Rant of the Day: Twitter

In the past few months I've had numerous run ins with the website twitter.com ranging from stalkingreading people's twitter page to being at a bar with a person who was oblivious to their surroundings because they were too busy "twittering" to people questioning why I wasn't "on it".

For those who don't know, Twitter is the Cousin Oliver to the Facebook Wall and Myspace status. It's the new hotness. It's fresh. All the cool kids are doing it, and to be quite honest, I just don't get it. If I understand it correctly(And I'm quite certain that I don't), the concept behind twitter is that you update it very regularly and write what you're doing. This process is known as "Micro-Blogging".

Each "Tweet" is limited to 140 characters and can be done via text messaging. Now don't get me wrong. I support any form of messaging that doesn't involve me actually having to talk to your dumb ass on the phone, but have we hit the point in our society where we need to know what everyone else is doing at every moment of the day? I promise you that you don't want to know what I'm doing/thinking all the time. My twitter would quickly turn in to an update of my regularity and obscure reference to things that I'm not even sure that I care about.

I guess my question is, "At what point did you become so important that anyone gives a crap what you're doing right now?". I can't convince half the people I know to read the blog that I write once a week, why would they check something I update every hour?

But here's the thing. I've been wrong before. For the sole purpose of this blog entry I invented a phone that lets me call people from the past and here's what I found.

On the subject of myspace, Jesse from early 2005 had this to say:

Myspace? Christ. I'd sign up, but I just checked and it turns out that I'm not 15, and my parents actually do understand me.

I'm just glad someone created a place so that all the emo kids could get together and express their uniqueness and individuality with the exact same crappy 5 themes that everyone else has.

"Wow, you like that band too?!? That's so crazy. I'd go to their concert tonight, but I'm busy setting up a tripod to take profile pictures from the ceiling so it hides my double chin and fat ass."

If I ever sign up for that crap, you have my permission to kick me square in the junk.

On the subject of blogging, Jesse from 2006 had this to say:

Blogging? There are 3 blogs in the entire world.
1) Some hack's crappy photos over and over again.
2) A dork writing about technology that nobody will ever read. Nobody cares about your feelings on USB versus the new 1394 spec, jackass.
3) Stories about someone's family that I've never met.

In the rare case that you find something that's a real written piece, it's generally just someone who finished up that English degree a few years ago and is still clinging to the idea of being a writer while he teaches Sophmore English at a High School. Stop pretending man. There's nothing wrong with being a teacher, but stop being a pretentious ass and selling yourself as a writer. You don't have a couple of things "in the works", and 2 comments(One from your mom) doesn't mean that one of your "pieces" is "in discussion".

If I ever write a blog, it had better be because I lost a bet or something.

I realized two things from my conversations.
A) Old Jesse is sort of an angry jackass
B) The phone had to be destroyed. It could be an instrument of evil if it fell in to the wrong hands.

Anyhow, feel free to follow my twitter. I don't plan on actually using it, but the same could have been said for my myspace, my flickr, my youtube, and my blog.

http://twitter.com/jessebearden