On This Twitter Thing

So, I spent the last couple days kicking the tires of Twitter. For the uninitiated, Twitter allows you to post online quick, soundburst-style updates of your current activity/mood/sexual position/etc. from your mobile phone, IM client, web browser, or whatever. I kept seeing Twitter links on blogs I would visit, and it seemed like the cool kids were doing it, and apparently the rumors that it was insanely addictive and just a gateway drug to the more lethal forms of web communication were just total rumors, and, well, I wanted to give it a try.

Basically, an explanation of Twitter to a standard friend of mine (FOM) would go thusly:

ME: So, I've started a Twitter account. Want to be my friend?

FOM: Why would I care?

Therein lies the rub. As a Twitter user, you basically have to assume that someone, somewhere, would care about what you're doing ALL THE TIME. I could see this being useful to an astronaut or a Navy SEAL or someone else with a life approximately ten thousand times more exciting than mine. But for me...honestly, I barely care about what I'm doing the vast majority of the time, and unless you're chained in a deep dungeon somewhere with the only enjoyment being the mental dialogue you maintain with the rats in your cell and my Twitter page on regular refresh on your computer monitor, you (with you being the World Wide Web at large, not you in particular, though the same probably applies) could almost certainly care even less.

Having already had an online presence here at the battered, neglected Foreign Embassy, my thinking when I created a Tumblr account was that I could use it to post and keep track of various links and photos that wouldn't warrant a full entry here. And it's worked for me. Twitter, following the same reasoning, would work similarly, but instead of hyperlinks, it would be for random thoughts. But the analogy falls apart with the sad, brutal truth that my random thoughts are either (a) not fit for public consumption, (b) completely nonsensical, (c) utterly boring, or (d) all of the above. I just can't be captivating in 140-character soundbytes (to which Statler and Waldorf shout from the balcony, "How many characters does it TAKE?").

Many Twitter users employ it as a means to maintain an online, ongoing conversation with multiple friends, but seeing as how the above conversation example would be pretty much spot-on for the vast majority of my friends, that doesn't work for me, either.

So farewell, Twitter, I hardly knew ye. Mayhap we'll meet again.

ADDENDUM: Well, we met again: last night, I sat down with a glass of wine and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and suddenly went all apeshit on Twitter with my iPhone. Go figure.