Twitter Fails Once Again, Slavish Devotion Continues

Nice grammar.

Previously I’ve written of my hatred for Twitter, including 15 Reasons Twitter Must Die, 1500 More Reasons Twitter Must Die, Twitter Fails Again, Twitter Officially Goes Mainstream, and Why is Mashable Obsessed with Twitter?. Not belabor the point (well perhaps), I’m afraid we need to revisit the issue. So let’s call this a series.

If your cell phone service occasionally went dead for an hour, would you be ranting all over the internet about how great it was? 

If the post office sometimes just didn’t deliver the mail for a day…OK, bad example.

How about if your cable or satellite TV went down during a big game like the Superbowl – even if you were watching something else? And next, during the World Series of Poker? And then during fairly-popular episodes of Oprah? Would you be excitedly proclaiming your provider’s greatness in your blog and encouraging others to use it?

As of today, Twitter worship continues, and yet this glorified Fisher-Price toy remains as unreliable as ever. This morning, TechCrunch reports on another Twitter outage, this time due to a “database problem“.

OK, fine. We all have our database problems now and then. My problem isn’t with the people at Twitter, though their Jack and Jill Magazine attitude toward their own failures must even get on their fans’ nerves sometimes:

No, my problem is with the slobbering fanboys and fangirls who are basing their monumentally pointless lives around it.

An exaggeration, you say? Let’s look again at Mashable, whose Twitter fandom remains unabated. On Monday, they posted the horrible “HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive“  by Elliott Kosmicki, which recommends using Twitter to accomplish various important tasks. A few of his most ridiculous:

• Manage to do lists (“Next time you’re telling your followers what you ate for lunch, you can also make a note to call the cute waitress you met while you were there.” Yes, I’m sure she’ll be impressed when you tell her the story of how you twittered yourself a to-do note about her.)
• Set a timer (Be sure and use it for really important things, like “remember to feed the baby”. And what device are you using to access Twitter anyway? Does it not have a built-in clock?)
• Get your flight information (Are you really going to depend on Twitter to help you get to the airport on time? If so, you deserve to miss that plane.)
• Track your expenses (Sounds like a solid plan. I’m sure the security is top-notch.)
• Get news alerts (Because you can never have enough news alerts. Hey, have they found Caylee yet?)
• Track packages (“If you’re like me and spend too much time tracking your latest Amazon order…” No, thankfully, I am nothing like you.)

Elliott isn’t the only offender, of course. In fact he’s not even close to the worst. Take Darren Rowse of the execrable Problogger.net (How to make your blog stand out? “Pick a unique topic”). Darren smelled the money and started a Twitter-specific site, the atrociously-named Twitip.com. Are these people unaware of the meaning of the word “twit”, or is there some type of irony involved?

The titles of the posts tell an ugly tale of pointlessness: 

• How to Target and Attract High Quality Twitter Followers from Your Blogging Niche (because we don’t just want ordinary readers, we want “high-quality niche eyeballs”) 
• Would you say what you say on Twitter if it was a Real Life Face to Face Interaction? (What would you say if I suggested you had no social skills?) 
• Helping others leads to Twitter Success (which contains the odious terms “Twitterating” and “Twitternation”)
• Using your Blog to Promote Twitter, (“Twitterverse”, “Tweeple”)
• The Quest for 5000 – How many Followers are Enough
• And the question on all our minds, Does The Way You Twitter Cause You Stress?.

There are so many more examples of sites like this, but my brain hurts already. So in summation: if you find yourself acting anything like these people, please seek help. And please don’t tweet about it.