next one takes over and then everyone gets the peer pressure to migrate again. I'm tired of signing up on them.
Facebook is more agile than the others, but it's still very stiff compared to the fluidity of the rest of the web.
. . .
Stuff like OpenID, MyBlogLog, Flickr, Wikipedia and Del.icio.us are closer to the kind of web tools I get excited about.
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