ben:

I’ve decided that I hate Twitter. Here are my reasons:

• The software is unremarkable. I understand that this is not really a good reason to hate it, but really, I could hire a developer to make a site that does everything Twitter does right now… and it would probably be more stable. I understand that there are a lot of users, but it’s insane that a site as simple as Twitter.com has as many issues as it does. People who know about the internet, feel free to correct me on this one.
• It’s not useful. Twitter had the potential to be useful, and for a short time it was. You can imagine it being used to break news as it happens or as a great place to find out about and share a variety of useful and/or interesting information. There was a short period where you would find out about big events before any mainstream source knew about them, but not any more. Now, Twitter is filled with mundane or vague messages of things no one really cares about and links to blog posts (that no one cares about). The few people who post interesting stuff to Twitter are the comedians like @lonelysandwich or @hotdogsladies, but why do I need Twitter to read their humorous quips? Why do they need to post them to Twitter? These guys are awesome, but I think they’re better than Twitter.
• It’s like a blog, but more stupid. I’ve seen a lot of developers and companies using Twitter like a blog. They’re posting updates or information about themselves or their products on twitter. 90% of the time they link to a blog explaining whatever their twitter message was. Why the fuck do I need to middle man? Why do I need this stream of notifications? If I want to know about your shit I’ll subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed or I’ll check it once in a while in the browser… sending news through Twitter is useless because it will be swept away within a few minutes and I’ll probably miss it. I don’t really have the time or the patients to dig through a bunch of shit to find the few messages that might be interesting  to me.
• That’s the other issue, a Twitter feed is just a blob of lame shit with a few interesting things thrown in. You can’t unfollow the uninteresting people because once in a while they’ll post something very interesting, even though most of the time they just make it harder to read the stuff you actually might care about. I don’t want filters, I just want people to post less shit. Giving users a 140 character limit makes them update more than the would if there was no limit. Most people with blogs post at most a couple times a day (I’m talking about individuals) or less, and the less they post, the longer the posts usually are (I’m generalizing). On Twitter, when you are posting you are thinking about the types of things that can fit into 140 characters. This means each post is a simple sentence. I can’t get into deep topics on Twitter, so if I want to make a complete thought about anything it’s more likely to be insignificant things like “My cat just vomited”. Because it only takes a few seconds to write and post something like that, I might make 30 posts like that a day on twitter. That means 30x the mundane bullshit… maybe a few interesting things doped in here and there. Not very useful to me as a reader.
• Most Twitter users just post things without reading other people’s tweets.
• It’s not a revolutionary communication tool. Sure, something can be said for a system where anyone can send in a message from where ever they are, but as I discussed, most of what they have to say is not worth reading. So twitter is like a board of public text messages aimed at no one in particular. At some point people started to talk @ people. making it like public email or public text messages directed at one person. I have to see these messages that are not directed at me. I don’t give a fuck, you should send a direct message. What if I the person I want to talk to doesn’t follow me? You probably shouldn’t be talking to them. What if they’re asking a question? There are much much better ways to go about getting answers to your questions from a bunch of strangers… like a blog with comments. (also, twitter’s direct message system is fucking retarded)
• It’s like a contest of the loneliest people on earth. I don’t give a fuck how many followers anyone has, it should not be a contest. Twitter isn’t any more useful for Ashton Kutcher than it is for me. If he told all his followers to go see his next movie on opening day, it wouldn’t make a difference in the box office earnings. Having a lot of followers is useless. It barely works as a way to get traffic to your websites.
• If you, as a business, need Twitter to get in touch with your customer or to let them get in touch with you… you’re doing something wrong.

I have more to say, but I need to go to bed. I guess it’s kind of weird for me to shit on Twitter like this after saying how much I love Birdhouse, but I didn’t like Birdhouse because it was a twitter app, I don’t use it as one (It gave me an idea for an app that is based on the Birdhouse concept, but a little bit more useful [for me at least], I’m thinking I should make an outline and some mockups).