Why I Don’t Use Twitter

I routinely keep an eye on the search engine keywords that are used by people when they make it to this site through google or bing (in a whopping 3.7% of the cases). Lately, i've noticed an increase in people googling (or binging) for some kind of combination of 'davy brion' and 'twitter' which, i presume, is to find my twitter page. Unfortunately (or luckily) for those people, i don't use twitter. Never have and i probably never will.

I don't really have a problem with Twitter, but it's just not right for me. For one, my opinions and statements often need quite a bit of clarification and context if i don't want them to be misconstrued. Hell, i often write longish posts to clarify them and even then there are still quite a few people who still misinterpret things. If i'd post them in tiny blurbs on Twitter, i'd probably end up wasting quite a bit of time in follow-up discussions to try to clear things up. So when it comes to communicating my thoughts, it's definitely not right for me.

When it comes to following other peoples' thoughts, the situation is even worse IMO. I looked over the twitter pages of a number of developers who's blogs i read and enjoy and frankly, the occasionally interesting tweets are far, far outnumbered by a lot of stuff that i'm simply not interested in. I honestly don't care about your personal life unless you're a friend of mine. I don't need to know how much you hated being stuck in traffic this morning (and why on earth would i want to look at a picture of it?). I don't need to know how great the date was you had last night. I don't need to know how much you enjoyed the latest episode of House M.D. I don't need to know what album or song you're enjoying at the moment. I don't need to know about the crappy meeting you just had or the fact that you didn't get what you wanted from it. I certainly don't need to know about the mess your cat left next to your keyboard and i really, really don't need to know about your bowl movements either. I'm not really interested in all of the sucking-up-to-the-cool-kids-while-they-pretend-not-to-care either, we are after all no longer in high school.

It's too bad really, because the interesting tweets that you do come across can definitely be worthy of discussion or conversation. But twitter has got to have the lowest signal-to-noise ratio that i've ever seen on the internet and i hardly have enough time to work on the things that i want to work on, let alone spending time going through a bunch of tweets every day to find the occasionally good one. Again, that's just my personal opinion. If you use and enjoy twitter, that's great! But it's just not for me.