I Don't Get Microblogging
The fact that the entire Ubuntu community seems to have dived into this microblogging craze disturbs me.
Actually, “annoys” could be a better word. I occasionally get into this with fiction, like movies and TV series: “Okay, this is kind of decent, but definitely not the masterpiece I was told it is. So what did everyone find in this overrated piece of drivel?” And then I start ranting about it, in the hopes of provoking a discussion and an opportunity to vent.
Technology is sometimes the same for me. A new fad strikes the entire Internet, I fail to see what’s so special about it or what it’s even for, yet the fact that everyone talks about it all the time annoys me enough that I often intervene with complaints that “I don’t get it”.
I honestly tried to get it. I read articles on it, including the Wikipedia one, watched video explanations on YouTube. This diagram, obviously, completely clarified the situation. But seriously…
* Random thoughts? IRC. Saying something that bugs me on an appropriate channel will inspire a more fulfilling response than a mess of short posts ever would. Or I could just write it in my blog—I have nothing against one-liners being there.
* “What I’m doing now”? Well, who the heck cares what I’m doing at the moment? And if someone does care (I can see why my parents and coworkers would, hypothetically, but not beyond that), why would they trace it over the Internet? The fact that someone might actually be interested in reading up-to-the-minute status updates in daily life—and that someone can actually care to update—sounds kind of disturbing by itself. Like virtual voyeurism. This sounds really far-fetched. Using the Internet to trace your son’s meal or finding friends having a party at the moment? Seriously?
From what I’ve seen on screenshots, signal-to-noise ratio of a typical Twitter feed (how do I subscribe to the bloody things anyway? Is it like RSS, via a URL displayed somewhere?) is disturbingly low. You need to trace on the particular service the person is using. That’s just unwieldy.
Maybe I just don’t lead the kind of life where microblogging becomes useful, but then it’s concerning to be different in this aspect from seemingly everyone else in the Ubuntu community.
“I don’t get Twitter” returns 23,500 Google results. For a technology that’s supposed to be simple and intuitive, that’s disturbingly high. Without the “I”, I stumbled onto this phrase: “If you don’t get Twitter [or other similiar sites for that matter], then it’s not for you.” Maybe I should just bitterly follow this statement and disclaim it as “not my thing”?
But dang.
(Added: Someone came to this page from the horrendously designed Planet Ubuntu Twitter page. The irony.)
I’m no twitter fan either; found this very amusing:
http://s2.b3ta.com/host/creative/52745/1235518122/twitter.jpg
Plenty more here:
http://b3ta.com/challenge/twitter/popular/
Cheers, Joseph