A Reason Not To Tweet.

If I had a Twitter account I would probably end up dong nothing but countering the BS tweets put out by other Twitter users.  Visiting an art page last night I saw the owner's Twitter feed, and it was full of a bunch of right wing nonsense pretty much unrelated to the content of the page.  And that's just one example I came across totally by accident.  I see enough other tweets blogged and otherwise commented on that I would have a target rich environment.  No thanks.

I Won't Read Them.

If you haven't heard already Toronto's Eaton Centre was the scene of a shooting today.  One person is dead, several others were wounded.  The thought came to mind of how long it took the idiot squad to start going on about how if only someone had been carrying a gun they could have stopped the gunman.  I would imagine it happened in fairly short order.  You'll excuse me if I don't go look, as their claims will just make me annoyed.  I can think of few things that would make things worse when someone is shooting up a mall than some amateur tying to play the hero by shooting back at him.

Interestingly one of the earliest online reports of the shooting may have been from a celebrity.  Brett Lawrie, the Toronto Blue Jays young Canadian third baseman, was in the mall when the shooting broke out.  He Tweeted about what he heard and saw after fleeing the mall with other patrons.  As you can imagine Lawrie has a lot of followers on Twitter, some 125 thousand according to the Toronto Star, so word got around very quickly.

The Big Five.

Twitter turns five today.  It can now go to kindergarten in the Fall.

The obvious question is where Twitter will be in five years.  A lot of internet big names have risen and fallen.  A few years ago Myspace would have seemed like the place to invest in, but now the site is stagnant.  AOL seemed to be everywhere at one point, but now has a much smaller public footprint.  Remember Altavista?  Even if you do you likely haven't used it in years.  Being on Twitter may seem tired in a few years, replaced by some other concept.

On CBC Saskatchewan's The Morning Edition this morning host Sheila Coles commented on the banality of many Twitter messages, like people sayng they're eating breakfast.  Given that Twitter is an online equivalent of cell phone text messaging this is no surprise.  Lots of text messages are equally trivial.

This post is longer than 140 characters.  Hopefully it won't strain anyone's attention span.

Full Circle.

The earliest successful form of electronic communication was the telegraph.  It was a text only device, with Morse code eventually becoming the common method of encoding messages.  Hearing the clicking of someone's cell phone keyboard today as he wrote a text message reminded me of the sound of a telegraph receiver clicking away.  Although the method is different, in a way the rise of text messaging is a surprising throwback to that pioneering era.  When most people imagined the future of personal communications devices they likely thought that the video phone would become popular, not typing short messages.  Video phones do see quite a bit of use, but at nowhere near the level many would have thought.  Although the transmission method is different text messages often resemble Morse code telegraph messages, where brevety and the use of abbreviations of various sorts were common.  Then there's Twitter, which has gone from nowhere to ubiquitous in less than 4 years.  I'm sure that Samuel Morse and the other pioneers of telegraphy would find this quite interesting.

Glass Houses And All That.

The front page of the Star Phoenix this morning featured an article about a former Saskatoon resident who is currently the number one Canadian user of Twitter. I shook my head on reading Khayyam Wakil spends some 6 hours a day Twittering. But a bit later the thought popped to mind how much time I use to spend posting to Usenet. It wasn't as much, and I didn't make as many posts, but conversely the 140 character limit of Twitter prevents the kind of verbosity you can use on Usenet.

Poor Usenet. Although it still has its fans the service is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. Some ISPs limit the amount of Usenet groups they offer, and some don't offer the service at all anymore. It's been a long time since I posted on Usenet with any frequency, like most users having become increasingly involved with web forums of various sorts, and of course blogging. But as I mentioned previously you won't be seeing me on Twitter.

Tim Doesn't Twitter.

In case you were wondering(you probably weren't, but I'm telling you anyways) I won't be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. I already have an outlet to bore people with my personal life, this one, and see no need to do so in 140 character chunks. If you feel the need to follow someone's Twitter feed why not Oprah's? I doubt it will be that much more interesting than what I would write, but I'll let you find that out yourself.