Out from under the thumb of corporate IT security for a bit, I decided to give Twitter a try, given the enormous amount of hype it gets in some online quarters. If you have somehow managed not to hear about or know about Twitter, the basic idea is that it lets you post short messages that can be seen by other people who choose to follow your messages, and vice versa. In other words, it’s sort of like the way email was way back when, using the social networking concept of “get all your friends to do this RIGHT NOW!”

So far, I’m not wildly excited by it. The service is plagued by its own success and is so overwhelmed by people sending messages that it just plain stops working for hours at a time. They just got some funding from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and another hot VC firm, so hopefully they can upgrade their server farm to the point where it’s at least reliable. But the quality of the technical aspect of the service is nothing compared to the issue of the quality of the content. I’m following about 30 people at the moment. Several of them (maybe 5) are very earnest Twitterers. They send out messages all day and night, very often use the service as a way to solicit information or feedback from others, and clearly are thinking about how this particular widget can be useful. But most of the messages from most of the people never go much beyond “What I had for lunch” or “I wish I could take a nap”. And even I am guilty of not being able to think up anything much more interesting to say, even though I somehow manage to write all these long blog posts every day.

One one hand, it reminds me of the early days of blogging, when the basic styles were not quite as well defined and people used them much in the same manner to post short, quippy updates about what was going on with them. So many of those people left blogging behind a long time ago; if 9/11 didn’t get them, the 2004 election cycle did. I would guess that many, if not most, of the people who liked blogs for that chatty, social interaction have become ardent Twitterers. It suits the need to say something directly to a guaranteed audience of willing lookers-on and does not demand the same level of creativity and committment that blogging turned out to have.

The IM-like character of Twitter is not nearly as compelling. Personally, I have always disliked instant messaging for its intrusiveness — maybe I really don’t wan’t to have a slightly-asynchronous conversation with someone right this minute. Because most Twitter posts (”tweets”, they call them…ugh) are general statements that do not necessarily require a response from anyone, it’s easier to let them slide without feeling that you’re snubbing someone in the process. When somebody does specifically direct a remark at you, it’s more like email than instant messaging. You can reply when you’ve had a chance to think about it and write a response without thinking someone is waiting for an immediate reply.

I find myself slightly amused by the earnest ones, because they were the same people who believed that blogs/IM/SecondLife/whatever were going to revolutionize everything and always bring that same degree of credulity to whatever online experience they have. I am more encouraged to see people recognize it as less of “The Next Big Thing” and more of “a less annoying form of e-mail”. I am a fairly chatty fellow when you get me engaged in a conversation, and I like the idea of being able to fire a quick message out to a friend or a small group of friends. I don’t like the idea of using it like a pulpit with a microphone to issue edicts and beneficent missives to my many any loyal subjects and followers. But, then, I never cared for blogs (and bloggers) who saw themselves as prophets or demi-celebrities either.

I found myself nodding my head in agreement (as usual) as I read Les’s post about not quite getting social networking in general and Twitter in particular. He clearly falls into the “why do I care what you had for lunch” camp, and, seriously, this sort of trivial and ephemeral status update messaging is absolutely worthless. Of course, the corollary to that is that there are quite a few people in this world who are not capable of conversation any more compelling than “how’s the weather?” You’re just being made far more aware of them because they can share this vacuity with you via the Internet.

But I think that very situation lays bare the real worthlessness of all the social network sites that are so popular at the moment. It seems that they really only exist for people to build lists of friends and thus create the appearance that these people are really interconnecting, when they’re mostly just swapping virtual trading cards. The better ones find some particular utility that can meet some sort of need. For example, I think LinkedIn is a particularly good application of social networking because it directly ties in to the eternal need for business contacts. But the MySpace/Facebook genre seems particularly devoid of utility. Fine for goofing around when you are a high schooler or college student with plenty of time to devote to the fine art of mindless fucking off, but vastly limited otherwise. Like some of the “Web 1.0″ websites that seemed like they were sure things, I just can’t imagine there being any lingering value to these. Twitter, if it is lucky, has the potential to turn into a useful enough thing to become a must-have app on just about everyone’s desktop the way that IM did, but it’s probably not because anybody needs to know that I ate ramen noodles with chicken today.