That's it Twitter. You're not for me. I quit. Well, that's not true. I don't quit. I just don't log onto you anymore, leaving anyone that follows me severely disappointed.
When Professor Williams asked us to sign up for Twitter earlier in the semester I was skeptical. I already had Facebook, which I consider a great way for me to connect with friends and old acquaintances. That part of my life was already full, so I wasn't interested in Twitter filling it. The only shot I thought Twitter had was becoming a way for me to get some of my news. I had heard of many stories about different organizations that provided news over Twitter, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Things started out well enough. I started by following various organizations which published news stories on topics that interested me. (Mostly sports and gambling. I'm a degenerate.) Before I knew it I was getting bombarded with dozens of news stories a day. How many of them did I actually read? A few. But before too long I just found myself going to those news organizations' Web sites and reading the news the new-old-fasioned way.
I think I know why this aggregation of news I tried to perform on Twitter just didn't work for me. I'm the kind of guy that likes to seek out my news. I like to get on, read the news at my convenience, and decide how deep to delve into what I'm reading without being told. For this reason, subscribing to news updates from someone/something on Twitter is a bit annoying to me. I log onto social networking sites to see what my friends are doing and share what I'm doing. This is the same reason I don't like RSS feeds. I find myself wading through a ton of information I just don't care about trying to find the good stuff. This wading process is much more comfortable for me when the information I'm not looking for is housed in cyberspace, and not my email inbox or Twitter home page.
This isn't to suggest that everyone on Twitter needs to give up distributing news. Using Twitter to distribute news can be done, it's just not being done properly for the most part. Instead of using some sort of bot to post links to stories housed on a newspapers Web site, papers would be much better served by using Twitter as an interactive way to see what readers feel about different stories. This goes back to Twitter being used as a social networking site. The important feature is the interaction of people, not the actual reading of news. I'm sure there are people doing this on Twitter, I just didn't find them or they weren't in my areas of interest.
So long Twitter, I gave it my best shot. Maybe I'll come back when I'm older, and closer to being in your target audience. I'll leave with a few good memories, and I'll still be sure to occasionally check out the tweets of funny users like Shaq, Barry Zito, and Ed Hightower. But other than that, I'm afraid I can live without you.
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