The Imaginary Part

Twitter has hated me for the last few days. I was getting consistent errors about exceeding my API rate limit when I haven't even been running any clients. Just in case I changed my password and now I'm getting inconsistent errors telling me that my account has been locked from excessive bad logins. Again, not running any clients.

Either I've recently become a Twitter celebrity without becoming aware of it and somebody somewhere is trying to crack my account, or Twitter hates me. Yeah, I'm going with the hate option. Never assume malice where stupidity will suffice.

So what's my response to all this? Shall I jump up and down and complain that the (free) Twitter service is not working and that I desperately need my constant intravenous flow of tweets to operate? It doesn't sound particularly elegant. Shall I make a declaration that Twitter fails in general and ragequit and try to delete my account? Tempting, but not incredibly rational or practical.

Instead, ironically, I've announced on Facebook that I won't be reading Twitter for a while. And that gives me a little bit of leeway to experiment. For Twitter has become a reasonably large time sink.

When you first deal with Twitter it's easy to fall into a naïve mindset that to prevent your list of tweets being full of crud you don't care about you just have to be careful who you follow. Unfortunately the reality is that perfectly nice and normal people, such as my friends and me, when given an environment like Twitter will fill it with all kinds of garbage. Alongside all the useful stuff you actually care about hearing from your friends. The signal to noise ratio is just bad because community expectations for usefulness of tweet content are not high.

The concept of flirting with the idea of not using Twitter for a while seems a little strange given that we all got along perfectly fine without it. All the same, it forms an inlet and an outlet in your brain which were nowhere near as active before -- an inlet for "I wonder what's been happening in my friends' lives lately" and an outlet for "heh, I just found/thought this thing which is kind of cool/annoying/I feel like sharing".

Previously those outlets had less opportunity to be exercised but they were invigorated by Twitter. When you stop using the service the outlets remain for a while. When I first started having difficulty with my API rate limiting my first desire was to post about it on Twitter. It gets into your BRAIN.

In hindsight I think those outlets were doing just fine before. I shouldn't have to think about what my friends -- or at least those connected to the Internet all day -- are doing at every hour, and I certainly shouldn't be sharing my random thoughts at a rate of several per day. Because they just ain't that good. If there's one thing the Internet is good at, it's showing you just how unoriginal you truly are.

Heck, I haven't even been reading Twitter properly lately. There's just too much crud. I'd never get anything done if I was notified every time a new tweet comes in, and it's something like a chore to read through the backlog a couple of times a day. It's not that the tweets aren't relevant to me or even that they aren't interesting -- they just aren't relevant or interesting enough. We have to draw a line, folks.

So is the correct response to not read Twitter at all? Beats me, but the Twitter website's failure to let me log in seems as good a reason as any to find out. I could go and play with identi.ca but I'd probably end up in a similar problem one day.

I just don't like micro-blogging in principle. I like using big words when they mean precisely what I want to express. The amount of time it takes me to fit what I want to say into 140 characters is significant, as is the amount of semantic intent I have to lose in the process.

Yet Twitter is fun. But it's not, lately. And now it's not working for me. So it can bugger off for a while.

Did I mention I like email? I like getting email from real people. Also phone calls. Just not at 4:20AM like the most recent phone call I got, please.