C'mon, admit it. Twitter is useless

Hey Jwallace. I didn't see "V." Though I'm interested in your UFO sighting. Regarding the article, I completely agree it was a snooooozer. No news what-so-ever.

Was this really Global News??

Just who is this Stephen Fry?  He's not on my "A" list of actors, actresses, and celebrities to be paying any attention to!!

Nicole, I think you hit it on the head, Twitter is little more than a futurized electronic world-wide update of the old passing the rumor note around school frenzy that most but apparently not all of us were supposed to grow out of...

With the 'Net so invasive in most peoples lives growing up really is becoming hard to do.

(As someone once wrote and sang in a song of some vague popularity...)

JD

Hey Nicole,

"as if they're some alien species inhabiting the earth"

Did you watch "V" last night?  I'm assuming that this isn't the best time or place to mention my unquestionable UFO sighting experience.

"After reading an article entitled "A Tweet Unleashes Vitriol on a User in Britain" in The New York Times this morning, I think I need to bash my face against this desk until I lose consciousness"

That article was incredibly boring to me...I wasn't able to finish it and was not sure if it was the time of the day as to why I couldn't get past the first paragraph.

I would read  his answers with a great pleasure if somebody tells him that he is boring. Stephen Fry seems to be a gentleman. You know, on one hand, I totally agree with you, this all situation sounds extremely idiotic ( now I can see why people committed  suicides after some stupid commentaries  on line).On the other, well, the Internet  prefers pretty sarcastic language, so when a guy stops being sarcastic, ironic and aggressive...well, ok. I give up...It looks sooo pathetic. Sorry, Stephen Fry, I love you as an actor, but after reading your 2 books and tweeter, I have to admit.Your writing is boring (let's hope he doesn't know about IE, otherwise, he will send a letter with apologies and so on:))))

I believe twitter to have extraordinary power...when its working(real time search was down today).

While standing in front of the customer service kiosk at the grocery store, a phone call came in asking the clerk if their starbucks had wi-fi. She simply said no, hung up and NEGLECTED to tell the caller that there is an actual starbucks within 100 meters of the grocery chain with wi-fi. The point of me conveying my observation? (drum roll please).

Real time search coupled with location based tweets might have solved that caller's issue. okay wait, that was kinda lame. I was attempting to overlay real life social search with the web's social search. The caller was only one step away from obtaining relevant bull's eye results.  I think the web's social search is very similar. Results tailored for each individual with the likes and dislikes of their social peers on similar results/search terms. going back to my point. if I were to tweet, can someone recommend a coffee shop of their choice close to me? with the twitter location api, perhaps my followers who are familiar with my current location would tweet back with their thoughts and location. 

next up:

Local police officers utilize twitter for faster safe keeping.

"It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter": i.e., even a boring (and somewhat sheepish) celebrity twitterer can make headlines. I bet this "non-event" generates a lot more publicity for @stephenfry than he ever hopes to get from his boring tweets. There goes the power of Twitter as a PR tool - before we know it, more celebrities will threaten to retire from Twitter just to get some attention. But, is it really a non-event? I thought if it was covered, it could no longer be a non-event whether it seems idiotic or not. Non-events are ones that don't get coverage by definition. And, I have no problem discussing this kind of issues - I don't know about Twitter having extraordinary power, but I think we've seen Twitter can be pretty unpredictable, and its potential should neither be underestimated nor dismissed...just yet! If it's Internet-related, we discuss!

I also think there's a greater issue here in all of this Twitter talk. As this is a site about the future of the Internet, whenever I read this fluffy Twitter coverage I can't help but think of it as problematic. People are so focused on Twitter's potential and how to leverage Twitter to make the most of it, and they examine it like it's going to be some saving grace. I kind of want to scream "snap out of it!" and implore people to innovate in other areas. So rather than jump on the Twitter bandwagon, I think it's important to balance the scale. Keep the masses somewhat lucid.

Funny, DavidS. The only thing I'd add though is that it isn't so much that Twitter is written about a lot that bothers me. It's that it's written about from such a positive angle. The story is always the same: "just another example of Twitter's power/potential," etc. My objective is usually to expose how idiotic that is.

Now JD, I in no way was pointing a specific finger. Like you, I think that Twitter gets an unduly amount of coverage.  But as you say, it does make amusing fodder. ;-/