One of the first things that excited me about Twitter and its 140 character limit was discovering new and interesting ways to say something, to get one’s point across in a legible articulate fashion. Exceeding the 140 character limit only ended up producing a truncated Tweet, possibly with the interesting bit or word not being posted. Well, that was my take on it anyway, wow, was I ever disappointed. No matter what the written medium these days, it would appear that txt spk ruls. There are more vowels dropped than in Welsh language. Frankly, I find txt spk lazy. Back in the 90s days of the 150 character text limit it was bad enough, but when I see it in email, fault report update, forum posts and on CVs it’s time for me to walk away.
I think I had been on Twitter for maybe 10 months before I got my first spam or bot follower, although it was inevitable and was no surprise it was never the less disappointing, they’re easy enough to block and/or report as spam and that’s fine but naively I still hoped Twitter would remain free from “that sort” of crap. But while there are scammers and internet porn out there, spam is never going away.
Twitter was originally billed as a micro-blogging site, a way to let people know what you’re doing now, right now, right this very hour/minute/second, that’s pretty damned amazing, or it would be if it hadn’t become a constant stream of “I’m eating toast” every day at the same time by the same people, yes, I get it, you eat toast at 10:17 every weekday morning. Twitter has become a lot of things to a lot of people, for instance, when I’m on holiday out of the country I never watch telly and rarely pick up an English newspaper, so, last year when I was in Prague there was the tsunami that wreaked havoc and destruction in Japan, I found out about that through Twitter from the news feeds I was following, and whilst the tsunami had no direct effect on me it was of interest as I like to keep up with both local and international news.
Unfortunately Twitter rapidly developed into a chat client, no better or worse than MSN and Yahoo chat rooms used to be back in the day, people used it instead of texting each other, what a great way to save money even in these days of 1000 free texts per month.. unfortunately whilst you’re saving 10p a go the rest of the world, or at the very least your followers are subjected to a daily conversation about the school run, the latest runny nose doing the rounds at school, “that miserable cow in the Ugg boots at the school gates” blah blah, seriously people use the direct message function for that crap, it still doesn’t cost anything and saves the rest of us from so much dross.
Let’s spare a thought for the trolls, you know, those insecure bullying types that have nothing to say to anyone that’s remotely pleasant or engaging, they randomly insult people, call them names, attempt to belittle them, their friends, their families, their beliefs, ethnicity or pretty much anything else they pick up on because they can. I had my very own troll recently, let’s call him Chris, I don’t know Chris, have never met Chris and had no reason for Chris to interact with me, however that didn’t stop him from going off on one about me not knowing anyone who cared about or gave a shit that it was 100 days until the Olympics.
Yes, I had my own little troll, not the best looking one in the world granted, but nevertheless, he was mine, or at least he was until he started on a couple of my female Twitter chums, but I didn’t mind sharing, judging by his picture there was certainly enough of him to go around, although I do prefer my trolls to have a little more hair.
I digress, the bottom line, Twitter is ok, it is what it is, it’s just not for me any more.
