140-character Tweets just cannot describe our colourful lives
LIKE my friend says, a Tweet sounds like the sound a car makes as you back dangerously close to the kerb.
When you finish chuckling over the silly name of the latest social media application Twitter, let’s move on with our lives.
After all, life is more colourful, complicated and crazy than can be contained in 140 characters, which is all the Web/cellphone service allows a user to beam to his ‘followers’ at a go.
So at the risk of being searched out and sent threatening Tweets – which actually, when you say it out loud doesn’t sound very scary at all – I’m going to say I’m not enamoured with Twitter so far.
I find it funny that we young things, who love nothing more than the sound of our own voices and have an opinion on everything, can confine ourselves to just that tiny burst of text.
That’s why they had to invent a system so that too-long cellphone text messages could be sent as a single one, instead of being cut off at 160 characters.
In fact, in Japan, no one sends text messages – they send e-mail from their phones.
So people just send more Tweets (that’s what each message is called), to convey what they want to say.
Which has been contributing to the problem of too much spam.
Also, the last I heard, talkshow host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres and rap star MC Hammer were exhorting their fans to join the fun. Yet, as more people find the fun too legit to quit, the noise of irrelevant messages also grows.
Sure, we could remove those noisy, irrelevant feeds, but if these people are our real-life friends, imagine the animosity – and sarcastic Tweets to everyone else – when they find out they’ve been blocked.
Plus, they know where you live.
The popularity of Twitter, which has about 14 million users now, is still a far cry from that of social network Facebook, which has more than 200 million users.
But it seems its burgeoning popularity has been too hot to handle for its makers.
For one thing, hackers have attacked the service numerous times, exposing how flawed it is.
Actress and singer Miley Cyrus has been a frequent target – her Twitter was hacked and her supposed sexual antics with a friend broadcast earlier this year.
Also, new users have to deal with the barrage of conventions in this brave new world. There are ‘dm’s’ or direct messages, ‘rt’s’ or re-Tweets, hash (#) tags, just to name a few.
But most of all, I find that Twitter is just over-shortening our life experiences.
I want to tell my friends that the cold I was suffering from made my bones ache, that I was huddled up in bed for five days, and I don’t think I can go to the karaoke with my squeaky sore voice. The shortened version of ‘feeling sick’ just doesn’t elicit the same sympathy.
So stop a-tittering, and if you are counting characters, make them the real people you surround yourself with.
