Not convinced by Twitter!

I seem to have been reading more and more stories recently about the social networking phenomenon Twitter. For those not in the know, Twitter allows you to post messages of no more than 140 characters, which are known as tweets. These tweets can be described as a combination of someone emailing, texting and blogging. People can follow you and your messages, and you can also follow other people.

It’s very similar to the status updates that you get on Facebook, where people tell you all kinds of exciting and interesting things they are currently doing or thinking, such as the update I found on my Facebook profile yesterday which read: LC… Has done absolutely nothing all day..... What a waste of a Sunday!!’ What a wast of a comment! Thank you for sharing that with me!

Apparently all kinds of celebs are now on twitter giving you constant updates of every little detail of their lives. At the moment I’m struggling to get the whole point of Twitter, and I’m not sure I want to get it!

Although I’ve not joined Twittter, and currently have no intention of doing so, I am on Facebook and get their Twitter equivalent of updates from people. Admittedly I do like to hear want close family and friends are up to, and some updates can be very amusing, but what you do get is a lot of boring and banal comments.

The sort of comments from people I went to school with, who I haven’t actually spoken to since 1993! The idea that I would join Twitter to follow other people, whether they be celebs or friends so that I can follow every little detail of their day to day life is too much!

What amused me this week was reading the blog of Hip Hop superstar Kanye West. He had a bit of a rant at those people who had set up a twitter profile impersonating him. On his blog he wrote:

"I DON'T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER... WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I'M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I'M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I'M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I'M NOT AND I'M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN'T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF."

I know Kanye is never shy of telling the world how talented and creative he is, but I think he does have a point. I personally don’t have the time nor interest in posting constant updates on what I’m doing, and I’m sure most people aren’t interested in hearing every little thing I’ve done in an average day.

What I find quite worrying about aspects of Facebook and Twitter, is the amount of people who seem to want to live their entire lives in the public domain. It’s as if people have to share everything about themselves to the world, in order to validate who they are or to confirm that they actually exist.

I occasionally put up my own posts on Facebook, but I don’t feel I need to live my life in public. The argument for sites like Twitter is that it allows greater interaction, and that people can share their lives, thoughts and feelings more, but I still feel that people should have a public and private life.

I’m quite happy to share lots of personal thoughts and feelings with family and friends, but I don’t need to include the rest of the world.

Add to this I’ve always had a deep distrust of the ‘Big Brother’ state, I don’t want the world to know everything that I’m doing or to know that there are people following me. For the time being I’m sure that Twitter will continue to become more popular, but for now you can leave me out of it all.