Breaking: Twitter Doesn’t Matter
Technology guru Leo Laporte had been using Google Buzz to aggregate his social media presence for a few weeks and discovered that his feed had stopped going out and discovered that nobody gave a damn.
Technology guru Leo Laporte had been using Google Buzz to aggregate his social media presence for a few weeks and discovered that his feed had stopped going out and discovered something . . . shocking:
No one noticed.
Not even me.
It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.
His corollary epiphany was that his older New Media exploits mattered much more:
Thank God the content I deem most important, my Internet and broadcast radio shows, still stand. I believe in what I’m doing there, and have been very fortunate to have found an audience. I’m pretty sure I would have heard from people if there had been 16 days of dead silence there. Hell, if we miss one show I get hundreds of emails. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.
I should have been posting it [on this blog] all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too.
Leo’s a legitimate celebrity. I used to watch him on “The Screen Savers” all the time. And, frankly, I don’t gave a damn about his encounters with sandwiches unless something horrific or uproariously funny ensues.
I enjoy Twitter as a means of getting a glimpse of the chatter on breaking topics and engaging in light banter. But he’s right: To the extent that any of our bloviating “matters,” it makes sense to do it in space your own rather than just blasting it out to the ether.
I have limited my twitter use mainly to getting updates on various transit routes I use for my commute and to see what Ron Artest is thinking.
LaPorte’s article seems to be more an example of how Google Buzz has basically been a bomb, rather than the “Twitter killer” that some had predicted it would be.