1. Facebook apps. All of them. They should all be banned.
     
  2. Crossposting all your tweets to your blog. I subscribed to your blog because I want to read your occasional lengthy thoughts. If I want to read your tweets, there’s this really great site called Twitter where I can go to read them!
     
  3. Retweets. Same issue: I’m following you because I want to know about you. If I really wanted to hear all about the #worthless #esoteric #crap you follow, don’t you think I would be following it myself? Ever hear of the concept of signal-to-noise ratio?
     
  4. Twitter as diversion. Trust me, no one but you wants to read the play-by-play of that intramural soccer game or five-minute updates on your experience at the airport luggage carousel. Tweeting just because you’re bored is a great way to prove to the rest of the world how boring you really are.
     
  5. Lack of due diligence. Never ask a community to answer a question you could answer yourself with 15 seconds’ research. Google and Wikipedia can answer almost any question your little mind can formulate in less time than it takes you to post it to a 5,000-member forum.
Twitter-Pated

Twitter.

Well, I signed up, if only to reserve my username. I don’t expect to ever use it, although that’s kinda how I originally thought about LJ, so let’s use the word “unlikely” rather than “never”.

If you don’t know about Twitter, you’re probably old and out of the loop. It’s a social network, like LJ with ADD. Short posts, often made from—and read via—IM or SMS. It is, of course, the rage among teens who want to stay connected every moment of the day and have the time and misplaced desire to record and share the tiniest bits of every day of their lives, rather than experience them fully in the moment.

On the other hand, I think Twitter could significantly improve LJ. If Twitter becomes the place to post the brief, ephemeral, and everyday events of one’s life—which I fully support—then LJ becomes the place for ideas that are deeper, more complex, more thoroughly explored, and worth saving. The division seems pretty clear to me.

I probably would, in fact, use Twitter myself if I really thought my fleeting moments were worth saving and sharing, but I prefer to let my ideas gestate and come forth as fully thought-out discussions. And most of the straightforward event-based stuff, if it’s sufficiently noteworthy, shows up on OrnothLand.

So that’s Ornoth on Twitter, at least for the mo’.

Frequent topics