Today I Painted My House Beige: Why I Just Don’t Like Twitter

I’m not one of those old guys that doesn’t accept new technology despite it’s obvious value.  On the contrary, I’m one of those new adopters that buys every gadget and joins every new startup’s beta, just to use something before everyone else.  But I just don’t like Twitter.

I see Twitter’s use.  It’s the world’s largest marketing tool.  Marketing your company or yourself.  If I was person or company of importance trying to reach fans or business,  I can’t think of a better way to do it.  It’s easy, I can post from anywhere, and I don’t have or nor am I expected to write much.  There is no simpler way to reach millions of people.  You know what else is simple?  Setting up thousands of fake accounts to push your spam.  And that’s what half of Twitter account are.

Type in any keyword in search and you’ll see the thousands of bots tweeting the same thing.  Twitter has replaced email as the spam of choice.  I realize there is a filter system but it’s pretty much a manual system.  If you carefully select who you follow it’s not so bad , but right off the bat I had to set the account to receive no emails when people follow me.  The spam bots flock to me like Oversee  does to a TRAFFIC hotel lobby (sorry couldn’t help it) .

I get so tired of people that don’t care what I have to say following me,  and in reality I don’t care about most of the people I follow care say either.  Why would I want to follow a blog writer that simply posts every blog posts he writes?  Then 20 other people retweet the same thing.  If I already follow the blog why do I also need to follow the tweets?  The only tweets I follow are people that I don’t want to read daily.  I peruse their millions of tweets and click on the post I want.  So basically I follow the mediocre blogs.  Celebrities are a different matter.

I get a kick out of what they say and most of them aren’t smart enough to post on a site so Twitter is perfect for them.  You have to admit watching the Lindsay Lohan train wreck is entertaining.  There are some crazy people out there and their tweets can be very entertaining.  I could care less what cheating Lance Armstrong and Ashton Kutcher say but I do care what Chrissie Wellington and other people I admire, have to say. They don’t post on websites so if I want to hear their point of view on life I have to go to Twitter.  So because of that I do see the value of following certain tweets.

The searching is certainly valuable as well. If I have a problem the first thing I do is check Twitter to see if others are experiencing it as well.  What I’m not looking for?  To buy stuff.  Matter of fact is anyone looking to buy something on Twitter?.  I highly doubt it.  It’s not the place to sell your wares and that includes domains.  It doesn’t mean you can’t indirectly sell your wares.  Promoting your company through giveaways and contests.  Giving out data about when, where, and how you do things.  I think that works.  In order for that to work you have to be someone or something that people actually care about.

If you aren’t a popular entity in some other realm of the world, building a following on Twitter is usually a bunch of games and scheming.  No offense to Fusible, he writes a nice blog, but no way in hell do 30,000 people care about his tweets yet that’s the number of his followers.  I don’t think that many people watch the shows on FX.  The follow me and I’ll follow you thing is just a game.  Getting followers is big business.  People that are at popular disadvantage use fake accounts and programs to try and gather more eyeballs.  If you look at the people that have the biggest amount of followers, they all were “famous” for other reasons that Twitter, popular websites, celebrity status, or some other personal skill.  They weren’t computer generated. There are a very few examples like @shitmyDadsays (that turned into the worst show on television in 20 years) that became popular BECAUSE of twitter.  If you can name me 10 others I’d be surprised.  Sure there are people that became MORE popular (see @aplusk Kutcher) but again more the exception that the rule.

And then there’s me.  Nobody cares what I have to say and I really don’t have anything to say.  I just can’t force myself to think that anyone would care about my daily life, hour by hour. I used to tweet but then I found myself forcing out tweets or tweeting my every move.  Then I thought to myself “Why in the hell am I spending 30 minutes a day tweeting shit nobody cares about?”  Today I painted my house beige… who the hell cares.