Some people who know me know I don’t like Twitter.

I have an account and its really only to promote this site, on some people I follow occasionally something could be interesting on IT, the middle east and various other topics that interest me.   Often Twitter is used as a casual way of running commentary of your life, as below:

MrXYZ – The number 7 bus is 6 minutes and 24.54 seconds late
about 2 hours ago
On my Texas Instruments scientific calculator

MrXYZ – I am putting on some trousers
about 3 hours ago
On the web

You also have people following VIPs, with people such as Stephen Fry who are the most followed people.  Stephen is absolutely brilliant man and a genius of acting, speaking and writing, one of the absolute legends of Britishness.  Its no secret he suffers from depression, but I think if you are going through something like this, its better to phone up or see a close friend and spill out what’s troubling you rather than write it online, like what happened recently when he ceased using Twitter for a short while due to he perceived as being people mocking or being unkind about something that was troubling him.

Gowala is one of the pointless add ons I see with iPhone users I see, “I am in blahblah pub” or such and such a place, as if anyone would ever care.

I don’t have an iPhone I only have a fairly simple clamshell type handset, mainly because where as I just need to make calls, I used to like the Voice notes feature which used to be on almost Motorola handsets in the last 10 years or so, press the side button where you can record your voice (including in a call)  and then set it to a alarm message, which was a brilliantly simple feature which needs a minimum of button pressing to keep something an important reminder, sadly my current now two year old V8 phone doesn’t have this.   I would quite like to have some simple version of Google documents and Gmail, seeing as I like to type notes and access to brief writings of things to do on any computer anywhere on the internet, with this I have more or less dumped my need to use Microsoft Office or Open Office now, or remember which of my work or home PCs or USB sticks I saved something on.  For this reason I might opt for Android phone at some point in the future.  The iPhone is a very slick and well designed piece of kit, I am not knocking it, its just I don’t want to pay £600 for 18 months worth of ownership for a phone, be it, by a contract or pay as you go.

Because of the portable, update from on the toilet or anywhere nature of Twitter, people may write things when they are angry, emotionally damaged or drunk, this could lead to writing things you later regret and at worse could cost a relationship or career.

I quite like blogging.  Twitter has meant a few people I have seen that used to blog, don’t bother any more and only put small snippets of the things that interest them on Twitter instead which is sad.   One of the things I like blogging as articles stay there on the internet indefinitely, so a helpful how-to on doing something I have learnt or want to share with the rest of the world, the ethic the internet should be; sharing what you know and learn what you don’t.  With articles of Twitter no one cares what you wrote yesterday, and I am not even sure if old tweets can be found with Google.

Like Facebook its often a vehicle to spread rumors and weighs on peoples naivety with the huge potential to spread scams and spam.   For instance today, as its April fool’s day, apparently numerous fake stories ended up on some newspapers as fact.  I also sometimes worry about those short URL type sites that condense web addresses into something brief that make it fit into the limited amount of space for a tweet, this could send you to something quite unsavoury or dangerous.

I think its likely the Twitter will get replaced by something better and will probably fade away after a couple of years or so.

Maybe an analogue version of Twitter would be to wear a hat and put some velcro letters on about what you are upto?

The only thing I do like about is purely to point people towards a more detailed writing about something, a free taste of a more detailed piece of information.

Using WordPress is a template for my blog I have mixed opinions on.  Its great that its free and has many different features to edit and change things how you like it, its not at all standards compliant, and changing the the layout of your blog often makes formatting go screwy, what’s in the draft layout is not always what you get in the final published result.  There’s also Blogger (owned by Google) and some other ones which are also free, and good as a ready to run way to blog without needing web developer background.  I like to call this freeze dried web design.  You use your own creative knowhow to write the content and there is a pre-fabricated template to put it all together.

I like and deeply hate Facebook at the same time as well, but that’s for article another day.