10 Reasons I Won’t Be Following You on Twitter
Posted on August 28, 2011 by isp
Social networking sites are all the rage lately. You can’t swing a cat these days without someone tweeting at it, then posting the pic on Facebook. Fine. Tweet away to all your tweeps, tweeter. I won’t see a word you’re tweeting. Why, you ask? Let me count the ways … Okay, ten. 

Here are 10 reasons why I won’t be following you on Twitter:

Honestly, how can I take a statement from someone seriously when it’s called a tweet, for Pete’s sake? The creators of Twitter knew this when they named it, which goes a long way in illustrating that it was never intended to be a medium for us to take all that seriously: “So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word twitter, and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.” - Jack Dorsey, co-creator of Twitter, LA Times, February 18, 2009

Don’t get me wrong. I do actually have a Twitter account, so I’ve given it a shot. At last count, though, I had about 104 messages which I have yet to read because, of the previous 200+ messages, most were from people that were selling something I didn’t want, nor ever expressed a need for.

What’s more, I can’t keep up with the influx of messages, even if by some miracle, there actually were some important bit of information posted. The truth is, I have to filter out the unimportant; and so Twitter just doesn’t suit me – or maybe I’m just not suited for it.

Then again, maybe I’m just jealous. Because in my life entire days can go by, even weeks, before I’ve got anything that seems tweet-worthy. But no, that can’t be it, because no one else seems to have that much to say either. But the tweets keep coming just the same.

As it turns out, all of my own tweeps are peeps with whom I already correspond regularly, via myriad other media. Seems we now have more ways with which to say something than most of us actually have worthwhile things to say.

Which reminds me: Is it just me or are half of all tweets merely links to some other place on the web anyway? Do I really need a tweet from someone, directing me to someone else’s blog, which links to a lolcatz .jpg that someone else got in their email?

As if that weren’t enough, what feature has Twitter added? Yep, Re-Tweets! Now they’ve armed you with a button exclusively designed for regurgitating old news. How utterly fabulous.

I’m not a company, a retail store, a celebrity or a “brand”. I’m a person, an individual; and my network consists of friends and family. For that purpose, I’ve already got a Facebook account. I had to. It was the only way to reach most of them anymore.

Basically, I have enough of a life to stay too busy to keep up with tweets, yet not quite an interesting enough one to tweet about. If only more people were as honest with themselves. 

This clearly is not the case, based on my incoming tweets, therefore … 

I, like Twitter itself, must limit myself to 140 characters; and I’m afraid you’d be #141. So here’s to keeping the number of characters in our lives to a minimum. Fewer tweets, fewer twits. Not that I necessarily think of you specifically in that sense; but my philosophy is, why chance it?

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