Oh wait…one of my friends genuinely believed in me and thought I’d finally had a good idea. Now the noose is twice as tempting.

Today, my imaginary readership, I’m talking about Twitter. Twitter is the newest craze sweeping the internet with people young and old, famous and obscure, boring and also boring, updating their mini blogs from whichever internet-capable device they can get their grubby attention-seeking hands upon. These updates are usually along the classic ‘Facebook/Myspace’ attention seeking posts amongst the teens (Jasmin is feeling Sad, Jasmin is Unhappy, Jasmin is going to Slit Her Wrists…) or from older people who see it as a genuine way to keep in touch with eachother but then become overwhelmed by the fact it requires so much attention and there really is an upper limit on how much useful information you have to impart to people around you. From there the updates will nose-dive into inanity; ‘Mum is putting the kettle on again, I drank all my tea half an hour ago.’

They’ll also encounter the ‘too many friends’ blockade. Acquaintences are suddenly all nearest and dearest, with everyone knowing the intimate details of eachothers day to absolutely no end. Vapid teenagers determined only to garner status in the form of followers will welcome the disproportionate numbers, but for the slightly more sane factions within the population it may all get a bit too much.

Clever people may have realized that Twitter is in fact the ‘What are you doing now?’ aspect of Facebook, if they’re familiar with that particular social whoring networking device. There’s a profile you can update but the barebones of the thing is ‘What are you doing RIGHT NOW?’ . No superpoking, no throwing ninjas, no event invites and no photo albums. Just a running commentary of your day sitting at the desk answering the phone, reading fashion magazines and counting the seconds until you can go home and feel dissatisfied with life. Or, you know, soap-boxing your depression so that people will love you. Either way.

There is also the factor of the most annoying question in the world being; ‘What are you doing RIGHT NOW?’ Most people really aren’t doing anything noteworthy for 90 percent of their day and if they are any sane person is going to be actually DOING IT instead of letting everyone know they are doing it. It’s in the same vein as people who feel the need to validate any activity they do with taking photos of themselves doing it, so that everyone KNOWS THAT THEY DID IT!

Of course Twitter also serves as a platform for people to announce their opinions. There are two kinds of people on the internet, generally (because I love to generalize. There is actually close to five billion kinds of people on the internet, but fuck you I’m a bigot).
Firstly you have the kind of person who encounters adversity/annoyances/humour/pain/an interesting concept and sits down to write a few thousand words in a lazy running commentary/essay format, stating their opinions and analyzing the subject.
Then you have the kind of person who needs to share the basic premise of their thought, in the third person, as it flits through their head. They will state their opinion on the subject, with nothing else, on their Facebook/Myspace/Twitter in the format of ‘___ thinks/feels/has _____ and it is _____’ or whatever.

The latter person, upon encountering Twitter, would (for sake of example) sit down and spend half an hour writing about it. And therein lies the difference.

Ian.