Social media site simply uses Facebook’s status updates
Now, I’ll admit when I first joined, I saw how status updates could be put to good use. As an economics student, I like keeping up with stocks and investments and hearing advice from the big guns in the markets. I figured, what better way to keep up with news than a site where you view mini clips of information directly from the source instead of having to read an entire story? Awesome, right? Wrong.
Seconds after joining, Twitter asked me to follow a few people who agreed with my interests. I added a couple recommended CEOs and investment gurus, and I even threw in some sports teams and players to entertain my competitive ego. I expected my Twitter “timeline” (the equivalent of a Facebook wall) to shower me with rays of knowledge that would increase my business know-how and make me the next sports authority. I was instead blindsided with useless rambling about lunch, gossip and other things that I thought previously to only spew from the fingertips of entertainment magazine journalists.
Trying to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt, I waded through a full hour of tweets, only to find myself gasping for air in the absence of any real information. I came to find very quickly that not only were the updates more inane than Five Points small talk, but the conversations were so disjointed that I found them hard to follow. I spent 15 minutes jumping back and forth between tweets just to be enlightened by Chad Ochocinco’s favorite pair of shoes and a Mozilla CEO experience at a Greek wedding.
Maybe this sort of information actually interests some people because the Twitter co-founder Evan Williams himself said, “Whoever said that things have to be useful?” I find this quote directly correlating to his site. In hindsight, maybe it’s my own fault for believing that Twitter could lead to me to a vast pool of intellectual stimulation. Regardless, whoever argues that Twitter contains any more substance than the self-indulgence of conceited celebrities’ lives and the economic elite is sadly mistaken. Let me use this article as my first and final tweet: Twitter #stinks.