The Trouble With Twitter

All anyone can talk about these days, it seems, is Twitter. The "micro-blogging" social networking site launched more than a year ago, but has started to break through in a big way in recent months, as celebrities have jumped on board, the corporate world has taken notice, and (since-denied) reports have had Google sniffing around it as an acquisition target.

Call me a skeptic. I joined Twitter about a month ago to see what all the fuss was about, and hundreds of tweets later, I’m still wondering.

Aside from its amateurish look and silly jumbles of #’s, @’s, and other out-of-place characters, my biggest problem with Twitter is that it does absolutely nothing that Facebook doesn’t do already. Facebook has its "what are you doing now" feature (or whatever it’s called these days), and a look at those gives me both a better sense of what my friends are up to and more entertainment than all my tweets. Not to mention, almost everyone I know is on Facebook, including most of my Twitter followers.

There are also the "celebrity" tweets, but guess what- you can read those without being a Twitter member, just by bookmarking them or adding them to your RSS reader. Besides, most of them suck. The only good ones I can think of are Shaquille O’Neal’s, as well as "fake" – and frequently deleted- feeds from the likes of Christopher Walken and sportswriter Rick Reilly.

As for businesses trying monetize Twitter, and use it to promote themselves? Good luck with that. I don’t think Twitter has yet figured out how to monetize Twitter; hence the alleged attempt to sell to Google.

Twitter isn’t the next Facebook. It’s the next Friendster. It’s not a game-changer; it’s something we’re going to laugh about in five years. It’s something that’ll make us giggle when we watch 2009 movies in 2015, the way we laugh at AOL in "You’ve Got Mail."