Quick and to the Pointless

Besides starting anything with "According to Meriam-Webster, ____ is defined as..." there's nothing lazier than a column listing random thoughts. Unless these musings are both amazingly witty or thoughtful in scope, they require a context. Anything less is either hugely arrogant or dumb, with nothing of value being said in either case. And really, that's my problem with Twitter.

Arguing about Twitter isn't easy, because its fans are pretty devout. They will defend the microblogging tool as a way to spread information, see what trends are picking up steam and often take you to task for "not using it right." All that may be true, but I don't buy it as anything more than learning stuff about friends without talking to them.

For those who want to argue the Web site offers something of value, they often point to the news it circulates. But even that doesn't hold up. Almost every news source has a Twitter, I suppose as a way of saying they are doing "new media," as little as it may be. Almost all of these accounts, however, literally post link to the stories with the headline in the post. That totals zero original content, i.e., what's the point?

If it were used productively by the media, I think we would be on to something. But if they simply update a dozen times a day with a link to the original story, doesn't that just make Twitter a more colorful RSS aggregator? Like most popular pages, they simply use it for self-promotion.

The other newsy argument for Twitter is that it breaks news. That argument still doesn't address how it's breaking news if you can't trust it half the time. Michael Jackson dying was huge, yes, but getting the same, and I stress this, unverified message over and over isn't much better than not hearing any news at all. In fact, it's just as useless. If a dozen friends told me that Michael Jackson died, and a dozen told me Jeff Goldblum died, we have an accuracy rate of 50 percent. Maybe it's just me, but I think we can do better.

By my count, there are a few events Twitter users keep citing as examples of its new found importance. There were the Iranian Elections, the Mumbai attacks, the celebrity deaths recently and that plane landing in the Hudson River. All of those, except maybe the Iranian Elections, provided few completely accurate details by mostly unverified sources very quickly. I don't want to spend my time looking at countless messages and sifting for accurate information. If it's a choice between that and holding out a bit for news I can at least sorta trust, I'll wait the extra 20 minutes.

Plus, Shaq's Twitter has been boring for months now.

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A list of the most followed Twittererses

Here's my local paper's Twitter

Here's the New York Times' Twitter, almost entirely the same, just more of its own articles to post