March 27, 2009

Tweeted out.

Tired of Twitter. I find I haven't tweeted in a while, and I'm not going to force myself. This was probably my last tweet:
I think I may have stopped tweeting. I'm a blogger not a tweeter.
Responses:
OrinocoPat@annalthouse Obviously

drawncutlass@annalthouse Shades of Dr. McCoy! Damnit, Jim, I'm a blogger, not a tweeter!

rhymeswithwhen@annalthouse Truly a distinction, I think. I can tweet all day long, but blogging wears me out.

Lawyer_Tom@annalthouse Quitters never win, Ann. We are like your tweets. Don't go!
I'm not a twitterer. I'm a quitterer.

And what do you mean, you are like my tweets? You are infrequent and short? Sporadic and stingy?

To blog is to create a place for people to visit. I love that feeling. I have many visitors. Come into this room that is my new post and say what you like. Be interesting. Hang out with us!

On Twitter, there's just an endless trickle of trivia and that vague feeling of obligation to dribble into the trickle from time to time. But what is it to me? It's not a place where I am. It's that thing over there.

I want to be here.

ADDED: "The trouble with Twitter":
James T. Kirk: SPOCK! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!

Spock: It appears that your computer has been infected and overrun by twitters.

Dr. Leonard McCoy: What in blue blazes is a twitter!

Spock: It was a primitive form of communication in the early twenty first century normally engaged in by adolescent boys in the basement of their parent’s homes....
More at the link.

61 comments:

Sofa King said...

To blog is

to be not frittering

the time that you

spent twittering

Burma-Shave

Unknown said...

Given that I follow nobody's tweet feed, and only click over to individual tweets when referred to on blogs, my vote is easy: blog baby blog!

JAL said...

I don't get twitter.

It's like texting. Useful if you have something quick to say that you don't want to spend time with (talking or writing) but don't care enough about to do either.

I don't want to waste time reading that my friend is doing her nails.

Fragrence of Narcissism me thinks.

JAL said...

It's the living room / kitchen feeling of a good blog that appeals.

Jennifer said...

Ooh frontpaged here via a tweet there. Love the cross-pollination.

traditionalguy said...

Amen!

Trooper York said...

Twitter is for people who can not write a coherent paragraph. Who lack creativity and depth. That is why so many of these journalists love it. Hacks.

The Dude said...

Ann wrote "dribble into the trickle".

TMI!!!

Jennifer said...

Twitter is to blogs
as haiku are to sonnets
we all say our piece

David said...

Twitter is for people who think that their momentary comings, goings and musings are of interest. Spare me.

Jim O said...

But twitter is how Ezra Klein slimed you! Will you not fight back?

Mad William Flint said...

bah. The conversations that are sparked on twitter can really be quite something.

The people "on my bookshelf" are far more accessible than I would have imagined. Shooting questions to (and getting responses from) people I've been reading for decades is very nice. It's also doing wonders for my job search.

The other thing is that using twitter through the website is abysmal. You've got to use something like TweetDeck.

Sure, it's got that "room of 10,000 people" feeling. But people have whined about "blogging about lunch" since it started.

You can get a lot out of it if you want to.

Or, you can follow shaq and complain that it's a content-free medium.

Not for everybody either way.

SteveR said...

This twitter thing shouts to me, "just because we can, doesn't mean we should". TMI

chuck b. said...

I was against Twitter before I was for it. But I like it now.

Twitter is good for linking to little things that I like and want to share but don't necessarily want to blog about. And because I keep the Twitter feed on my homepage, it's there on the blog for a little while.

Also, I enjoy the people that I follow and enjoy the supplemental information they tweet and sometimes the pithy wit.

chuck b. said...

That was a really bad sentence.

Ann Althouse said...

You can link to little things on a blog. I like short posts and make all my posts as short as I can.

chuck b. said...

Yes, that works well on your blog.

Unknown said...

I could see the merit of a custom-designed blog with a sort of two-column approach: one with tweet-like short clips and one with longer commentaries.

Mad William Flint said...

Indeed. Yeah I can't argue FOR using twitter if someone's not interested any more than I argue that people 'should blog'. But the "it's all crap" line that you hear out there a lot lately is a little silly.

Bob said...

Imagine Glenn Reynolds maintaining his post count at Instapundit without all of those one-line posts. Of course you can use the short form to blog with.

Hoosier Daddy said...

Tired of Twitter. I find I haven't tweeted in a while, and I'm not going to force myself. This was probably my last tweet:

I didn't know much about it but from what I saw, it looked a lot like a passing fad. Seems like it was just a substitute for texting or am I wrong?

Bissage said...

Let's all sing like the birdies sing: tweet, tweet tweet, tweet tweet.

Let's all sing like the birdies sing: sweet, sweet sweet, sweet sweet.

Let's all warble like nightingales.

Give your throat a treat.

Take your time from the birds, now you all know the words.

Tweet, tweet tweet, tweet tweet.

Ernesto Ariel Suárez said...

I refuse to twitter.

Palladian said...

Good. The word "Tweet" used in this way makes me angry.

Is the Twittering Twat Maxine still tweeting her twatish twitters to her tittering twatish followers?

Jennifer said...

Hoosier Daddy - I don't think Twitter can be generally classified as a substitute for texting any more than blogging as a substitute for writing to friends and family. Some people may use it that way but the possibilities are much broader.

Sofa King said...

The use of twitter

is to get bits

of broken thoughts

from lots of twits

But not

Burma-Shave

Trooper York said...

(Captain James T. Kirk opens up his computer and a mound of inane comments and meaningless tripe falls out and covers the entire room almost to his neck)
James T. Kirk: SPOCK! WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!
Spock: It appears that your computer has been infected and overrun by twitters.
Dr. Leonard McCoy: What in blue blazes is a twitter!
Spock: It was a primitive form of communication in the early twenty first century normally engaged in by adolescent boys in the basement of their parent’s homes.
James T. Kirk: But how did it multiply so and why are there so many of them in my computer.
Spock: Logically Captain it would flow that stupid mutates and grows in a geometric pattern. One inane supercilious comment breeds another until we are inundated with the moronic musings of undeveloped minds. It was quite a problem at one time.
James T. Kirk: How do we control this mess? Boner.
Dr. Leonard McCoy: That Bones how many times do I have to tell you? Damn it Jim I’m a Doctor not an editor. I don’t know how to stem this tide of babble.
Spock: One would hope that eventually the people indulging in would grow up and want to communicate in full sentences and paragraphs. But it seems that each twitter is born pregnant and will give birth to more insipid twaddle. That’s the trouble with twitter.
(Star Trek, The Trouble with Twitter, Season 2 episode 12)

Jon said...

The attraction of the Twitter phenomenon completely escapes me.

Am I wrong, or couldn't Twitter have existed a decade ago?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The attraction of the Twitter phenomenon completely escapes me.

Same me w/ txtng.

bill said...

Prescriptivist poppycock. They're just two utilities for writing. One is highly restrictive, one is not. Neither form is more or less inviting nor more or less substantial. They're just blank space to make unblank.

JAL said...
It's the living room / kitchen feeling of a good blog that appeals.


Somewhere awhile back there was an article about architects designing kitchens. There are homeowners who like open kitchens for socializing and homeowners who prefer to keep everyone out while food appears through closed doors. Both are fine, just depends on the user.

The Dude said...

TY, comment of the day.

Sofa King - honorable mention for the Burma Shaves.

Anonymous said...

What's Twitter?

AllenS said...

Real men don't Twitter.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hoosier Daddy said...

Is the Twittering Twat Maxine still tweeting her twatish twitters to her tittering twatish followers?

golf clap for Palladian.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I’m tweeted out.

Or.. How Twitter lost Althouse.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

twitter = brain farts

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Twitt has peaked the way of bell bottoms.

srfwotb said...

I like them both. It'd be a lot easier to tweet if I didn't have to switch screens. I like listening in on the bs random thoughts from others. It's humanizing. A blog and a tweetfeed together and you have reasonable approximation of what it's like to be inside someone's head.

Of course Twitter is confining for more sustained thought - a lot like passing notes in 7th grade.

I saved a trash bag full of the notes I passed in the 7th grade, btw. I found it in my mom's closet a few years ago. In hindsight, it was one of the best things I saved from my childhood. All the things I thought I would care about later, the programs for graduation, awards ceremonies etc. I don't care about as much as I thought I would, but I loved those notes. And some of them were novels.

Accordingly, I saved my niece's little precocious love tweets she had me post to a Jesse McCartney fan site because she was too young to type or spell.

Geoff Matthews said...

"You are infrequent and short? "

that's what she said.

joewxman said...

i too can't seem to get my head around twitter. I have my blog and my facebook page. I don't see why i need it.

amba said...

We're in sync! (With you, too, Palladian.)

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the linkage, Ms. Althouse.

Twitter...Nahhh...Good 70's-90's Rock...Yep!

Thomas said...

I am the Lawyer_Tom referenced in the post. My grammatically horrible tweet is a prime example of why people shouldn't Twitter while driving. Well that and I can cause an accident.

chickelit said...

Twitt has peaked the way of bell bottoms.

Twitter...Nahhh...Good 70's-90's Rock...Yep!

Bellbottoms! most groovy!

Dark Eden said...

Twitter just seems so narcissistic to me. It seems like a giant chatroom that everyone is in. and 99% of people suck and bore me. Why do I want to know how their latest bowel movement went?

Trooper York said...

I don't know. Ask Titus.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Why do I want to know how their latest bowel movement went?

I know how you feel,

Vana White doesn’t do it for me anymore either.

tim maguire said...

Good for you. I tried twitter. I think I tweeted (twitted? twatted?) once. I followed two people but only checked when I remembered (which quickly became rarely).

I don't get the attraction of twitter on any level. Has anything of value ever been expressed that way? It seems like a stupid waste of time to me.

And facebook isn't much better.

Unknown said...

Why don't you hire a ghost twitterer? (h/t Hot Air)

Trooper York said...

Well she is a new bride and she doesn't want Jennifer Love Hewitt hanging around.

blake said...

Twitter is for people who think that their momentary comings, goings and musings are of interest. Spare me.

The same can be (and has been) said of blogging. Like blogging, it can easily become overwhelming.

It's fun to follow other Althouseians and a few other people you wouldn't necessarily expect. (Brent Spiner is really funny. There's a guy who probably isn't Christopher Walken who's funny, too.)

It's making news, I think because it's on a faster cycle than even blogging as far as what's happening right this very second! And it's fragmenting the search market, which we should all understand by now is Very Important.

Logically, the next extension should be something like a massive area where anyone can type anything, as long as they don't exceed 20 characters and use only punctuation and numbers.

Snark aside, the 140 character constraint seems to have created its own demand. That's sort of interesting.

Jon, most Web 2.0 isn't really about technological advances. (AJAX plays a part, but even that isn't all that new.) Lots of people had blogs before they were called blogs. A lot of chat rooms are like Twitter, in that people only say things sporadically, and in short bursts.

Yet, here we are on a blog talking about Twitter.

Hazy Dave said...

I think I understand...

"Nearly everybody gets
Twitterpated in the springtime."

Well, it's not going to happen to me!

DaLawGiver said...

Twitter = blogfart.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Sofa King, you should work for xkcd.

Anonymous said...

I didn't join Twitter because it creeped me out when it asked me about my e-mail.

Anyway, moderation is the key to good health right? So, my moderation is blogging, but not Twitter and no Facebook. QED.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, my comment showed up!

I have been trying to comment and my comments just disappeard into either even though it said the may comment was saved.

I seem to have the ability to always screw things up on the internets.

Chennaul said...

onparkstreet-

It seems to do that when you comment using an id source other than blogger and there is a greater amount of traffic on that particular thread.

It will dump the other id sources and just do/or prioritize blogger.

At least that's what I've experienced and that's my excuses for it.

chuck b. said...

"I don't get the attraction of twitter on any level. Has anything of value ever been expressed that way? It seems like a stupid waste of time to me."

Lol If it has no value to me, it has no value to anyone! "Good for you"!

dick said...

It always reminded me of that people who use cell phones all the time. I remember being on a bus in Manhattan and a woman got on and gave almost a travelogue of here we were to her friend over the phone loudly enough that I could hear her distinctly 6 rows away and I am hard of hearing. I see those same people now getting on the bus with the cell phone to their ears while they pull their transit cards out; then they sit down and immediately start twittering to all their friends while the person who is with them sits there doing the same thing. And most likely what they are twittering about is totally useless and of no redeeming social value at all. The person being tweeted to probably doesn't really give a damn.

sonicfrog said...

So I joined Twitter to say "hi" and keep up with my niece. I twat exactly once. God, it's so trivial and boring. I'll take my blog and FaceBokk any day.