Ok, here's the deal. I Tweeted. I can't say I "don't get it," cos I think I do. 140 Characters is not long enough to say anything useful, so "tweets" always end up being one of two things: Of interest only to the person posting ("Oh Nutella, can I love you any MORE?") or links to something somebody wrote, somewhere else. So as a news ticker, it's fun to watch -- what with all the big news orgs jumping on the bandwagon lately (MSNBC) -- but I'm not sure I really *need* a steady stream of constant, 140-character brain farts from people I don't know, all day long.

I note a disturbing number of Twitter spammers and accounts that seem to "tweet" nothing but one giant infomercial all day long. Twitter is like starring in your own talk show, I suppose -- just that you have to share the channel with x-thousand other people. Which is great, if you just realize that really, nobody is listening.  If you *do* get people to listen, by tweeting aggressively, and often, during the course of the day, you lose everybody as soon as you take the weekend off and stop tweeting about your morning coffee and that trip to Home Depot.

It's like open mic night at the corner coffee bar, with absolutely no barriers to entry.  

I have an extra computer, and it has nothing to do. I installed TweetDeck on it and I let it run all day. It's fun, "visual background noise," if you don't need to pay attention to it, but for now, Twitter in general has failed my usefulness test -- do I find myself drawn to it on the weekends, when I don't *need* to be by a computer? No. Might that change if I started to "tweet" from my mobile phone? Probably not -- it's like that line from Absolutely Fabulous, in reverse: "Why didn't you call me to let me know what you were doing?" "Too busy doing it, darling..."

I still have my Twitter account and I'll follow you if you want, (@LAScottV) but there might not be too many updates from me right away -- somebody wake me when it gets interesting. ;-)

(PS -- I'll probably go ahead and Tweet this, and include this here video because it's funny and it backs up my point. On Reddit, they call this "linkjacking" and it's considered bad form -- on Twitter, though -- actually I think this is one of the main things Twitter is *for*...)

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