The "What Are You Doing?" Fad Craze

So, Twitter. 140 characters of thought, emotion, activities, etc. It's now practically a "need to have" thing for those who want to be "out there". Out where? Oh, you know, where other people will see you. Because everyone will see you on Twitter. Sure.

I wouldn't say I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. For me, it's kind of a "whatever" relationship. I don't need it, I don't feel like my online visibility has been improved by it (though if you think otherwise, please do let me know), and I'm pretty sure I have gained much at all from Twittering. Actually, I think the fake verb all the cool kids use now is "tweeting". But again, I'm too "whatever" about it to really care about technically (in)correct grammar. I think I actually like Jaiku more overall, partly because it's less of the hip thing, you can add additional RSS feeds to it and, well, now it's owned by Google. And you all know what a Google fangirl I am. Yet Twitter is where the people are, so if I am to get anything out of a mini-blogging medium, Twitter is where I should be.

Mini-blogging. I don't know if that's the correct term for services like Twitter or Jaiku, but that's how I think of them. Instead of posting a 140 character update directly to my blog via Blogger, one goes to Twitter because... well, I don't know why. Because it's cool, I guess. And you know, loading the Blogger homepage, clicking the "new post" link from the dashboard, typing, then posting, is all so much work if you just want to make one tiny little 140 character update on your current thoughts or activities. It's perfect if you want to make a 142 character update though.

I guess some people don't really see the function of Twitter in the same way I do. Sure, they use it as a "mini-blog", but they can't seem to grasp the concept of short, intermittent updates that I feel is inherent in the Twitter concept. I've seen people post five, six consecutive Twitters (tweets? eh, I still don't care) all on the same subject. And I want to tell them--or really, @them, if you dig me--that they should take their typing elsewhere. It's like each post is the next sentence of a paragraph, but instead of just... oh, I don't know, writing a blog post wherein each sentence is part of a paragraph, they post (I'm inclined to use the word "spam" actually) a series of related sentences over Twitter with only a few minutes in between each new update.*

Maybe I'm just mean, or bitter that I myself am not dedicated enough to the Twitter fad to update every revelation of thought or minute action that occurs throughout my day. But I honestly just feel it is a spammy nuisance to see half a dozen or more updates from the same person, with no updates from anyone else to break up the repetition of avatars. That's why I follow a good variety of people, after all; if I really wanted to see updates from just one person, I'd go to their individual Twitter page. And if I really wanted to see everything a person felt about a single subject, well, I'd go to their blog, which is where that sort of thing would logically be.

Seriously people, you need to blog more. Sure, it's fun to see just how creative you can be with keeping your update to 140 characters or less. But I promise, it's even more fun to see how creative you can be when you have no limits.

*I swear, I have actually seen people relay a short fiction story via Twitter. And you know, at the time I thought it was kind of novel (pun not intended, though realized) yet I still thought that they should post that sort of thing on their blog. Or at the very least, take some freaking time with it and draw the story out. It's called "suspense", people.