Webupon

During the past year or so, Twitter has become quite the phenomena. It’s attracted people from parents to politicians, advertisers to market execs. But why? What is so popular about this little site? Quite frankly, I don’t have the slightest clue. For people raving that it’s the next big step in social networking, it’s not. If anything, it’s a step back to the old days of large chatrooms and instant messages, except conversations in those usually consisted of things more intelligent than “I’m posting on Twitter” or “I’m eating Frosted Flakes”.

I believe it appeals to each of the groups I mentioned above for different reasons. It appeals to parents and politicians because they believe it makes them look “hip” and “cool”, although just them using those terms would be an immediate tip off that they weren’t. Advertisers and market execs are there because they believe that that’s where the teenagers are, since it must be bacause that’s where their parents are. (Yes, they use infallible logic in trying to understand how teenagers think.) Truth is, most teenagers create an account there, use it once or twice, then never so much as glance at it again. They realize that their friends don’t give a rat’s ass what they’re having for lunch, the only difference it, those friends will tell them just that.

The funniest part is that it is general knowledge that Twitter is useless, yet you still see big news companies such as CNN telling you to check their Tweets or Twoots or Twats, or whatever, to get the latest updates. To add to the hilarity, should you actually check out the page, what you are most likely to see is the news that they have just told you about.

While I hate to say it, Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere for a couple of years, when communicating through fax machine makes a comeback, so I guess we’ll just have to put up with the annoyances for now. Unless of course, Twitter goes the way of Facebook and essentially becomes a dead site. I’m putting my $10 on that side of the bet.