Charles Darwin, in particular, is a blast: “Caught an Armadillo, which was but a poor breakfast & dinner for two men”.

http://twitter.com/cdarwin

acannon is right, and Kirk Broadhurst is right: If you don’t like Twitter, well, don’t use it! But why go out of your way to denigrate those who do find value there?

Yes, you can phone or TXT someone to arrange dinner. No-one’s stopping you. But if you do that in public, in what Shel Israel and Robert Scoble called Naked Conversations in their book of the same name, then someone else might join you serendipitously.

But… If you don’t want that to happen, well, don’t do it. It’s as simple as that. But labelling it “pointless” is unnecessarily judgemental IMHO. And funny to watch. Feeling insecure about something…?

A lot of tweets are this kind of pointless - just someone describing what they are doing, what they are thinking, what’s going on. It’s not very hard to argue that this thread is pointless, or discussion of any kind is pointless. Whatever topic that teenagers are currently interested in is pointless. TV is pointless. Heck, even news is generally pointless.

People’s tweets might become interesting if you knew them. If someone tweets ‘Going to see the exhibit at xyz’, I might be made aware of something of potential interest. If someone tweets ‘Trying to make/build/write abc’ and I know something about it I can potentially help out. If someone tweets ‘Movie x was great / sucked’, I might change my view of that movie. All of these really only make sense if I know the other person.

So as has been said elsewhere, Twitter is much like IRC. Is IRC pointless? Is MSN / Yahoo chat or whatever else pointless? You might not find a use for it but that doesn’t mean that it’s a waste of time.

Finally, if the popularity of Twitter continues then it will be a major online player; and therefore it is a newsworthy topic. The ‘Pointless’ argument is almost a moralistic one - and my response is the same: if you don’t like it, you have the right to ignore it. Don’t try to tear it down just because you don’t understand or see value in it.

Oh please! Spare us the crap.

Who says it’s pointess? I say it’s pointless and I bet that 99% of the popualtionh, on or off Twitter, agrees with me. If you need to tell the person organising dinner you’re eating a sanwich, you TEXT them or RING them personally - you don’t announce it to all your twitter followers. How many Twidiots who Tweet this kind of ‘message’ are trying to communicate anything? It’s white noise.In a world of information overload, the challenge is not how to squeeze more and more white noise into our lives, it’s how to filter it.

There’s a Legend icon for ‘obsolete before plateau’ which is unused on the graphic. I don’t agree with some of the dates but their interpretation is generally quite good.

I’ve also written a way-too-long comment on all this over at my own website.

For the past 3-4 months, if I pull my mobile phone out at a party/cafe/bar/park/work I am invariable asked ‘You don’t twitter, do you?’ with a look of disgust and awe. Friends who don’t twitter (i.e. almost all friends) reply with an indignant ‘No!’ or ‘Of course not!’, while I ignore the question.

I think the alternative GenY crowd have already decided that Twitter is being forced upon them by MSM and that it is ‘not a good thing’. It’s probably not as bad as Facebook, but it’s a sham.

On the other hand, the consumerist GenY crowd are interested - because they hear about it thru MSM - but don’t understand or are still waiting for a reason to sign up, i.e. once all their friends are on it, ala Facebook.

But I think that the hype has been turning negative for weeks if not months. ‘Inane babble’ would probably be the biggest tag in the Twitter ‘Tag Cloud’ at the moment.

Uh huh. No hype here, folks. Just the hard stuff.

Fundamentally, though, this study (almost) entirely misses the point of what people on Twitter experience. It sampled the Twitter public stream, which is the total assemblage of what everyone using the service is producing.

But what looks like ‘pointless babble’ isn’t pointless, if it’s from people you know or care about. It’s social grooming, it’s keeping in touch. It’s what most human conversation is about. If you think this stuff is pointless babble, you’re really not going to enjoy parties. Or indeed be likely to maintain fulfilling personal relationships. On Twitter, you get to choose whose ‘pointless babble’ you want to follow. Almost nobody who actually uses Twitter uses it by reading the public stream.

If you learn about Twitter by reading these sorts of reports, you’ll get a bizarre view that really tells you very little about what it’s like to use as a service.

And this brings me to the general point about teaching with new technology: you can do the most methodologically sound research about Twitter you like, but without a decent appreciation of what it is to use the service, you’re going to struggle hard to make sensible use of it in teaching.

Not just in teaching, of course, but that’s Doug’s thing.

I found this post via Memex 1.1, where Pear Analytics’ white paper is described as “cod research”.

The redoubtable danah boyd has also weighed in.

However the icing on the cake is this news: The “Sarah” who got so defensive and sulky on Stephen Dann’s blog is none other than Sarah Monahan, who played the daughter “Karen” in long-running Australian TV sitcom Hey Dad…!.

Says it all really.

I don’t mind communicating with strangers, as per this conversation, just think twits are pointless and as I said self indulgent…pretty much who cares? I reckon Twitter has a self life that will be sooner rather later, however it’s just my opinion, millions of others can disagree

Of course the point is that the tweets of random strangers are not for you, but their circle of friends and acquaintances. Should you choose to use Twitter, you’d doubtless follow the people who are important to you. Or, you may choose not to use Twitter, if it doesn’t appeal.

Adam Barker: The story here is not so much about Twitter, but that the mainstream media uncritically ran a fluffy marketing piece dressed up as pseudo-science because that story was about Twitter.

That said, Twitter has just passed the peak of what Gartner calls the “Hype Cycle”. After the bubble of over-inflated claims we’ll now see a surge of negative stories as the media pack turns. More on that tomorrow.