Note to casual site readers: This post is off-topic for this blog. Once in a while, this happens when something comes up that I genuinely think is worth posting about.
I've been a Twitter user for a while now. I've built a list of followers and followees that isn't huge or extensive, but is personalized and filled with people I actually want to interact with. While some Twitter power users are all about maximizing the number of followers (I have those types on my list), I've noticed that they rarely seem to be actually holding any conversations.
Twitter can be used in a number of ways, of course. It can be a glorified RSS feed for a blog or blogs, it can be a marketing tool for sending out (annoying) messages about your latest scheme, or it can be a glorified chat box that's limited to 140 characters or less per tweet.
For most Twitter users, I've noticed, it's a combination of these things. For me, it's mainly a chat box and an RSS feed. I also like the sharing aspect of re-tweeting something cool one of my tweeps send out. That, I think, is probably supposed to be Twitter's original purpose.
All of that said, there are down sides to this. So I've decided to list a pro/con list of the top five reasons to use Twitter and the top five reasons to not use it.
Top 5 Reasons to Use Twitter
1- It's a great social networking tool for finding people with a similar bent and share websites/links on topics of similar interest.
2- It's an awesome RSS replacement for a blog so that those who don't like RSS and like immediate notification of a new blog post can quickly get it.
3- A large (active) Twitter network can have your link sent to hundreds or thousands of people within minutes of its being sent.
4- The limited number of characters per tweet means that those who use Twitter are less likely to be overly verbose or waste time with a lot of extraneous information.
5- If you're the Paris Hilton type, then Twitter is a great way to immediately tell everyone on your followers list exactly what you're doing when you're doing it.
Top 5 Reasons NOT to Use Twitter
1- Finding someone who tweets something similar to what you've tweeted (or re-tweets a friend's re-tweet) doesn't mean you agree with them or are interested in what they're tweeting too. This can be overcome if you look at each person you follow individually before following, which is how I do it.
2- It's an awesome RSS replacement, but only if all you're getting (or sending) are RSS feeds and if your WordPress (or whatever) plugin works right. My entire website shut down for almost two days thanks to a stupid WP-to-Twitter plugin that didn't work right.
3- While a large and active Twitter network can have your link forwarded to hundreds or thousands of people in minutes, most of those hundreds of thousands are just chronic re-tweeters and won't visit the actual link, I've found. Analyzing my site traffic tells me that the number of Twitter users coming to it are minimal, to say the least.
4- The limited number of characters also encourages both mass tweeting and lame cell phone txt speak. Neither of which I like. It's also not stopping the overly-verbose one bit, in my estimation. In fact, it's making them worse because now they have a quantifiable audience to preach to, measured by “followers.”
5- The Paris Hilton types are exactly the reason Twitter is such a PIA most of the time. Today, for instance, I dropped a person I was following for a couple of weeks because for the past two days, he's insisted that everyone cares about Billy Mays' death and a police chase on I35 in Texas. Repeatedly insisted on it, which is why I stopped following. This happens a lot.
Now I think I'll explain the largest reason I wrote this article to start with: time. I have a limited amount of time, like everyone else, and I have a lot of work to do, being self-employed. Twitter has become a HUGE time suck.
It's not that I spend a couple of minutes here and there, it's that I spend it ALL DAY like that, so anything requiring concentration means that Twitter is getting in the way. Today, for instance, I got into a worthless, waste-of-time argument with someone regarding vaccinations.
Since the whole argument basically boiled down to what we could stuff into 140-or-less, it mostly ended up being one-liners and pithy statements. Finally, I just said “Screw this, I'm just not responding.” Great, except he's probably thinking he “won” the argument by default.
During that time, I was (supposed) to be working on a series of articles for a website I write for. Out of the six I need to finish, and should have finished in that five hour span, I got two done. Hmm...
Now, of course, instead of finishing the other four, I'm wasting even more time with Twitter by writing about why I shouldn't be using it. Great.
