Twitter - welcome to the world of the mundane!

Twitter is seriously overrated and not a little dangerous! That's my opinion.

In the very first instance, it's for people with short attention spans who can't be bothered (or are simply unable) to write more than a few words at a time - mainly because they haven't got anything of any interest or value to say.

More importantly, however, it's for people who have convinced themselves that they have hundreds (if not thousands) of friends scattered all over the planet who are just dying to hear about every single mundane thing they do. I mean, who really wants to know that you've just blown vast amounts of snot into your paper handkerchief? I mean, really!

For those of you who don't already know what this is all about, 'micro blogging' (as it is called) allows you to update your status (what you are doing at any given moment) with very short messages of up to 140 characters - pretty much like a mobile phone text message.

Some services - like Twitter - allow users to become 'friends' with each other. A 'twit' (my name for a person who uses Twitter!) calls this 'following' (a word I find rather disconcerting considering it's association with stalking).

When one twit 'follows' another twit on Twitter, they are able to receive instant 'status' updates from each other. This can be done via the Twitter web page, IM, mobile phone, blackberry or a variety of other third party applications.

What it basically means is that someone you've never met before - someone you would normally have nothing to do with in the real world, but whom you now call a 'friend' - is able to keep you informed of their toilet habits at any hour of the day or night. Wonderful!

I agree with Kathy Sierra and Dan Russell - co-creators of the Creating Passionate Users blog - when they say that there are three [worrying] issues that should be considered where micro blogging systems such as Twitter are concerned:

"1) it's a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines.

"2) The strong "feeling of connectedness" Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain "knows" something crucial to human survival is missing.

"3) Twitter is yet another--potentially more dramatic--contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking... you can't be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state."

If you want to fool yourself that you have more friends than you really have, and if you don't have anything of any importance to say but you want to say it anyway, Twitter is the place for you. Welcome to the world of the mundane!