Register Friday | April 26 | 2024

Noisy Twits

126 posts in, I'm still finding Twitter largely pointless. It's just not enough for me to care about -- Facebook has these big huge profiles and blogs have as much space as you would like, but there's almost no way to determine who you are dealing with on Twitter unless you know them already. And most people don't distill well into 140 characters (I count myself in this group) -- Twitter is boring because most posts are a) links to articles or other people's twitter posts that I am not going to follow because there is no commentary provided and I don't know where the "tiny url" will take me, b) comments on other people's twitter posts that I didn't read at the time and now can't find (why on earth don't think link the comments to the posts? why?), so the comments make no sense to me, or c) boring.

I've been told that I'm bored by Twitter because I refuse to accept it as it's own medium, and keep waiting for it to be Facebook or a blog (witness the above refusal to call Twitter posts "tweets" -- I just can't anymore). Even those Twitter friends of mine who Twitter amusingly, if they (used to) have a blog I keep wishing they'd expand the point (you know who you are).

Someone said that I would like Twitter better if I followed celebrities, and when I said I don't know any celebrities, said I didn't have to. Apparently Twitter is less like Facebook, where you friend people you know in real life in order to keep up with daily adventures and thoughts and share your own (well, that's what I'm doing on Facebook) and more like a blog, where you offer thoughts and opinions to the wide world o'strangers, and see if there's anyone out there who is interested in them.

So I'm trying, and have a (very) few celebrity Twitter recommendations of Twitter feeds you might enjoy. I like the tiny stories of Arjun Basu (although they often strike me as installments of one larger story). I also follow novelist/short-story writer/playwright AL Kennedy, who is very wry and funny about literary celebrity in Britain (she's always unwell, on a train, about to go speak to a conference of people for reasons she does not understand.) And I'm not even sure how this happened, but for a while now I've been following someone named Nerdy Girl, who turns out to be the publisher of This Magazine, Lisa Whittington-Hill, and also is hilarious.