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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Wait, People Do This for Fun?

posted by on June 24 at 14:59 PM

The Tyee reports on The Death of Pleasure Blogging.

Technorati founder David Sifry, who compiles extensive blogosphere stats from time to time, released numbers last spring that showed a potential plateau of blogging growth. While the number of blogs was still increasing at an impressive clip, the stats showed more and more people weren’t updating the old ones, thus keeping the number of active blogs stalled at about 15.5 million. Blogging activity appeared to have peaked.

But, apparently, according to the article, Twittering is still on the rise. But does anyone actually Twitter? Why don’t they just change their Facebook status messages a whole lot?

RSS icon Comments

1

My professional opinion: Twitter is useless and dumb. The end.

Posted by Matt Fuckin' Hickey | June 24, 2008 3:04 PM
2

My professional opinion: What the hell is Twitter? Is it inside my computer, and if so, how to I get rid of it?

Posted by NapoleonXIV | June 24, 2008 3:13 PM
3

I'd use twitter if you could look at the aggregation of twits... "Fourteen twitterers at Joe's Bar. Avoid. Avoid."

Posted by umvue | June 24, 2008 3:16 PM
4

who has time for all this shit? There's a new Web 2.0 Activity Treat TM every month it seems.

Posted by him | June 24, 2008 3:19 PM
5

Twitter?! I barely know 'er!

Posted by leek | June 24, 2008 3:19 PM
6

I've looked at Twitter's site repeatedly and never signed up, because apparently it's only useful if other people you know use Twitter and monitor it constantly to see what you're doing. I don't get how it's more useful than just texting, calling or emailing people. I'm having trouble telling if it's popular by its own usefulness or just the inexplicable hype over it.

Posted by The CHZA | June 24, 2008 3:20 PM
7

Dang - you caught me! I'm a Facebook Status junkie ...

Posted by Will in Seattle | June 24, 2008 3:33 PM
8

Yeah, twitter scares me. Also my day is really boring. What am I going to say?

Arduous is on the train.

Arduous is at her desk.

Arduous is in the bathroom. Oh wait, now she's back at her desk.

Arduous. Still at her desk.

Arduous is going to bed.

Who wants to read that?

Posted by arduous | June 24, 2008 3:38 PM
9

This doesn't surprise me in the least. Blogging, or Twitter for that matter, like all "new media" applications has its uses - up to a point. But, they're activities that require constant active participation on the part of the user in order to be, well, useful, unlike say Google, which requires only occasional viewing by an end-user to be of some measurable benefit to them.

So, a lot of people get caught up in the lastest "you MUST text/IM/blog/MyFace/Twitter/Fanpop/Second Life et al" craze, but after a while simply either find the interfaces and plethora of otherwise useless add-ons too burdensome ("Oooh, look. My seventeentrillionth vampire bite. Yay.") or get annoyed with the email spam generated by these same (primarily) data-mining apps, or simply become bored when the Next Big Thing comes along to replace it, creating the electronic equivalent of Sargasso Seas full of abandoned, forgotten, and presumably eternally cached sites, profiles and whatnot.

It's just that, unlike other fads and flavor-of-the-month crazes, these thing never really end up in any sort of Internet equivalent of a dusty box in the attic, or a landfill, which is where previous incarnations of these kinds of short-lived pop-culture phenomena have traditionally been relegated once their limited life-spans have run their course.

Posted by COMTE | June 24, 2008 4:03 PM
10

Well, hopefully they'd be interested in the last one, arduous.

What freaks me out is the UW Tower has RFID chips that spy on you in the bathrooms.

Posted by Will in Seattle | June 24, 2008 4:04 PM
11

Had two blogs up through last year, one a "personal" blog kept, I thought, exclusively for friends and long distance family, the other a semi-"professional" blog I was invited to keep on a site dedicated to nerdy subject matter. Both were under my own actual name.

I ended both after a weird stalker found me and my family on the web and I realized how insane it was to leave traces of myself online of any kind.

I closed down my blogs, took my personal web site offline, scrubbed my posts off various message boards I'd frequented, cancelled my account on that creepy LinkedIn site and so far I've managed to avoid social networking sites and so on for long enough that my name no longer comes up with any hits on Google, even in advanced searches.

Posted by at least I admit I have a problem | June 24, 2008 4:07 PM
12
Posted by Raving PA Fan | June 24, 2008 4:09 PM
13

COMTE @ #9 sums it up well.

i'm still bitter over my Friendster account.

Posted by josh bomb | June 24, 2008 4:33 PM
14

I was going to write some bitter, pithy comment about how no one reads personal blogs, often no even family and friends, unless you're already important.

But then I realized no one would read the comment.

Posted by K | June 24, 2008 4:53 PM
15

Twignorance rears its head in the trollish trenches of yet another comment thread.

That rhymes and rules.

Posted by jackie treehorn | June 24, 2008 5:31 PM
16

...because you can set Twitter to update your Facebook status for you, of course. It would be redundant to do both. =)

Personally, I like it. I have 4 or 5 people on there - a couple friends that I like getting their 1-5 comments a day, and the Rifftrax blog because I like their articles. It could drive you crazy if you put too many people on, but with restraint it's really nice.

Posted by wench | June 24, 2008 5:37 PM
17

I read your comment, K. Your existence has been validated.

Posted by him | June 24, 2008 5:57 PM
18

i find twitter genuinely useful. i think the wired article "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense" does a reasonably good job at explaining why. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson

i do find whrrl more useful though (local service where you check in from a location and it tells friends where you are.)

Posted by kim | June 24, 2008 6:32 PM
19

I like Twitter, because it's a repository for the random thoughts that pop into my head that I have to tell someone, but don't want to burden my friends with random texts that they may or may not want to read.

It's different than your Facebook status because you don't have to include your name at the beginning. It's a mini-blog that you can update from your phone.

Posted by Andy | June 24, 2008 11:27 PM
20

Must stop posting - feeling Facebook withdrawal bad.

Posted by Andy twitter | June 24, 2008 11:41 PM
21

I follow Joe Trippi and Barack Obama on Twitter. Joe gives relevant political insight and news before the major news sources get it.

And like @16 says, you can have your tweets as your Facebook status message, allowing you to not have to log into facebook all the damn time, and you can use it via the web or from your phone. It's like a texting mailing list.

As Warren Ellis put it once, Twitter is a global non-sequiter delivery service. And I find that entertaining, if not always useful.

Oh, and I disagree with Kim @18. I think Whrrl sucks for the same reason COMTE @9 doesn't like a lot of the new Web2.0 services: You have to babysit it. I checked in at Moe Bar once on Whrrl and got notices about happenings there for 10 days afterwards, even though I was only there for an hour or so.

Posted by NaFun | June 25, 2008 9:13 AM

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