Somebody had to say it

by Will on November 13, 2009

David Harsanyi admits the obvious: Twitter is basically useless. Sure, I understand the social appeal, and my will to resist setting up an account will probably erode over time. But why a 140-character format is becoming the dominant form of media communication among politicians, pundits, and other so-called serious people is beyond me.

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Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.

{ 8 comments }

1 E.D. Kain November 13, 2009 at 8:15 am

I never remember to check my twitter page. No matter how hard I try.

2 JosephFM November 13, 2009 at 9:47 am

I suspect it has something to do with how they all have Blackberries and iPhones.

3 JosephFM November 13, 2009 at 9:48 am: Or Palms or G1s or whatever.

4 John Gee November 13, 2009 at 9:53 am

A lot of people are using twitter the wrong way. As a friend who works in Menlo Park explained to me, it’s intended to be mostly a crowd-sourcing thing. Like a less-focused version of yelp. Specifically, with search functionality you could see what “people” were thinking in the last x minutes, hours, or days. Now, there’s some problems with that model. It may become focused on targeted advertising. It may not make a whole ton of sense from the micro perspective of the user (or at least not right now). But it doesn’t serve a person-to-person or person-to-crowd function. Twitter is a crowd-to-person aggregator, and like anything new, it’s still working itself out.

5 John Gee November 13, 2009 at 11:10 am

Oh, and also here’s Tyler Cowen saying the same thing much better.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/in-defense-of-twitter.html

6 Will November 13, 2009 at 12:57 pm

If the conversation wasn’t so limited and superficial (a function of Twitter’s design constraints), I think this argument would be more persuasive. I can accept the social and organizing functions of Twitter as genuinely useful, but I think it’s been over-hyped as some revolutionary new form of communications.

7 John Gee November 13, 2009 at 3:32 pm: Absolutely true: 140 characters are not enough – but at some point, maybe a hundred words or so, there’s too much room for the purpose, which is not necessarily to hold “the conversation” on Twitter itself. That function is much better served by people like yourselves at the League (i.e. the blogosphere). I do think, however, that Twitter can help to facilitate conversation by drawing people’s attention to salient articles. It’s almost certainly overhyped, sure. But it’s not “basically useless,” a point on which we seem to agree.

8 Jaybird November 13, 2009 at 11:35 am