Monday, April 28, 2008

If People Could Hear the Twitter About Twitter, We'd All Be Deaf

Have you gone to the movies lately? I am obsessed with going to movies and go pretty much once a week, if not more often. Anyway, if you go as often as I do you've probably been subjected to many different versions of the "Don't talk during the movie!" message. How about the one where the screen is black except for those jumping soundwave lines and there are a bunch of loud noises going on at once: a baby screaming, people talking, cellphone ringing, etc. Do you know the one I'm talking about?

If so, you know how that commercial makes you want to pull your hair out because it's so annoying? Well, take that feeling but replace those noises--baby crying, talking, etc--with Twitters. Imagine that instead of reading everyone's "tweets" or incessant chatter about Twitter you can actually hear them. Lately that's what it feels like inside my head.

Don't get me wrong, I love to twitter (I prefer to refer to it as twittering, not tweeting). Nothing more entertaining than constantly spitting out 140 word witty insights or random thoughts. Ditto reading other people's twitters. The twittering itself is not the problem.

The thing that's gnawing at me is reading a million blog posts ABOUT twittering. It's one thing to read someone's actual twitters; it's another to read blog after blog after blog after blog about Twitter this, Twitter that, Twitter as a business tool, Twitter shaping social media, etc, etc. Enough already--we get it.

It's like Twitter is a new religion or something--people discover it and feel like they've uncovered a new frontier or something. Not like I'm a veteran myself or anything--I've only been doing it for a few weeks--but I don't feel it's so revolutionary that it warrants constant "Hey--look at me--I'm twittering!" blog posts or conversations.

Imagine if it were the phone--fine, everyone's talking on the phone. But what if everyone then started blogging about how they're talking on the phone, analyzing every little shred of why they're talking, what they're talking about, why it's good to talk on the phone, etc, etc. Probably wouldn't be all that interesting to read about, right? Ditto writing about Twitter.

There are only so many ways you can analyze Twitter. Granted, I myself am guilty of exactly what I'm criticizing others for: blogging about Twitter so I'm one to talk.

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