You ever notice how they come out with an awesome tiny economy car, and then every few years they redesign it, adding a couple inches here, an inch there. It's 50 pounds heaver, 100 pounds heavier. Take the Honda Civic. It was a tiny car you could park anywhere, that weighed like barely a ton and didn't use any gas. The Civic today? Like 4,500 pounds 20 feet long, seats seven.

Why? The plan is you buy a cheap small car in college, then in a few years you trade it in for the same car because you like it so much, yet magically it has "grown up" a bit. By the time you have kids, your car is a limo. Look at that BMW Mini Cooper. It keeps growing, and growing, and groooowwwwing. When it gets truly huge, they will have to introduce a "new" small Mini which is the same as the old original small Mini because the original small Mini is too big. The "new" car won't really be new; it's the same car they made before but replaced with the ever-larger update.

Social networks the same. It's bloat, to serve an aging population. The kids will have some hip new thing marketed to them. And they tell you that simplicity is a clever "innovation".

Somebody should reinvent Twitter as a proper low level Internet communication protocol. The big problem now is that the service is owned by this company which needs to make money on it. As a medium it wouldn't be tied to one company, but many different servers could compete and interoperate.

It's become a boring stew of self-promotion, self-righteous finger-wagging over the latest media event, pointless arguments that never change minds, and inane chatter about television shows.

Uh, welcome to the entire internet?

Twitter is successful because big entities and personalities built followings. I don't know aaaanybody who actually uses Twitter largely amongst their friends.

The more Twitter tries to be a "social network" and the more it strays from the simplicity of a microblogging platform, the worse it gets.

To the degree that Twitter stays out of the way and simply shovels little 140-character strings around, it is always going to be just as good as the total of that which is written by people whose feeds you subscribe to.

"It's become a boring stew of self-promotion (Savage), self-righteous finger-wagging (Mudede) over the latest media event (Ferguson, pot legalization et al), pointless arguments that never change minds (Leftist), and inane chatter about vapid shows (Block Party, Bumpershoot, Hempfest). I roll my eyes at Slog a lot these days."

Looking at Twitter in normal times is an exercise in inanity. Where Twitter shines is in breaking news -- not because the tweets are great but because it's easy to find the most recent links to the best stories. As you mentioned, during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon Bomber, or the Ferguson stuff, it was riveting.

Now that Google has apparently given up on news (it's impossible to find anything more recent than a week ago, and almost never a quality source), this is an important service.

But day-to-day? Fuck that shit.

@2: They did, almost. Twitter is to Identica as AIM and ICQ are to XMPP/Jabber (and thus, sort of, as AOL mail was to Internet e-mail).

I don't know that there is anything out there that matches Twitter for the type of news I want to be aware of. I really think the quality of Twitter is entirely dependent on the people/groups you follow. Same with my RSS feed. I've curated the type of content I want to see. My mother and I always joke about her internet and my internet because we are exposed to radically different things.

@7: Fnarf, it sounds like you are unfamiliar with Twitter lists. Taking just a random sampling of the entire Twitter feed will, indeed, turn up mostly people tweeting about going to the gym and worshipping celebrities. You're doing it wrong.

@10, I'm not doing it at all, mate. I dip in once a year at best. And even the best-curated (what a fucking word that is) Twitter List is uninteresting to me.

I enjoy Twitter, but I only check the timeline of tweets from people I follow, and half of them are comedians.

Haven't figured out how to use it as a news source.

Typical white hipster social media burnout. Now that other folks are there it is no longer cool.

SMS in raw form is the true hipster gold.

Twitter's been a good method for me to start letting it sink in just how many awesome writers and journalists are working hard every day out in the wide world. Once I tapped into some good reading sources it slaked a thirst I didn't know I'd been feeling. As a result I don't make such a pest of myself in threads here on Slog any more. Whew.

I use twitter for breaking news, that's about it

I love Twitter, if some bozo keeps tweeting about inane TV shows or whatever there is an "unfollow" button that will mercifully kick him out of your feed. Didn't I originally used to follow Paul Constant? I don't remember how he got kicked off of my list but I am pretty merciless about it.

So basically Twitter is going to copy Facebook's dumbass move that everyone hates.

Twitter is a one way text toilet.

@3 FTW.

Also, the beauty of twitter, in addition to the real-time, reverse-chronological posts Paul cites as the primary success of the service and what makes it so unique, is that you can also be very discriminating in who you follow, much more so than on facebook, which is a network that has become saturated by the masses -- e.g., your grandma, your ex, your high school history teacher, and so on... There are users on twitter who are exclusively committed to disseminating good, up-to-the-minute news that is accurate and relevant. And then the are people like the Iron Sheik, who are just consistently hilarious. Anyway, hate twitter if you want, but I for one enjoy my time on the service a lot more than I do on FB. I find myself rolling my eyes, flabbergasted and irritated at whatever inane religious, political, or self-involved posting is scrolling by -- not to mention the latest pop/celebrity news in the feed on the right side. And twitter keeps it raw. If that's too tough for the more highbrow or "serious" amongst us, then don't use the service. Go update your linkedin or something.

@18 Yes

I love Twitter the way it is. I couldn't agree with you more.

Blaming Facebook for not being a timely source of news is bizarre. It has always been a social network; I would no more go there for accurate breaking news than I would The Stranger.