Twitter Fail?

May 26 2009, 7:18pm

Unless you’re on Twitter all the time you miss so much that it becomes useless. How can you get benefit from using Twitter once a day, or once a week when the volume of tweets is increasing exponentially?


We’re still early adopters, all of us, and yet the noise is already overwhelming. ‘Most Popular’ Twitterers are already pointless follows. Too many, boring, irrelevant snippets of celebutard twaddle or geekery. Particular culprits are Robert Scoble and Courtney Love, strange bedfellows indeed!, who each have a such bad case of Twitthorrhea that unfollowing is inevitable.

What will happen when everyone wants ‘micro-blogging’? Twitter Fail?

The analogy here is with Synthesisers. Originally, analogue synths had crude, imprecise controls and few parameters for adjustment. As they progressed, they developed memory banks, more refined resolution and ultimately completely retrievable states. Perhaps what Twitter needs is presets? Set ‘states’ that relate to your mood or mode of use.

I not only want my ‘work’, ‘personal’ ‘intimate’ and ‘extrovert’ presets, I want just that man’s funny tweets and only her tweets about him and only his links and none of her nonsense. Who ever thought that artificial intelligence would be advanced out of a need to separate the wheat from the chaff in streams of social network commentary?

The easy bits are really easy. I know who I don’t want - Twadvertisers, Twitsperts, Twankers and Twats. I click through to things that interest me but I seldom click through to things that pitch at me. I can switch them off and be happy with the archaic, binary functionality of an on/off switch. The difficult bit is panning for the gold in the stream. Too many tags, boolean functions, secondary and tertiary arguments and too much computational evaluation for a mere mortal to consider. Can Wolfram Beta make my twitter work properly please?